By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
The Kenmore Avenue side of the Wheel Chair Home in 1926
The twin Eberhardt mansions on Delaware Avenue in Kenmore. The building in the foreground, on the corner of Kenmore Avenue, still stands. The building next door, at the corner of West Hazeltine, was torn down 1977-78.
“Many invalids are just happy to be alive,” says the story subhead as the Buffalo Times extols the praises of the Wheel Chair Home in 1926.
The “Wheel Chair Home for the Incurables” was established in 1910 to “maintain a home for incurables and chronic invalids and to provide wheel chairs for invalids among the worthy poor of Buffalo.”
A Wheel Chair Home “inmate,” 1922. All residents were women.
After opening at 93 17th St. and then 344 Hudson St., the home moved to the former Eberhardt Mansion on the corner of Delaware and Kenmore in 1915.
Kenmore visionaries and real estate tycoon brothers L.P.A and Fred Eberhardt built twin mansions in 1893-94 on the border of Kenmore and Buffalo on Delaware Avenue, with the hope of starting the same sort of mansion development that was famous on the Buffalo stretch of Delaware further south.
While that development didn’t happen, the side-by-side stately mansions did serve as the entryway for the village for just over 80 years.
The Wheel Chair Home organization bought the other “twin” mansion, which had been the longtime home of Kenmore’s YWCA, in 1976.
Plans to tear down the former YWCA were put into motion the following year. When asked why, the administrator of the Wheel Chair Home told reporters that if the building were to catch fire, the smoke would negatively impact the home.
“We fear an arsonist might burn down the building,” said administrator Edward Gray, failing to describe any impending danger other than someone might try to burn it down. Others pointed to developers looking to build an office building and restaurant on the site as the likely driving motive – but either way, the home of LPA Eberhardt at the corner of Delaware and West Hazeltine was demolished in 1977.
In 1979, the Wheel Chair Home broke ground on a new facility on Elmwood Avenue between Sheridan and I-290. When the new building opened in 1980, it was officially renamed the Schofield Residence, in honor of the first president of the old Wheel Chair Home Association.
The same year, and perhaps reflective of the motivation of the earlier demolition, the now-empty, but still-surviving Fred Eberhardt mansion was in danger of being torn down with the offer of $350,000 on the table to clear the property for a Perkins Pancake House. Cooler heads prevailed, and the property has been owned by coin and metals dealer Jack Hunt since 1981.
