English: The former offices of the American Kardex Company at 532 Main Street (corner Wheeler Street) in Tonawanda, New York, as seen in November 2021. Erected in 1924, the architecture of this three-story, steel-framed office building is nothing if not reminiscent of its time period: a streamlined Neoclassical aesthetic in whose fine details can be seen a presaging of the Art Deco style that would come to the forefront in only a few years' time. On the buff brick façade we see vertical rows of amply proportioned windows set into shallow recesses, which alternate with pilaster strips on which shield-shaped decorative panels (executed in finished cut stone, along with the other exterior trimmings) serve as ersatz capitals. Atop are found, consecutively, rows of corbeling and a stepped parapet whose angular forms are one of those manifestations of proto-Deco styling. The flat roof once featured a rooftop garden and outdoor cafeteria for workers. By contrast, the entrance is more traditionally Neoclassical, with a pair of engaged Doric columns supporting a stone entablature. The interior was originally finished in wood panelling of maple and walnut, and the grounds were landscaped with curved paths, lawns, and flower plantings. Founded in 1915 by James Rand, Jr., American Kardex was an office supply manufacturer whose specialty was filing and index card systems for the health care industry. The year after inaugurating the above-depicted facility, the company purchased in quick succession its main competitor, the Rand Ledger Company (owned by James Rand's identically-named, estranged father), as well as Library Bureau (a Boston-based manufacturer of library card catalogs founded by Melville Dewey, the innovator of the Dewey Decimal System), and the merged Rand Kardex Bureau became the largest office supply manufacturer in the U.S. Aside from the administration building, the complex featured 11 other structures, the others of which housed the company's manufacturing operations. In 1927, the company was purchased by Remington Typewriters to form Remington Rand, a massive conglomerate whose manufacturing purview came to encompass everything from electric razors to firearms to the world's first supercomputer; its corporate headquarters were in New York City, but the Tonawanda facility remained in use by the company's Kardex Division until the early 1960s. On a national level, Kardex is probably best known as the namesake and sponsor of the shortest-lived team in the history of the National Football League: a former member club of the New York Pro Football League, the Tonawanda Kardex Lumbermen joined the NFL in 1921, lost their first game to the Rochester Jeffersons by a score of 45-0, and promptly folded. The complex today serves as office and storage space for a number of different local firms.