The Coit House: Prelude To Preservation
By Linda Levine
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Jonathan White, chair of the Coit House
Preservation Committee, in front of the Coit House. Photo by Jim Bush. |
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration building was the best building that Buffalo ever tore down, and arguably the best that America tore down. But preservation has never concerned itself with only the best. It’s concerned itself with what is worthy, quite apart from architectural significance. It’s attended to what is of historical significance, and this isn’t necessarily the finest architecture. Consider the presidential White House, neither a great building that moved the history of American architecture forward nor the best example of a type. But it is a good example and certainly a great landmark of high importance. So, too, with the George Coit house in Buffalo.
A classic American icon
In 1961, at the same time that Jacqueline Kennedy was redecorating the White House in true restoration style, an architect named Olaf. W. (“Bill”) Shelgren Jr. was reconceiving the Federal-style Coit house. This was also a white house and, with a date of 1815, not far distant in era to the other.
Clapboard wood-frame, the Coit house was a classic eastern type and one that had existed widely in Buffalo. Among its few remaining Federal houses, the Coit was not grand but eminently human in scale, with broad wood floors and wide window moldings, a livable private home that eventually suffered by being transformed to a rooming house for the aged. Barren and bereft, it became a slum dwelling needing more than redecoration. It needed a major overhaul to recapture its original zest.
The house had two distinct virtues: purity of architectural style, and authenticity of age.
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Besides age, the significance of the house lay in its formal character. Shelgren described it as a typical three-bay townhouse, with a door and two windows on either side at the street level and three windows on the second story. George Coit built his house in a town of large homes amidst the ashes of what was then the village of Buffalo, burned by the British army on December 30, 1813. A businessman who ran a pharmacy in the developing business district, he’d arrived in the village in 1811 and envisioned for it a bright future. According to a recent story in The Buffalo News, “were it not for Coit ...and his partners signing a $12,000 promissory note making it possible to begin work on the Buffalo harbor, the Erie Canal would not have terminated in Buffalo, transforming a small village into the Queen City of the Lakes.”
Subsequently, the house was subjected —not unhappily—to several changes. First, in 1825 it acquired an addition. Then in the 1870s it was moved from Pearl Street south of Swan Street to 414 Virginia Street, a move away from a part of the prosperous city where commercial development was increasing and to a residential vicinity. Too, when moved, the front entrance was expanded into a center hallway and the house was made symmetrical.
By 1961, while retaining the essence of its architectural integrity, the single-family house was subdivided into numerous apartments for elderly people. In that year, its future fell into doubt due to a multiple housing code that the city instituted, covering all dwellings of three of more apartments. The city threatened to demolish the stylish house if the owner wouldn’t comply with the code, and he wouldn’t. He took the position that the house would be too costly to redeem, and was willing to let it be demolished.
The birth of a preservation group
In 1961, twelve men met at a home on Irving Place in Allentown to address the threat to the Coit House and the threats to Buffalo’s other significant architecture it augured. They comprised the newly formed Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier, the first preservation organization in the city, a private group. The Coit house was their first major effort.
This object they rallied around, while pleasingly well-proportioned, was not rare except in respect to its age. Neither particularly fine nor unique, nevertheless it took a fine and unique place in the story of preservation in Buffalo. It represented buildings that once existed, and wood-frame housing stock built generations after it. Even some architects have been known to say that Buffalo’s wood houses weren’t meant to survive, but sometimes architecture fools us. The Coit house could be called exemplary—every-house, one, yet many.
In 1961 there was as yet no local, state or federal law protecting historic sites. Almost the only way to control the fate of a site was to buy it. Appleton (“Tony”) S. Fryer, a businessman and one of the men who founded the Landmark Society, tried in a face to face meeting to persuade the owner of the house to conform with the code. The owner still unwilling, Fryer got a hold on demolition from the city and finally used personal funds to spearhead its rescue. Its disheveled interior and exterior underwent a general cleaning, and Fryer resold it with restrictive covenants to a private couple, Henry and Linda Priebe.
The Priebes needed drawings to show City Hall how they would use the house, in bringing it back from a rooming house to its original state as a single-family dwelling. For instance, sleeping quarters would be disallowed on the third (attic) floor unless a fire-escape were added, because too often people were trapped in a wood-frame house. “We think of buildings burning down,” said Shelgren, characteristically precise with language. “But they burn up. Henry Priebe didn’t want to spoil the outside by putting up a fire escape.” He asked Shelgren to do the drawings minus third floor sleeping quarters. Unsurprisingly the architect did them gratis, given that he was a member of the board of directors of the Landmark Society which hoped through the Priebes to save and restore the house.
The Shelgren legacy
Well before the circumstances surrounding the Coit house, Shelgren had begun his preservation activity. He documented Buffalo’s best buildings (such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist Darwin D. Martin house) for the Historic American Buildings Survey, a national record compiled by local contributors as a way of raising America’s awareness to the quality of her architectural heritage. He also wrote a finely illustrated pamphlet on the cobblestone houses of western New York State. He had the philosophy that Buffalo’s architecture didn’t stand in isolation, but as part of a regional and national architectural history.
Documenter of sites; initiator of Buffalo’s first preservation institutions; a founder of the Landmark Society and later long-serving president of the Society; major contributor to the establishment of Allentown, the nation’s largest residential historic district; a writer of Buffalo’s official historic site ordinance; long-term head of the Landmark and Preservation Board which administered the ordinance; architectural restorer— Bill Shelgren was Buffalo’s first preservationist, in a true, modem, complete sense. He was there when historic preservation was a refined activity among a few, friends, and even before that, and he stayed long after it spread into a phenomenon of broad appeal. He represents a full thirty years in the growth of the preservation movement, a man of quiet power and of staying power who remained passionately on the scene long enough to tell the tale of how preservation came to Buffalo and how it evolved.
In saving the Coit house, Shelgren and the other men of the Landmark Society acted very much in reaction to the demolition of the Larkin building. As the first building they saved, it could serve as both opening and closing to a narrative of urban preservation. Preservation was thus given birth by an elite of dedicated, committed people, a group of insiders. “Often it’s outsiders,” Shelgren remarked, “who promote the cause of preservation in a city. This is not the case in Buffalo.”
Endangered again—and saved again
It is in the nature of preservation that sites are rarely assuredly “saved” for very long. In 1999, the Coit house came back onto the real estate market. The heirs of Henry Priebe sold it to the Allentown Association, the city’s largest neighborhood organization, which then announced an ambitious restoration plan to reinstate what The Buffalo News called the Coit’s “former grandeur.” The Association, aided by local foundations, has articulated hopes to turn it into a “grand historic home” and open it for tours as an interpretative museum (see sidebar to this article). Such layers of institutional support are a far cry from the days when a dozen men met at a home on Irving Place and dealt with the destiny of architecture.
This article is adapted (with additions from other chapters) from a chapter on the Coit House in Linda Levine’s forthcoming publication, The New Urbanity. Linda Levine, who wrote for Spree for over twenty years, died in March, 2002. Her book, edited by Maria Scrivani, will be published by White Pine Press. Maria Scrivani is a free-lance writer and former staff reporter for The Buffalo News.
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