File:Asa Silverthorne House, Delaware Avenue, Bryant, Buffalo, NY - 52630507741.jpg

English: Built in 1906, this Beaux Arts-style house was designed by Esenwein and Johnson for Mattie F. Silverthorne and Asa Silverthorne, a lumber merchant, whom had a controversial career, including being accused of fraud on several occasions and being arrested at the house in 1919 in a case that helped establish that corporations have the same protections from search and seizure by the authorities as individuals. A year before Silverthorne’s death, the house was sold in 1920 to Theodore H. Wickwire, founder of the Wickwire Steel Company and the Wickwire-Spencer Company, and his wife, Emma V. Wickwire, whom sold it after Theodore’s death in 1926. The house then was sold to a widower and stockbroker, John N Pistell, and then inherited by his son, Clarence K. Pistell, upon his death in 1930, whereupon the house was divided into apartments, though Clarence lost the house due to back taxes in 1935. The house was owned by the City of Buffalo until 1944, when it was bought by Lawrence Kelling, whom owned it for ten years and converted the carriage house in the rear into a garage with two apartments above. The house was purchased by Walter G. Thom in 1954, and then by Louis Wertheimer in 1958, with Robert Boasberg acquiring joint ownership with Wertheimer in the early 1960s. The house over the rest of the 20th Century was used variously for residential and office purposes. In 2006, the house was purchased by a couple whom converted it back into a single-family residence. The house features a brown brick exterior, hipped roof with wide overhanging eaves, hipped wall dormers with decorative stone trim, decorative stone window trim, quoins, a front porch with brick and stone columns, triglyphs, and a cornice with dentils, wrought iron railings, a front door with a decorative transom, one-over-one double-hung windows, a concrete base, and a red brick rear carriage house with a hipped roof, stone trim, and a large central doorway on the first floor. The house is one of only a few historic houses on Delaware Avenue that is presently in use as a single-family residence, with most others having been converted to apartments or commercial uses in the mid-20th Century and remaining so today.