University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

New housing touts UB campus

Promotional material for University Park noted that the future campus of UB adjacent to the development would make homes there “more desirable and more valuable.” Photo: UB ARCHIVES

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Published: June 9, 2010

In the summer of 1915, new houses were being constructed in University Park, the subdivision established across Main Street from UB. In promotional literature, developer Anthony J. Huck boasted how University Park was 30 minutes by trolley from downtown and located “directly opposite the site where will be erected the Greater University of Buffalo.” 

The developer also was quick to note that the new Niagara Falls Boulevard begins at Main Street and runs the length of University Park. “This is one of the most famous and most traveled of highways. Tourists by automobile between the East and West will invariably seek this wide, brick paved boulevard, and soon it will become a thoroughfare known from Maine to California.” 

University Park was promoted as “a restricted residence subdivision,” with the restrictions aimed at making home ownership in a well-planned community affordable. Based on the size of the lot, the minimum construction price for a house was $3,500 to $7,000. The purchase price for lots was low because the land had remained in the same family since it was purchased from the Holland Land Company in 1810 and had not transferred from one developer to another.

On each lot could be constructed one dwelling, plus a garage or barn. A minimum distance between houses was established, and all construction plans had to be approved by the developer.

The groundbreaking for Foster Hall, the first building to be constructed on UB’s new campus, was five years away when Huck wrote, “It will not be many years before there will be a magnificent university, with its beautiful buildings and broad campus, directly opposite University Park. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of dollars, will be spent in erecting and beautifying the university buildings and grounds, all of which will tend to make your home here more desirable and more valuable.”

Houck’s prediction about UB was correct and so was his claim that “University Park has everything to commend it and not one objectionable feature.”

—John Edens, University Archives