Erie County Apartments for Rent

Erie County, New York, was founded in 1821. Its name comes from Lake Erie, which in turn comes from the Erie tribe of American Indians who lived south and east of the lake before 1654. According to the 2010 census, the population is 919,040. The county seat is Buffalo.

Erie County is part of the Buffalo–Niagara Falls metro area. The southern part of the county is known as the Southtowns.

The county has a large number of properties on the National Register of Historic Places listings; one interesting site is the Rider-Hopkins Farm and Olmsted Camp.

A historic farm and summer camp located at Sardinia, the Rider-Hopkins Farm and Olmstead Camp consists of a 188.4-acre property that hosts a Greek Revival-style brick farmhouse dating to the 1840s known as the James and Abigail Hopkins House. The property retains the original boundaries as it had when purchased from the Holland Land Company in 1828. The property is also the site of the Olmsted Camp, a turn of the 20th-century family summer camp in the Adirondack “Great Camp” tradition, built in the Arts and Crafts style. The camp was designed by Harold LeRoy Olmsted, a prominent local architect and artist, who was also a distant relative of world-famous Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape designer and Renaissance man.

Another unique attraction in Erie County is the Irish Classical Theatre Company, located at the Andrews Theater on Main Street in Buffalo. The theater was founded when two Dublin-born brothers, internationally-acclaimed actors and former members of Ireland’s celebrated Abbey Theatre, found themselves performing Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the dining room of a local hotel in Buffalo. They were enthusiastically embraced by the western New York audience and together with another Dubliner, Dr. James Warde, founded the Irish Classical Theatre Company. The theater’s glowing reputation for artistic excellence and community involvement made it the fastest-growing theatre company in the region and led to the building of its home, the Andrews Theatre, in 1999.