Fred Eberhardt House - Table of Contents

History - The Fred Eberhardt House
2746 Delaware Avenue, Kenmore, NY
Present owner: Hunt & Associates


Photos courtesy of the Tonawanda-Kenmore Historical Society
Click on illustrations for larger size -- and additional information

L.P.A. Eberhardt in his thirties when he established Kenmore

The real estate office of LPA and Fred Eberhardt at 2749 Delaware Ave

L.P.A Eberhardt's first home and carriage house at 2749 Delaware Ave.

The Winfield Mang store and tavern site
where the "twin sentinels" were built in 1894.

Delaware Avenue at Kenmore Avenue, c 1899. At left are the "twin sentinels."

In 1899, when the village of Kenmore was incorporated, transportation was provided by a horse drawn omnibus


When the Belt Line railroad was extended to Amherst Street in 1883, development of the open lands to the northern city limits and beyond became a real possibility. People could conveniently live farther away from their jobs. Thus the city's affluent flocked to Parkside and smart entrepreneurs opened trolley lines to Hamburg, Orchard Park, Williamsville, and Tonawanda. Trolley tracks began to weave the city and its neighbors together.

L. P. A Eberhardt (1860-1939)

Louis Phillip Adolph Eberhardt was one of the most fascinating entrepreneurs of the time. A real estate developer, he began his career in 1882 at the age of twenty-two by subdividing a forty-acre farm inside the city at its northern fringe.

By 1888, he began purchasing land just outside the city limits in the town of Tonawanda from two farm families, the Ackermans and the Mangs. The land was located on Delaware Avenue running north toward the village of Tonawanda. Eberhardt hoped to develop a new community just north of the Buffalo city line. There he hoped to lure people who wished to escape the congestIon. noise, and fast pace of urban life and to reside in a pleasant community with a small town atmosphere.

He constructed a substantial home (pictured above), with a large carriage house for himself and his family on the east side of Delaware Avenue in 1888-89.

When this home burned several years later, Eberhardt eyed the propoerty across the street where the Winfield Mang store and tavern (pictured above) stood on the northwest corner of Delaware and Kenmore Avenues. Kenmore citizens bought out the saloon and converted it into a residence and pharmacy which was occupied by Dr. J.J. Drake. L.P.A. Eberhardt then bought the property, razed the buidling, and had the carriage house moved across the street.

He erected the "twin sentinels" there in 1894.
These were two red Medina sandstone, Richardsonian Romanesque-style mansions designed and built for himself and his brother, Fred, by noted local architect Cyrus Porter. The cost for each was $15,000. These "twin sentinels" signaling arrival in Kenmore were familiar landmarksfor generations of travelers along Delaware Avenue.

The Fred Eberhardt home still stands today as an office building, but the other mansion was torn down in 1977 after serving many years as a YWCA.

Birth of Kenmore

A horse-drawn omnibus enabled people to travel to Eberhardt's new home from the New York Central Belt Line Railroad, one mile south of the city line. Near the "twin mansions" he constructed, Eberhardt envisaged a village of large stone and brick homes with carriage houses and spacious lawns.

While his suburban village, Kenmore, never quite reached that scale, it did become a community of comfortable, mostly frame homes for people fleeing the hustle-bustle of urban life for the small-town atmosphere. By 1890 there were nearly three hundred inhabitants in Kenmore, fifty of whom used the omnibus daily to commute into the city.

Nine years later, the citizens of Kenmore formally incorporated into a village, Buffalo's pioneer planned suburb.

See also: Highlights of Buffalo's History, 1889



Special thanks to the Michael Blinkoff and Associates law firm for their cooperation


Photos and their arrangement © 2003 Chuck LaChiusa
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