295 Main St

The Ellicott Square Building at 295 Main Street was, at the time of its completion in 1896, the largest office building in the world — a distinction that speaks to Buffalo's enormous commercial ambitions in the Gilded Age. Designed by the celebrated Chicago firm of D.H. Burnham & Company, the building represented a direct importation of Chicago's revolutionary commercial architecture to Buffalo and demonstrated that the Queen City could compete with the nation's most dynamic metropolitan centers.

Daniel Burnham's design draws on the Chicago School tradition that he had helped to pioneer, featuring a steel skeleton expressed through the building's rational grid of windows and piers. Ten stories rise above a richly ornamented base of pink granite and terra cotta, with the building organized around a spectacular skylit interior courtyard — the largest interior atrium in the United States when constructed.

The courtyard is the building's crown jewel: a vast light-filled space measuring 60 by 165 feet, topped by an ornamental iron and glass roof that floods the interior with natural light. Shops and businesses line the ground floor of the courtyard, accessed by arcaded galleries on upper floors. The elaborate ornamental ironwork of the balconies and the original mosaic tile floor of the courtyard are among the finest surviving examples of Gilded Age commercial interior design.

Charles W. Goodyear, the developer, named the building to honor Joseph Ellicott, the surveyor who laid out Buffalo's street grid in 1804. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and remains one of Buffalo's most visited landmarks, still operating as a commercial office building with active retail on the courtyard level.