File:H. Tracy Balcom House, Buffalo, New York - 20220403.jpg

English: The H. Tracy Balcom House, 1193 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York, April 2022. Built in 1911 on prestigious Delaware Avenue, here we have a particularly highly realized example of the Georgian Revival as it pertains to residential architecture, with virtually all of the requisite bases covered: side-gabled roof, symmetrical façade, rectangular footprint (excepting the later additions at left), and Classical detailing (note the pediments crowning the dormers, the cornice with block modillions under the eaves, the nifty wreath carvings in the stone lintels above the ground-floor windows, and particularly the entrance portico, flanked by a pair of Doric columns and crowned consecutively with a frieze with triglyphs and a wrought-iron balconet). Much of the local lore regarding this house is incorrect: it's popularly known as the "Welch Mansion" and incorrectly reputed to have been built for the head of the Welch's Grape Juice Company, but neither of those facts are accurate. Instead, for the first twenty-four years of its existence, 1193 Delaware was the home of Henry Tracy Balcom (1865-1949), the Cleveland-born founder of the Balcom Piano Company, a co-founder of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and an accomplished pianist in his own right who was famous for giving impromptu recitals in the parlor of his residence. Balcom lived in the house until about 1935. Subsequent owner Stuart Cary Welch (1895-1959) was an architect and World War I flying ace unrelated to the grape juice manufacturer, and lived in the house for a comparatively brief period in the 1940s. However, it was Welch who, in 1950, sold the house to the Buffalo Catholic Diocese for use as a nursery school, staffed for most of its existence by the Felician Franciscan Sisters, and indeed the Guardian Angel Day Care Center was believed to be the oldest existing one in the country upon its closure in 2005. The following year, the building was purchased by Canisius High School for use as office space.