[3] The building is also known for once being the office of John R. Oishei (1886–1968), the company's founder and an industrialist who went on to become one of the most important philanthropists in the Buffalo Niagara Region.

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.

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.

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 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.

[9] 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.

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.

This multistory factory building style is characterized by exposed rectangular frames usually of reinforced concrete, with glass mostly replacing solid exterior wall materials.

[Daylight factories] have the Vitruvian virtues of firmness, since they still stand; commodiousness, since they have proven highly adaptable to new uses after their first functions have disappeared; and delight, since they can still generate those mysterious emotions and responses that are supposed to be the prerogative of great architecture.

Earlier multistory industrial buildings had typically been built with load bearing masonry walls allowing only small windows, and with wood internal structures.

[13]: p.82–86  The architectural style reached a fully realized form in 1906 with the Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit, and in 1907 with the Pierce Arrow Administrative Building in Buffalo.