File:Hudson Building, Buffalo, New York - 20220513.jpg

English: The Hudson Building, 483 Main Street, Buffalo, New York, May 2022. Owing its name to its designers, the local architectural firm of Hudson & Hudson, this contributing property to the new southern extension of the locally-listed and NRHP-eligible 500 Block of Main Street Historic District is a textbook study in the early-20th-century "Stripped Classical" aesthetic, with understated Greco-Roman detailing (note the rusticated façade, the frieze with Vitruvian scrolls separating the first and second floors, the cartouche reliefs above the second-floor window, and the prominent cornice) that hints at elegance yet is not too ostentatious for the typical budget of the small-scale commercial ventures for which the style was generally used. The building's history can be traced with certainty only as far back as 1928, when the Buffalo Courier-Express reported on the construction of what it described as a "new three-story building" to house a Buffalo branch location of the Lucy Lou Shop, a New York City-based ladieswear retailer. However, it's a point of debate whether the building was truly new, or if the work merely consisted of extensive renovations and a new façade for the preexisting structure on the site. If the latter is true, then 483 Main is one of the oldest extant buildings in downtown Buffalo, dating to 1843, when Bavarian-born immigrant Jacob Dorst (1814-1873), heretofore a grocery clerk at the firm of Sexton & Wells, had finally saved enough money to open a shop of his own. Dorst retired in 1865, selling the building to Lucas Chester (1830-1899), whose Buffalo Steam Dye Works (later Chester Dye Works), one of the foremost in the country, operated on the premises from c. 1869 until his death. At any rate, the Buffalo branch of Lucy Lou was defunct by 1930 - likely an early victim of the Great Depression - and in the years since, the building has fulfilled a variety of purposes for a revolving door of tenants. Notably, it was the headquarters of the local chapter of the Socialist Party for a brief period in the mid-1930s, served as the local Singer Sewing Center in the 1950s and '60s, operated as a Christian Science Reading Room from the 1970s through at least the mid-'90s, and in intervening periods has housed too many retail stores to list. The ground floor is currently home to City Fare Café, in operation since 2017.