11. Guaranty Building
28 Church Street at Pearl
 The Guaranty was one of the first steel-supported, curtain-walled buildings in the world, and its thirteen stories made it, at the time it was built, the tallest building in Buffalo.
Terra cotta: Sullivan's lively reddish brown terra cotta ornament adorns the piers, spandrels, tympani, columns, and arches of the Guaranty Building, giving the structure an exuberance and personality that remind one that Sullivan's father was an Irish dancing master. The designs seem to be derived from American nature forms and perhaps from the Celtic Book of Kells.
The main motif is a kind of oval pod or seed shape, which Sullivan used to suggest man's potential for spiritual and creative growth. The pod is sometimes superimposed on a rectangle and connected to it with stem-like filaments. It recurs profusely in the interior of the building, in the stairway balustrades, the elevator cages, the letter drops, and the Tiffany-like art glass ceiling. The swirling lines and the opalescent glass also reveal Sullivan's interest in Art Nouveau.
Lightwell: The Pearl Street lobby features a skylight adjacent to the elevators. In the original U-shaped building design, the elevators and the skylight filled the "cutout" section of the U shape, with offices receiving light from either the outside of the building or the interior lightwell. The lightwell is about 30' wide with a depth of about 68'. The lightwell was infilled in the 1980 restoration, adding an additional 1,400 square feet of office space. The lobby skylight is now artificially backlit (above the skylight).
Elevators: The original Sprague Gear Driven electric elevators were so bad that they were replaced in 1903 with water hydraulic ones.
Lavatories: Most of the offices from 2-12 had their own "lavatory" a sink with both hot and cold running water. These features were not unique but somewhat uncommon
Text courtesy of Chuck LaChiusa
Credits
Scripts: Denise Prince and Jane Kwiatkowski
Voice: Christopher Jamele of Jamele Freelance Services
Audio production: John Davis of Eclectic Electric
This project was made possible in part with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts.
Tour content courtesy of Buffalo Tours.
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