File:Cookie - fmr Black Rock Station House (Engine No. 11, Hook & Ladder No. 4) - Buffalo, New York - 20220109.jpg

English: Cookie, 1195 Niagara Street, Buffalo, New York, January 2022. A fine example of the Italianate style of architecture, here we see an elegant design that incorporates a trademark red brick exterior, a varied fenestration scheme wherein round-arched ground-floor windows contrast with an unusual scheme of clipped corners in the second-floor windows (with, in the case of the paired ones flanking the central blind arch, give the effect of a stylized Doric pilaster strip in between). On both floors, however, decorative cut-stone window heads provide an interesting color contrast on the façade. At the roofline, consecutively, are seen some impressive step corbeling and a prominent cornice that's typical of the style. The building spent most of its life as a fire station: the so-called Black Rock Engine House was built in 1874 at a cost of $9,000 and initially vaunted as the finest and most modern such facility of its time in the Buffalo Fire Department. However, problems with its construction quickly attracted the attention of the Committee of Public Buildings: contemporaneous news reports indicate there was a loophole in wording of the contract that allowed the builders to be paid by the city government for their work without actually completing it, and inspectors' reports issued only a few months after its opening cited low-quality masonry work on the façade, shoddy flooring, a leaky roof, and poor ventilation in the stables. Compounding the issue was the mysterious disappearance of the architect's blueprints from the city records (the identity of said architect remains unknown). The question of who would pay to remediate these issues, and in what other ways the contractor should have been penalized, became a hot-button issue on the city's political scene that year. Nonetheless, the building remained in use as a fire station until the early 1960s, then was repurposed for commercial usage: most notably, it has been owned since 1979 by the Rich Products Corporation, whose sprawling corporate headquarters are located just across the street, and who operate it now as a retail outlet, indeed the only place Rich's line of products - normally supplied to restaurants and institutional cafeterias - are available for sale directly to the public. Originally known as the Red Brick Market, the store is now dubbed Cookie, in homage to the baking ingredients that were always its best-selling items.