Deveaux School Historic District

Set above the Great Whirlpool at the north end of Niagara Falls, this six-acre campus grew from a charitable school founded and endowed by Judge Samuel DeVeaux for orphaned and destitute boys. Its centerpiece is the stone Van Rensselaer-Munro Hall, begun in 1855 to designs by Buffalo architect C. H. Otis and enlarged in 1866 and 1888, when Munro Hall added a larger chapel with a crenellated bell tower. Three other nineteenth-century structures survive: an 1863 brick barn, an 1870 gymnasium with an unusual barrel-vaulted interior, and the 1890s chaplain's house called Edgewood. Run by the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, the school modeled itself on New England boarding schools, and a long dispute over admitting fee-paying students ended in 1910. It later served as a boys' preparatory school, closed in 1971, and reopened a year later for children with learning disabilities. The grounds remain one of the city's notable open spaces.