24. Liberty Building
424 Main Street at Court Street
 Architect Alfred Bossom (1881-1965) spent the years 1903-1926 in New York City, where he became a designer of skyscrapers. After that period he returned to his native England to a second career as a respected member of the House of Commons. Bossom had great faith in the skyscraper as the building of the modern age, and before he left America he wrote a book on the subject entitled Building to the Skies. Always a man with expansive sensibilities-Lord Bossom was renowned in London for his lavish eve-of-season parties - he generally decked out his tall buildings with romantic paraphernalia.
The Liberty Bank is crowned with two reduced in-scale replicas of Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty. High and dry above Main Street, the twin matrons from a distinctive, if slightly fantastic, feature of the Buffalo skyline. Facing east and west, they are prime symbols in the iconography of Buffalo as a city with a strategic national position. Indeed, Bossom may have remembered that Bartholdi originally envisioned his colossus at the mouth of the Suez Canal, where it was to have marked and international coming together of far-flung civilizations.
Text and photo 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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