The 10-story Dun Building was downtown's first high rise when it was constructed in 1895. It remains one of downtown's most ornate buildings. It is named for R.G. Dun & Co., a precursor to financial services firm Dun & Bradstreet and was designed by architects E.B. Green and W.S. Wicks. The Pearl Street building is located within the Joseph Ellicott Historic District and is a designated city landmark.
The Dun Building, with its fireproof steel skeleton, led a building boom which was to transform Buffalo in the succeeding ten years. Preceding the Guaranty and Ellicott Square Buildings in high rise construction by a year, the Dun Building symbolized Buffalo's progressive attitude and economic might.
Though steel frame technology was new, architects stretched existing styles to fit the new skyscrapers. Green and Wicks, the dominant local firm of the period, applied the popular renaissance style (with its imperial Roman details) to their first steel frame design.
The verticality of the Dun Building found expression in the fourt-story-high arches which dominate the façade. The arches are filled by tripartite windows with metal mullions. The renaissance style is shown to best advantage, however, in the details, which have an academic exactitude.
These start with the yellow Roman brick of the cladding, long and thin, laid atop a foundation of ashlar masonry. The courses of brick are regularly interrupted by bands of stone at the 3rd, 6th, 7th and 9th floors. A dentil band tops the 10th story, and cornice of scrolled modillons caps the building with a flourish.
The entrances are especially rich in details. The reveals have an elaborate foliate pattern and the surround has talon and bead and reel molding. The entrances are topped by scrolled cornices supported by ancones and scroll modillions with acanthus leaves.
Above each entrance cornice is a round window surrounded by egg and dart molding and palmette, keystone and foliate carvings. A frieze with swag carvings and egg and dart molding wraps around the third floor.
Source: Buffalo's Best. The Preservation Coalition of Erie County, edited by Tim Tielman. 1985.
The building fell on hard times in the 1970's and was vacant except for the basement-level restaurant space. Five owners in ten years sought to breathe new life into the 33,000 sq.ft. building but couldn't get a project off the ground. Developer Michael S. Jordan purchased the building at a foreclosure auction in 1987. Jordan obtained Preservation Board approval to remove the building's cornice after determining it would be cost prohibitive to restore. He promised to duplicate it as part of his $2.6 million restoration plan for the building, converting it to office space while retaining the lower-level restaurant use. Work was completed in 1989 but the cornice was not replaced.
Jordan lost the property through foreclosure in 1998 after several tenants relocated from the building. It was purchased in 1999 by Dun Building LLC, an affiliate of Clover Management. Each floor contains 2,600 square feet of space, ideal for smaller tenants desiring a full floor of offices. Clover lists just two spaces available in the building: 1,650 and 1,050 sq.ft.
Get Connected: Clover Management, 716.856.8538