The Webb Building was commissioned in 1888 by Marine Bank chairman and business titan Jewett M. Richmond (1830-1899) and was completed the following year. The brick and stone structure is a fine example of an arcaded building, in which the elevation is articulated by grouping the windows beneath a series of arches. (H.H. Richardson, of course, fathered this style. His 1886-87 Ames Building in Boston is, similar to the Webb Building, rendered in brick. Also in both, the arches rise the entire height of the office floors, and, according to architectural historian Vincent Scully, “it is only a step to Sullivan’s most advanced skyscraper, the Guaranty, in Buffalo, of 1895.” How fortunate Buffalo then is to have this building situated, like an illustration in a timeline, on Pearl Street between the Civil War-era structures to the south and Louis Sullivan’s great Guaranty Building to the north, comprehensible in one glance.

In geography and chronology, not only does the Webb Building point the way to the Guaranty, it stands at the head of a row of earlier Italianate structures. To its north, beyond a parking lot, stands Green & Wicks’s Dun Building of 1894. a skyscraper in height, if not style. Then, on the next block, the Guaranty. Buffalo is the only city in which a person can stand in one spot and take in the march of architecture and technology from pattern-book commercial buildings with load-bearing walls to the first pure skyscraper. The Webb Building is pivotal in many ways to that story and the future of Pearl Street and lower downtown.

Late 19th century commercial structures of this description are still common in New York City, but most of those built in Buffalo during the same period were destroyed during the Urban Removal period, which for Buffalo lasted into the 1980's (some would argue it still carried on, in a kind of cold war mode, as a means to fund local development agencies. See the J.N. Adam coverage below). Architect Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz (1853-1921), was the son of Leopold Eidlitz (one of the most important American architects of the mid-19th century), who along with Richardson was responsible for the redesign of the state capitol in Albany in the 1870's. The prolific younger Eidlitz was most noted for the 1896 New York City Bar Association and the New York Times building of 1903-1904, for which Times Square was named. 

In Buffalo, Cyrus Eidlitz triumphed over none other than Richardson himself in the 1884 competition to design a grand civic library for Lafayette Square. The magnificent Buffalo Library was tragically demolished in 1961. (Richardson's design placed second to Eidlitz’s Richardsonian design.) Eidlitz also designed the Iroquois Hotel (1887), a commanding hostelry which stood at Main and Eagle until the 1940s. His star could not have been brighter when Richmond hired him to design the Webb (named for a principal tenant). The supervising architect for all three of Eidlitz's Buffalo buildings was August C. Esenwein, one of the city's leading architects of that era.

The destruction of the Webb Building would have been a great architectural loss to a city that has already lost far too much of its priceless inheritance. Pounding it to dust would have been rued by the general public and all those who cherish heritage and its tourism potential. Will Buffalo’s establishment, now howling to get the J.N Adam (AM&A’s) buildings demolished, ever learn? The Webb Building, if it indeed joins the string of downtown buildings being converted to residential, may yet stand as another example of good things coming to those who wait.