BUFFALO, N.Y. — The flowers began to come up in spring, like a message from the past.

First came the tulips, with waxy petals crowning stiff stalks and rigid leaves. Next, the violets pushed through the soil, purple gems studding a sizable stretch of earth. And then the chives sprouted, a brilliant green, flooding the air with the smell of onion.

The garden at 139 Howell St., which appeared one day in May and stayed in continuous bloom through the fall, surprised four University at Buffalo architecture students who had purchased the property for $6,500 at a city auction the previous October.

They had bought the parcel with plans to transform a dilapidated home on the premises into a statement in design and minimalist living, an exhaustive renovation that would serve as their master’s program thesis project.

For the young architects, the garden was a link to the past, a relic of some forgotten era. The blossoms, blooms and buds seemed to tell a story: The house on Howell Street, now in a state of decay, had once been treasured.

But by whom?

When the students discovered it in 2008, the two-floor building was crumbling. Trash littered the floor. Vandals had attacked walls with black spray paint, smashed glass paneling on a door to the kitchen. Downstairs, windows facing the street were boarded up. Upstairs, in what was once a bedroom, cream-colored paper peeled off the ceiling.

The four friends tried, with little luck, to learn about the home’s beginnings — who had constructed it, how old it was. One of the only leads they received came from an area resident who thought the dwelling dated to the 1850s, a conjecture that would turn out to be wrong.

In fact, the house was from 1901. It could claim a rich history. Crafted in part from lumber from the Pan-American Exposition, it had been owned by a single family for over a century.

By the time the young architects took ownership, however, few traces remained of the old home’s earlier life. The once-celebrated structure was wasting away. It seemed as if no one had cared about the property — until the flowers began to bloom.

THE BUILDER was an immigrant from Alsace-Lorraine, a man by the name of Jacob DeWald. He was a contractor, constructing houses from the ground up. His granddaughter, Lorraine Chapin, now 90, remembers him as a conversationalist, a fun-loving man. He spoke German, French and English.

DeWald came with his wife and three children to the United States in the late 1800s. In America, the couple had two more daughters, Chapin’s mother being the elder of those younger siblings. They lived on Peach Street and then on Amherst Street, but finding a place for such a large family was difficult. So DeWald got to work.

It was the turn of the 20th century, a time of prosperity for Buffalo, whose population would double between 1890 and 1920. The World’s Fair, dubbed the Pan-Am, came to the city in 1901, bringing throngs of tourists and gawkers who reveled in amusements ranging from organ recitals and horticulture exhibits to rides on an Otis Elevator and viewings of the 410-foot high Electric Tower.

DeWald, likely through connections in his trade, was said to have secured lumber left over from the massive exposition to help complete the home he was building at 139 Howell St. The residence began with two bedrooms and grew soon after to include a wood-frame addition holding a bathroom and kitchen, along with a third bedroom where Chapin and her mother would live in later years.

From early on, the house was the stuff of family lore.

“When I was 10 or 12, you know, they’d talk about it…My aunt used to live in Riverside, and she used to come over and visit,” remembers Chapin, who was born next door in another home she says her grandfather built. “They used to walk over. And we were at 137 [Howell St.], but we always went over to my grandmother’s house when they came.”

Chapin and her mother moved to 139 Howell St. in 1939, after DeWald and his wife had died. In 1950, Chapin’s brother, Ellsworth “Bud” Chapin Sr., joined his sister and mother there. With him came his young family — his spouse Alfreda Chapin, his daughter Gail, and his son, Ellsworth Jr. or “Buddy.”

The dwelling became the central meeting spot for the Chapin clan. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, and even on Sunday nights, friends and relatives would congregate around a dining room table — wooden, with “great big legs,” Lorraine Chapin recalls — that sat a dozen people.

“We would have candles,” says Gail, 61, whose married name is Koslowski. “And was it Aunt Nellie who used to bring the holiday napkins?…We had the little pilgrim candles, and that sort of thing, the holiday salt and pepper shakers…and the fine china. Everything came out of the china cabinet for the holidays, and the good silverware would come out.”

Fond memories of the Howell Street home also rose from everyday life. In one black-and-white photograph, Koslowski’s father kneels in the driveway, icing bottles of beer in a bank of snow. When the weather was good, neighbors would drop by to play cards outdoors on a covered patio with Buddy, who had muscular dystrophy and sat in a wheelchair.

