ARLINGTON PLACE
Perhaps Allentown’s most charming address, this is the street where Frederick Law Olmsted lived while he built Buffalo’s park system. He attracted architects to live here, each creating his own elaborate designs in trying to outdo the others. As a result, every house on this street is unique. The homes are built around a common green, today known as Arlington Park.
At No. 60 is one of the most unlikely and wonderful residences in the city, looking like a storybook gingerbread cottage. This two-story Gothic Revival was built in the 1850s of board-and-batten construction, and is believed to be the last remaining home in Buffalo using this construction method. Windows are crowned by label-moulded brows beneath a steeply pitched gable roof. In the 1880s a porch was added, and what a porch it is! A string-moulded vergeboard drips like rich icing from the eaves of the roof. A modillion-bracketed pediment incorporates an elaborate cutout of twelve-spoke mandellas flying over a pattern-spool frieze interrupted by cutout panels in an Old German motif. Elaborately turned spindle posts are bracketed to the porch roof by jigsaw-cut brackets in a complex foliate design.
In stark contrast, No. 15 illustrates crisp, modern design as the only Dutch Colonial in Allentown. It is one of the newer homes in the neighborhood, built in 1898 with an expansive addition added in 1919. It was extensively renovated in 1987 by Mary Hamlin Goodwin, who died in 1996, leaving as her life’s legacy 23 rehabilitated houses in Buffalo and in Santa Fe, NM. Unseen from the street is a wonderful enclosed garden with first- and second-story decks.