File:Westminster Club House, Buffalo, New York - 20220515.jpg

English: The Westminster Club House, 419 Monroe Street, Buffalo, New York, May 2022. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018, this is one of the very few remaining buildings in Buffalo that's historically connected with the Settlement House movement: a pioneering effort at social reform that traces its origin to the 1884 founding of Toynbee Hall in London, but truly came into its own when Jane Addams imported the concept to the U.S. five years later with her Hull House in Chicago. Facilities like this would typically set up shop in working-class immigrant neighborhoods of large cities (a descriptor that certainly fit this section of Buffalo's East Side at the time), providing the residents with health care, education, and social opportunities through the volunteer efforts of middle-class "settlement workers" (often connected to a local church, such as Westminster Presbyterian on Delaware Avenue, which administered, and gave its name to, this one) who lived and worked among their charges. The local firm of Colson & Hudson employed the Arts & Crafts style for the building's architecture: an apropos choice, given that the movement was conceived as an implicit criticism of the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism, yet also quite functional, especially in terms of the large free-flowing spaces that characterize the interior. The design is noticeably simplified, with the characteristic widely overhanging eaves present only as a sort of decorative awning (with ornamental brackets mimicking exposed rafter tails) underneath the parapet wall of a flat roof. The Westminster House remained in operation for over half a century, from its founding in 1910 through its acquisition by the United Way in 1962, by which time both the demographics of the neighborhood (from German immigrant to African-American) and the organization's purview (from assimilating newly landed immigrants to providing community services to inner-city youths) had substantially changed. The building is now home to Westminster Commons, an 84-unit affordable housing complex for senior citizens.