Does anybody know if the Balcom/Chandler house is going to be demo'ed as part of this job. It is a historic house and the GSA has been trying to find someone to move it out of the way of the courthouse. These things usually don't work out, though, for obvious reasons.


THREATENED WITH DEMOLITION

Balcom/Chandler House
89 Niagara Street, Buffalo, NY

by Tim Tielman, Executive Director of the Campaign for Buffalo
History, Architecture and Culture

The Balcom/Chandler house at 89 Niagara Street is significant as the residential structure in the neighborhood of Niagara Square.

Philo Balcom, a brick manufacturer with works at Main and Ferry near a notable clay deposit, purchased the lot from the adjacent Niagara Square Baptist Church and erected a house in the fashionable Italian Villa style. The house was constructed c.1852 of bricks made by Balcom himself.

Balcom sold the house in 1855 to Fidelia and Alden Barker, a land and insurance agent for $4,500.

Balcom Street, running from the Linwood Historic District to near the Hamlin Park Historic District is named for Balcom and near the clay deposit he exploited.

The Barkers owned the house for about a decade, selling it to Henry Chandler in 1864.

Chandler owned the house for the next two decades and probably added the mansard roof and bay window to the tower in the late 1860s or early 1870s.

Chandler (1830 -1896), was a master engraver and the developer of the wax process of engraving. He parlayed that invention into the firm Jewett and Chandler. Jewett and Chandler at one time had the contract to do the illustrations for the U.S. Patent office. After Jewett & Chandler was dissolved in the late 1870s, Chandler moved on to Matthews and Northrup, a major northeastern printer of maps, atlases and colored panoramas headquartered in Buffalo.

In the 1880s a reversal of fortune in the 1880s forced Chandler to sell 89 Niagara Street.

Chandler Street in North Buffalo, notable for its late 19th and early 20th century industrial architecture, is named for him.