Hospital Campus

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Preservation Coalition of Erie County (Home Page)

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October 1995

Marine Hospital Campus in Parkside Gets Partial Reprieve

The Buffalo Marine Hospital, a complex of five buildings on Main Street directly north of Sisters Hospital in the Parkside section of the city, received a bit of good news in late July. Benedict House intends to renovate the original and main building of the complex as a hospital for terminally ill AIDS patients. Sisters Hospital bought the entire complex in 1993 with the intention of demolishing it for an expanded parking lot. The main building is a designated local landmark.

The mini-campus was used by the University of Buffalo from 1950 to 1993. Prior to that, it was part of the Marine Hospital Service established by Congress in 1798. The original building of the Buffalo complex was built in 1907 on a tract of land purchased from LeCouteulx St. Mary's Benevolent Society for the Deaf and Dumb at 2183 Main Street (now 2211 Main).

The hospital was to serve the growing numbers of Great Lakes merchant seamen passing through Buffalo. (The Lake Seamen's Union had a membership of 7500 around the turn of the century, with 3000 belonging to the Buffalo chapter.) Other Marine Hospitals were in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago.

The original building was designed for 50 patients plus staff. The building was designed by James Knox Taylor (1857-1929) as Supervising Architect for the Treasury Department, an office he held from 1897 to 1912. Buffalonians may know him from his days in the Post Office Department, when he designed the Old Post Office, now ECC City Campus. The original Farrar & Treffts coal boilers remain in the basement, though inoperable. Farrar & Treffts was an old Cobblestone District business.

In the wake of WW I the facility grew overcrowded, a condition which persisted into the Depression, when expansion was finally approved as relief work. Four new buildings were authorized: separate communal residences for female staff (23 beds) and male staff (25 beds), a duplex for junior doctors, and a superintendent's house (on the site's southwest corner, facing Main Street).

Exterior construction was finished in the fall of 1934, although the wet-laid plaster in the interiors did not sufficiently dry until the next summer. The campus looked then essentially as it does today: A broad and deep frontage of lawn and shade trees insulating the main hospital building and its superintendent's ‘dependency’ from the noise and bustle of Main Street; and behind the first building, the three residences describing a quiet grassy quadrangle.

Awaiting the drying of plaster in the female Nurses Residence in the summer of 1935 was a mural commissioned by the Federal Works of Art Project, an offshoot of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The Art Project was to ensure proper embellishment of public buildings and provide employment for artists. The local Art Project Director was Gordon Washburn, director of the Albright Art Gallery. He selected William B. Rowe to design and paint the mural.

Rowe was born in Chicago in 1910, but raised in Buffalo, where he graduated from Bennett High School. Rowe went on to Cornell University, where he majored in architecture and fine art. He returned to Buffalo after graduation, where his first commission was to design a 100-foot mural at Bennett. The mural, called “New World Symphony,” was completed in 1935 and depicted the folk inspiration of American music. The work brought Rowe to Washburn’s attention and landed him the commission for the Nurses’ Residence mural, variously called “Old Buffalo of the Elegant Eighties and Nifty Nineties,” and “Buffalo and the Gay 90’s” Rowe went on to become a major figure in the Buffalo art community, founding, in his eventful year of 1935, a cooperative studio and later becoming president of the Art Institute of Buffalo.

It is not certifiably clear who the architect of the new buildings and siting was, although it seems likely to have been a product of the Public Works Division of the Treasury Department. (The Public Health and Marine Hospital Service became the Public Health Service in 1912, under the Treasury Department.) The most significant signature on the plans is that of J.A. Wetmore, Acting Supervising Architect, Treasury Department. Wetmore served with the federal government for 45 years and was finally responsible for the design of some 2000 buildings. He was born in Bath in 1863, retired about 1937, and died in 1940.

The Buffalo Marine Hospital operated as such from 1907 to 1949. In 1937, alterations were made in the hospital building to accommodate, for the first time, “female beneficiaries of the Public Health Service classified as merchant seamen.” At some point it also came to care for seamen of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. After WW II it was open to all armed forces veterans.

The aftermath of WW II, however, found the Marine Hospital inefficient. In 1949 the decision was made to close it, the services it provided to be supplied by the mammoth Veterans’ Hospital already under construction at Bailey and Winspear Avenues.

In January 1950, the announcement was made that the buildings would be turned over to the University of Buffalo Medical School for a Chronic Diseases Research Institute. Ownership remained with the Public Health Service until June of 1956, when title was transferred to UB.

Under UB, the buildings served a number of purposes, primarily connected to the Medical School. During these years some very important work came out of the complex. A physical medicine center pioneered new therapies for polio victims and did some of the first community trials of vaccines for the disease. The Erie County Chronic Disease and Respiratory Functions Study was initiated here. This was one of the first studies in the country to investigate the relationship between exposure to community ambient air pollution and risk of respiratory disease. The results of this landmark investigation were used by regulators to establish the initial standards for total suspended and other pollutants during the formation of the Clean Air Act in the late 1960’s.

In the 1970’s most of the university's departments and schools moved to a new Amherst campus, leaving the Main Street campus for the School of Medicine. As the buildings on that campus were remodeled, the buildings at 2211 Main Street were vacated. In 1984, the freeing up of two buildings–the old Residences– led to the creation of the Western New York Technology Development Center, which functioned as a business incubator. Such was its success that the University decided to build a new incubator at the Amherst campus in 1993. In 1991, the last of the Medical School offices moved out of 2211 Main.

It is obvious that the four ‘new’ buildings of the complex can be put to productive use if one is open to the idea. Especially in these times of upheaval in the medical industry, it would be imprudent to allow them to be demolished.