Buffalo Savings / M&T - Table of Contents  ........................  Fountain Plaza - Table of Contents

North Elevation
Buffalo Savings Bank / Goldome / M& T Bank Branch
545 Main Street, Buffalo, NY

The Dome By Tom Buckham Reprinted from The Buffalo News, march 1, 2001 The dome is 23 feet tall and 56 feet in diameter. It is covered with 13,500 terra-cotta tiles, meticulously engineered to interlock and overlap each other. Each of the 54 rows of tile differs in size from the row above or below it, and each tile is individually imprinted with a row and cast number. The tiles originally were overlaid with copper, which took on a greenish hue. Three times since - 1954, 1979, and 1998 - the dome was gilded with pure gold. The last restoration took required 140,000 paper-thin sheets of 23.75-carat gold leaf and cost $500,000. See drawing of dome being constructed taken from "Tee Gold Dome: An Architectural Profile," pub. by Goldome Bank

The North Wall By Mike Schalk July 2, 2002 The door frame that now sits in the middle of the north facade was removed and re-installed there when that section was removed for the large addition of 20 years ago. I re-call the demolition of the brick commercial building on the north side of the main building in the mid-1960's and since that was there long before the rotunda, there had never been any granite facade against that building - only filler brick. Whatever was exposed when the 1967 building was torn down was a result of that adition. I have never felt that the treatment of the north wall in the 1980 project was esthetically pleasing to either building aand should have been something more simple.

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