To this day, Koslowski speaks of the old house with a certain wonderment, dwelling on curious features that intrigued her as a child — the laundry chute connecting a first-floor closet with the basement where the family washed and hung clothes, and the basement itself, accessible only through a trapdoor opening onto a steep flight of stairs.

And then, of course, there was the garden.

For more than five decades, Alfreda Chapin tended to a patchwork of flowers and vegetables — tomato plants, peppers, cucumbers, roses, irises, hydrangeas, peonies, and many more varieties. She baked pies with rhubarb that grew in the plot. She changed the water in a bird bath and clipped the ivy that crept up the house’s painted, white façade.

“I was lost in there from morning ’til night,” she says. “[Lorraine] used to holler at me, saying, ‘You going to come in today?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I will be there.’”

People used to walk by and admire the home and garden, she says. Children called the residence the “Hansel and Gretel House,” she adds. “It was beautiful.”

AS YEARS passed, the number of family members residing at 139 Howell St. shrank. Koslowski married in 1969 and moved away. Other residents died. Alfreda Chapin lost her son and her husband. Lorraine Chapin lost her mother.

In the end, only the sister-in-laws remained: Alfreda Chapin, with her flowers, and Lorraine Chapin, a career-minded woman who never married. (She worked for 40 years at American Brass at Sayre Street and Military Road, rising from a secretary job to become head of the incentives department.)

Into their eighties, the two continued living as they always had. They did laundry in the basement, braving those precarious steps. They shoveled their driveway — ”I just loved to shovel,” Alfreda Chapin says — in all but the worst snowstorms.

But in 2004, the pair agreed to relocate to Grand Island, where Koslowski lived. They were old. Routine chores — the shoveling, hauling the garbage to the curb — had become taxing. They sold the home that for so long had met their every need. Five generations of Jacob DeWald’s descendants had passed through the doors at 139 Howell St., with Koslowski’s children and a granddaughter all visiting. Now, the family heirloom would be in the hands of strangers.

“It was hard,” says Lorraine Chapin, who, like her sister-in-law, wears wire-rimmed glasses and a head of thick silver curls. As she talks about the residence, about the neighbors, about Black Rock, tears well briefly in her eyes. “It was just a difficult time to leave, you know? After all those years. I was in that neighborhood my whole life.”

For the first few years after their move, Koslowski would bring her aunt and mother to see the old house during shopping trips to Wegmans on Amherst Street. But watching the building’s deterioration became too painful.

“One time I drove by, the windows were boarded up,” Lorraine Chapin recalls. “So then we didn’t go.”

“We didn’t need to see that…You felt that sadness, of the house,” Koslowski says.

Her mother chimes in: “I was there for over 50 years.”

Then, on June 29 this year, they saw it in the Buffalo News: A photograph of the Howell Street home on the front page of the business section. Since the Chapins had sold the residence, it had changed hands several times. The article said the new owners, a group of graduate students, were in the midst of renovations that would transform the building into an architectural marvel.

The project, with its modernist touch, seemed strange. The snapshot in the newspaper showed the structure with portions of giant wooden cubes — 7-by-7-by-7.5-foot spaces that would serve as bedrooms — jutting out from the original brick exterior. But the home had a new life. It was no longer being neglected.

“Then we said, ‘Let’s go through Howell and see what the house looks like now,” Alfreda Chapin says.

“We went,” says Koslowski, “to see the rebirth of it.”

THE STUDENTS were Michael-John Bailie, Paul Dudkowski, Ernest Ng and Dan Stripp. In 2008, in the final year of their architecture program, they had begun hunting for a vacant house to remodel for their thesis project, hoping to use their time in school to create something useful. Dudkowski and Stripp would live in the home with Stripp’s dog Cosmo after the overhaul.

They scrutinized dozens of properties on the city’s auction list, setting $10,000 as the maximum they would pay. The building they were looking for would be under 1,500 square feet, a manageable size. It would be in a safe neighborhood. The house at 139 Howell St. was a match — derelict, but on a tree-lined street in a welcoming community where other owners maintained their homes.

The students tore down the wood-frame addition where Lorraine Chapin’s bedroom had been. They gutted the rest of the house. They constructed four “cubes,” two downstairs and two upstairs, investing $36,000 in the renovation, including the $6,500 they spent to buy the property. A few local businesses donated labor and supplies.

