The Hodgson Russ law firm’s holiday party is set for Dec. 14. Managing partner Benjamin Zuffranieri Jr. plans to call everyone together in a downtown lobby of stained glass luminance, where he’ll raise a toast to the definition of a monumental act:
It will be 40 years, almost to the day, since the Guaranty Building reclaimed its rightful place as a crown jewel of Buffalo.
The 13-floor landmark is an architectural masterwork by Louis Sullivan, an American genius and “father of the skyscraper,” his plans reinforced by such brilliant colleagues as his partner, Dankmar Adler, and draftsman George Arthur Elmslie. The fundamental truth about the beauty they revealed in 1896?
No matter how often you walk in, the awe never wears off.
On Dec. 15, 1983, about 1,000 people jammed inside the Guaranty to celebrate the rescue and restoration of a treasure the late Ada Louise Huxtable, legendary architectural critic for the New York Times, once described as “one of this country’s most important works of architecture.”
Those words mattered not only because they were true but because of the influential guy who read them and acted on them, as we’ll explain.
The Huxtable piece appeared in the Times on Oct. 2, 1977. During that same period, one Buffalo Evening News article about United Founders, then owner of the building, carried this headline: “Owners will seek power to raze Prudential Bldg.,” as the Guaranty was often called.
A separate piece from 1978, in the Courier-Express, used a haunting expression in assessing how much time that landmark, despite its 1975 listing on the National Register of Historic Places, might have left:
As in, the demolition clock that in 1950 claimed the Larkin Administration Building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, to Buffalo’s everlasting sorrow.
As in, the demolition clock that in 1968 ran out for the majestic Erie County Savings Bank, once a neighbor – just imagine that – to the Guaranty.
As…
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