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Trico Plant No. 1 is a historic windshield wiper factory building located at Buffalo in Erie County, New York. It is an example of a style of architecture sometimes referred to as the daylight factory - a style for which Buffalo is well known. The building was mostly constructed in the 1920s and 1930s of reinforced concrete and features curtain walls of metal sash windows and brick spandrels, although a portion of the plant incorporates an historic brewery building from the 1890s.〔 ''See also:'' 〕 It was the original home of Trico Products Corporation, the first manufacturer of windshield wipers, and was an important factory during a period when Trico was the largest employer in the city of Buffalo. The building is also known for once being the office of John R. Oishei (1888-1968), the company's founder and an industrialist who went on to become one of the most important philanthropists in the Buffalo Niagara Region. The Trico business continued to operate at the building until 1998, when, after having transferred most of its manufacturing facilities to Texas and Mexico, the company moved out of the building. In 2003, plans were developed and conditionally approved by the New York State Historic Preservation Office to reuse the building as a mixed residential and commercial structure. That developer subsequently died, and in 2007 the property was purchased by the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus(BNMC).〔(Buffalo Rising blog, "New Owner for Trico and M. Wile Buildings" )〕 After sitting dormant for another four years, it was reported that BNMC planned demolition of about 95% of the building beginning on April 15, 2012 (saving only the brewery building). Meanwhile, community groups have called attention to BNMC's refusal to conduct an adaptive reuse study or evaluation process prior to demolition to assess the feasibility of building reuse.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 Public Statement re: Trico Plant #1 Building )〕 Trico Plant No. 1 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.〔 ==History== The Trico Plant No. 1 was the first factory built by Trico, which went on to become a major manufacturer of windshield wipers. The company was founded by John R. Oishei, who in 1917 was the manager of the Teck Theater in Buffalo, when while driving in a heavy rain he struck a bicyclist with his car. This inspired Oishei to team up with John Jepson to market the windshield wiper blade Jepson had invented. The business first rented manufacturing space in North Buffalo, but in 1919 the Pierce Arrow Motor Company contracted the manufacturer to supply manually operated wipers for its luxury cars, and in 1920 Cadillac, Packard, and Lincoln did the same. The growing business, now fully owned by Oishei, purchased and moved its operations to the former ice house of the Christian Weyand Brewery at 624 Ellicott Street, recently made vacant by Prohibition. The four-story, 40,000 square foot, brewery building's brownstone and brick facade can still be seen from Ellicott Street surrounded by newer parts of the factory, and is known as Building #1. The building was built in the 1890s for the Weyand Brewing Company at a time when several large breweries were located in what was then a German American neighborhood. Christian Weyand (1826-1898), a German-speaking shoemaker from the Lorraine region in eastern France had earlier partnered with John Schetter to start the brewing business. Shortly after his two sons joined him in the business in the early 1890s, Weyand expanded the brewery to a capacity of over one million barrels per year, and built the ice house as a storage facility. The ice house is the only surviving part of the Weyand Brewery, and Oishei's decision to adapt and reuse the brewery building preserves one of the few remnants of Buffalo's once flourishing beer-making industry. The company continued to expand. In 1922 the manufacturer became the supplier of automatic windshield wiper systems to Cadillac.〔 Initial work expanding the factory began in 1924, when the Buffalo architectural and engineering firm of Harold E. Plumer and Paul F. Mann were brought on to erect a modern four-story reinforced concrete building, known as Building #2, a short distance north of the ice house building. Additional buildings followed in the ensuing decades, including two stories added above the original ice house. Later buildings replaced Buildings #4, 5, and 6, and building #10 was built prior to 1923, but was purchased by Trico in 1946. By the completion of Building #8 in the late 1930s, Trico had taken up the entire block bounded by Burton, Washington, Goodell, and Ellicott Streets. Construction dates for the different parts of the building are shown in the table below. The building continued to be used by Trico for the manufacture of windshield wipers and related automotive parts until 1998, when the plant was closed. Buildings #9 and #10 were subsequently rehabilitated and used for the BNMC Innovation Center, a biomedical business incubator.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 url=http://www.bnmc.org/innovation/index.aspx?s=7 )〕 The remaining parts of the plant have remained vacant. John R. Oishei died in 1968. During his life he started a charitable foundation that has become one of the most important philanthropies in the Buffalo Niagara Region.〔 In 2010, The John R. Oishei Foundation had $284 million in assets and contributed more than $14 million to community and medical causes in the region. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Trico Plant No. 1」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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