English: The Harlow C. Curtiss House, 864 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York, September 2020. A contributing property to the locally- and NRHP-listed Delaware Avenue Historic District, the house is a work of the local firm of Esenwein & Johnson, whose Colonial Revival design incorporates such Classically-inspired features as a Greek-style front entrance topped by an open-bed pediment and framed by Ionic pilasters, with Adamesque tracery in wrought iron on the door and a wide, elegant fanlight on top. The interesting fenestration pattern on the second story alternates single sash windows with larger ones with sidelights, separated by engaged Doric columns. In all cases, the windows are topped with splayed lintels in stone. An attorney, real estate investor, and politico of local prominence, Harlow Clarke Curtiss (1858-1933) was born in Utica but moved to Buffalo as a young boy, where he returned after his 1881 graduation from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut to work for the law firm of Cleveland and Bissel (whose senior partner was the soon-to-be President of the United States, Grover Cleveland), establishing his own practice soon after. Curtiss lived in this house for only seven years: from 1898, when he vacated his
residence in the Midway Row Houses, until 1905, when he had built for him an
equally distinguished residence on Lincoln Parkway. Subsequent owners include lumber merchant William Silverthorne (1867-1941) and businessman-turned-diplomat Walter Schoellkopf (1882-1955). In the years following the Second World War, the Curtiss House joined the ranks of the former Millionaire's Row mansions that have become headquarters of local not-for-profit organizations: from 1947 until 1973 the building housed the offices of the Buffalo Association for the Blind, and since then it has been the home of the Buffalo chapter of the International Institute.