Adam, J.N.-AM&A Historic District

This group of eight buildings in downtown Buffalo once formed the J. N. Adam & Co. department store and, from 1960, the home of Adam, Meldrum & Anderson (AM&A's). The main store on Main Street, a seven-story Art Moderne block 382 feet wide, dates to 1935 with an addition of 1946-1948 by Starrett & Van Vleck. It incorporates older buildings, including service buildings on Washington Street designed by Green & Wicks in 1891-1892 and 1895-1896 and by Esenwein & Johnson in 1909. Warehouse buildings on Washington and Ellicott Streets, dating from 1911-1912 and later, completed the complex. Materials range from brick, terra cotta and cast iron in the nineteenth century to granite, stone, plate glass and steel framing in the twentieth. The district was listed because it still conveys the character of a large downtown department store that grew and prospered from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth. Most of the buildings have been vacant for many years, but one has been rehabilitated.