The finished building is a work of art. The exterior, with the sleek wooden boxes protruding outward, has a whimsical quality. The interior, with less than 700 square feet of floor space, has a contemporary feel. On the first story, a rubber curtain separates a bathroom from an open area with a kitchenette, a parlor, and a bedroom that doubles as a lounge. Seven-foot-long rectangular windows, enclosed in painted, black steel frames, look out onto the world. A slate-colored varnish gives hardwood floors a silvery sheen. The home’s façade is a similar hue.

THIS WAS NOT the house Koslowski and the Chapins remembered. The kitchen with the inviting, yellow wallpaper was gone. So was the patio where Buddy used to play cards. The students had chopped down the ivy, worried it would ruin the paint.

Nevertheless, when they saw the article in the Buffalo News, the women still viewed the home as theirs. The bricks that Jacob DeWald had laid more than 100 years before remained. Alfreda Chapin wondered about her garden.

So the family members made their way over to 139 Howell St. for the first time in two years. They also contacted “the boys” — Bailie, Dudkowski, Ng and Stripp — asking to tour the property when work was complete.

ONE AFTERNOON in late November, Koslowski and the Chapins assemble at the sister-in-laws’ apartment on Grand Island to look at pictures of the house on the Howell Street in its more-or-less finished state.

They examine two dozen photographs, reviewing each twice. They inquire about the new locations of certain rooms — the bathroom, for instance: Where is that now? They are happy to see that the staircase to the second floor, with its backbone of painted steel, had shallow steps. Both the Chapins will be able to make it up.

“I think it looks…” Koslowski says, pausing. She blinks. “I want to say the word ‘neat.’ I know that’s not an architectural word to say. It just looks crisp and clean and nice. It looks inviting.”

“Yeah,” says her mother, who nevertheless seems skeptical. Alfreda Chapin wants to know where the vine went. She hopes the ivy the students tried to kill will come crawling back.

“I don’t know…I don’t feel like it’s ours anymore,” Koslowski says after a while. Then she catches herself: Well, I shouldn’t say that.”

“It’s so different.” Alfreda Chapin says.

“It’s so different, yes,” her daughter continues. “[But] the shell is still there. I see the shell of the house. And the garden, of course, still makes it ours.”

“And that’s what I say,” Lorraine Chapin says. “I’m glad that at least part of it is still there.”

“Yeah,” Alfreda Chapin says.

Earlier, on one of their drive-bys, the Chapins and Koslowski, a retired special education teacher with a motherly disposition and golden bob, had stopped to talk with “the boys” about the house. Bailie lives on Long Island now, and Ng teaches at Mississippi State University. But Dudkowski and Stripp, who have stayed in Buffalo, plan to invite the family over soon to view the home’s interior.

When the students, now graduates, first heard from the women, “We were like, ‘Tell us everything,’” Stripp says. While gutting the house, the team had found yellowed copies of the Buffalo Courier and Buffalo Evening News in the walls, serving as insulation. The newspapers, spanning the early- to mid-1900s, had piqued the friends’ curiosity about the structure’s origins.

“It’s interesting for us. [The builder] used materials from the Pan-Am, and we also re-used materials,” Dudkowski says. Some of the fixtures the architects purchased for the home — a claw-foot bathtub, for instance — came from buildings stripped during demolition.

Looking forward, Dudkowski says, “It would be nice to keep part of the history of the house.”

He is thinking of the garden.

Earlier this year, Stripp’s girlfriend made a strawberry-rhubarb pie from the rhubarb, and Bailie planted some black-eyed Susans, a gift from a professor. The students took pictures of the blossoms, white and pink and yellow and magenta. They counted at least four kinds of roses.

They admired varieties they couldn’t name, including “awesome flowers that were, like, this big when they bloomed,” says Dudkowski, cupping his hands to illustrate an object with the width of a dinner plate. Alfreda Chapin suspects he is talking about the peonies.

Busy with the house this year, the architects had little time to work with the plants. They know little about growing things, but sound keen on learning. They hope their property can be featured in next year’s community garden walk.

“It’s a really nice garden,” Stripp says. “It would be a shame to waste it…We’ve gotten a lot of comments from people who said it used to be beautiful.”

Soon, it may be beautiful again.

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Jannifer, the author of this story, works in the University at Buffalo’s communications office and previously wrote about the architecture students’ project here. A version of this story ran in the spring 2010 issue of UB Today, UB’s alumni magazine. This blog, however, is independent of Jannifer’s job at UB.

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