English: The Michael Shea House, 48 Vermont Street, Buffalo, New York, March 2022. Built in 1898, this handsome two-story house is one of three adjacent ones in the NRHP-listed Prospect Hill Historic District to have been designed by local architect William Hart Boughton (including Boughton's own former home and studio, standing at the corner of Columbus Parkway). The house's unique design defies easy stylistic categorization, but the steeply pitched roof, the stucco siding on the projecting upper floor, and tall chimney centrally located on the side elevation all point to a French Eclectic influence that's one of the earliest examples of such in Buffalo. Even more noteworthy, however, is the semicircular enclosed front porch with its engaged Doric columns and unusual domed copper roof. The house was built as a speculative venture and, for the first four years of its existence, passed through the hands of a revolving door of short-term lessees while advertisements in the local press continually sought a permanent owner. That owner was Michael Shea (1859-1934), who was eulogized in the pages of the Buffalo Evening News as "probably the oldest active showman in the United States" and "the last and individually most influential of a group that nursed variety entertainment from its struggling days as the offspring of the old music hall into an international amusement form that filled hundreds of theaters weekly", beginning with the 1892 opening of Shea's Music Hall in the ill-fated Arcade Building on Lafayette Square, continuing through the inauguration six years later of Shea's Garden Theatre (one of the first purpose-built vaudeville houses in America), and reaching its crescendo in January 1926 with the magnificent Shea's Buffalo Theater, the flagship in what was by now a chain of more than a dozen silent movie palaces stretching from Buffalo to Toronto. Shea lived here from c. 1902 until 1929, when he downsized to the apartment in The Westbrook that would serve as his residence for the rest of his life.