English: The Spolka Building, 436 Amherst Street, Buffalo, New York, August 2021. A two-story buff brick commercial building erected in 1917 in a Neoclassical-influenced vernacular style using building materials left over from the construction of the interior of the Assumption RC Church across the street, the Spolka Building's angular façade features a trio of windows - tripartite on the sides and one-over-one sash in the middle - with decorative brick framing and stone cornerpieces, with a metal cornice and parapet above, a newly constructed storefront dating to a recent renovation, and most interestingly, an offset main entrance with a half-round transom above and ornamental keystone above. Built by the Polish-American Building Company, the space was originally occupied by tailor Jacob F. Bujarek, but by 1921 was operating as a branch location of the Spolka Clothing Company, founded fifteen years earlier as a locally-owned, cooperatively-run business that allowed Polish-Americans not only to ensure that their consumer dollar stayed within the community, but also to build wealth by becoming shareholders and receiving dividends on the business's profits. The model was so successful that, throughout the 1920s and even into the 1930s, Spolka was able to expand from their original location on Broadway not only to the building depicted here (which was centrally located within Buffalo's second-largest Polish-American enclave, in the Black Rock section of town) but also to locations in Niagara Falls, Binghamton; Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Detroit. Spolka thrived through the 1960s, but as the Polish community in Buffalo and elsewhere gradually assimilated into the larger society and the prominence of their distinct ethnic identity began to wane, sales began to fall and locations began to close down (including the Black Rock branch, which ended its run in the early 1970s). In 2000 the original Broadway location, too, closed its doors. 436 Amherst Street housed a number of other businesses afterward and was at one point converted into apartments, but had been vacant and boarded up for the better part of a decade by the time rehabilitation work kicked off in 2016. It's now owned by the Black Rock Historical Society, who moved their museum into the building in 2020 from its former home on Niagara Street, and was designated a City of Buffalo landmark the following year.