Historic marble pieces get new life at Crofts Hall

If those massive pieces of marble on the front lawn of Crofts Hall look familiar, they should.

And if you were wondering whether they were intentionally positioned just so on the hilltop, they were.

The five marble drums — each weighing 14,000 pounds — are leftovers from the iconic marble columns at Baird Point, erected nearly a half century ago.

Stashed away and long out of public sight, the remnant marble was recently reclaimed from a storage lot on the North Campus and moved to nearby Crofts as a “folly” — an extravagant decoration at the center of a perennial wildflower pollinator garden that will begin to take shape in the spring.

While Crofts, an administrative building in the southern corner of campus, has some benches and picnic tables, its outdoor space is relatively sterile, says Daniel Seiders, a landscape architectural planner in Campus Planning.

The columns provide an opportunity to connect landscape and art, he says.

“This brings a lot of interest, and it brings a human scale that makes people more comfortable in the landscape,” Seiders says.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if once the garden is there, and we throw a few Adirondack chairs out, we would see a lot of people spending time in that space.”

Like the marble columns at Baird Point, the Crofts marble once adorned the façade of the former Greek-revival building constructed downtown at Main and Swan streets in 1914 as headquarters for M&T Bank. The bank later sold the building to the Buffalo branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which occupied the “marble temple” until 1959, when it was demolished.

The columns were salvaged and given to UB, where for years they sat on the South Campus unassembled and subjected to vandalism until the pieces were moved to the North Campus for creation of a Greek-style amphitheater on the southern shore of Lake LaSalle.

Reassembled into three columns with single pieces arranged around it, Baird was dedicated on Sept. 10, 1978 — nearly two decades after the marble was given to UB, according to University Archives.

Why the five remaining pieces were not used at Baird Point is unclear, Seiders says.

Instead, the five pieces were out of sight for years until this past spring when workers started clearing the storage lot on Service Center Road to make way for construction of the new Empire AI Data Center.

“There were more of them than we knew about,” Seiders says. “A couple of them were actually buried in a spoils pile that was over there, so when they started digging that up, they hit these huge chunks and were like, ‘What are these?’”

There was discussion about storing the marble pieces elsewhere, but campus planners recognized their historic significance. Sean Brodfuehrer, assistant director of campus planning, suggested putting them just outside the window of the department’s temporary offices in Crofts, where they would be safe and not forgotten.

Seiders consulted with a civil engineer and pulled the building’s original blueprints to get a better sense of the grading and soil conditions to ensure the hefty pieces wouldn’t sink into the hill.

Seiders, who envisioned arranging them as ancient ruins, created a digital model of how best to lay out the pieces and contracted with a rigging company from Lockport to haul the marble into place on the lawn.

“We are thrilled to introduce another piece of public art to the campus community,” says Kelly Hayes McAlonie, director of campus planning. “This type of investment, however small, has a tremendous impact on the lives of our faculty, students and staff.”

The project eventually will include smaller pieces of marble, also found in the storage yard, which will encircle the drums and serve as a frame for the garden, Seiders says.

“We don’t necessarily think of Crofts as being their forever home,” Seiders says of the marble drums.

“As there are larger conversations about outdoor placemaking and social spaces, it’s totally possible that these may someday be incorporated into a place where more people can enjoy them,” he says. “But for now, this sort of lets us think about them and understand their potential.”