File:Market Arcade, Main Street, Buffalo, NY - 52686077385.jpg

English: Built in 1892, this Beaux Arts-style building was designed by Edward B. Green and William S. Wicks as a shopping arcade, an income-generating property for oil tycoon G.B. Marshall. The building was based on the Burlington Arcade in London, and was, for a time, known as the Palace Arcade, though the name Market Arcade came from the proximity to the Chippewa Street or Washington Street Public Market House that once stood across Washington Street to the east on the site of what is today a massive surface parking lot. The building features two identical facades on Main Street and Washington Street is clad in buff roman brick with terra cotta trim, a granite base, marble corinthian columns and pilasters flanking the storefronts and entrance door on the first floor of the front facade, with the columns supporting ornate architraves and cornices with modillions, with an architrave above the front entrance door with the words “Market Arcade” emblazoned on it below a relief with festoons below a simple cornice and an arched transom. The second story features an arched opening in the middle with a brick barrel vaulted ceiling, decorative terra cotta trim around the arched transom above the entrance doors, a large, multi-course band of arched terra cotta trim around the arched opening in the middle of the facade, which terminates at a cartouche keystone featuring a Buffalo head, leaves, a wreath and scrollwork, with the arch being flanked by buff brick cladding and one-over-one double-hung windows on each side with decorative terra cotta trim surrounds with wreaths, ribbons, and margents. Above this, on the third floor, is a band of terra cotta belt coursing at the sill line of the windows with dentils and decorative motifs, arched one-over-one double-hung windows and recessed brick panels flanked by corinthian columns with decorative reliefs on the shafts, architraves above the plasters and recessed panels with decorative motifs and egg and dart motifs on the cornices, an arched trim over the windows with corbel keystones at the top of each arch. Above the third floor windows are a few courses of brick, above which is a terra cotta architrave with motifs including egg and dart and fleur-de-lis, dentils, a cornice with modillions separated by rosettes, and a brick parapet above, enclosing the building’s low-slope roof, with scroll buttresses at the ends of the top of the parapet and flanking the central datestone atop the parapet that spells out the building’s year of construction in roman numerals and surrounded by egg and dart motif trim, a decorative panel above with a wreath flanked by ribbons and egg and dart motif trim, and an acroterion that looks like a seashell at the top. The building’s roof features a large hipped glass skylight in the middle, which allows natural light into the interior of the building. The interior features retail shopfronts with large plate glass windows on the first floor with marble panels at the base, a mosaic tile floor, pilasters with egg and dart moulding on the capitals, metal staircases with decorative railings, a second-story and third-story balconies with decorative metal railings ringing the central court, with large interior storefront windows allowing light into the offices on the second and third floors. The building closed in the 1970s as the surrounding area declined, but was rehabilitated and reopened in 1995, today housing a variety of commercial office and retail tenants.