Traveler - The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy

Traveler
Postcards from Buffalo
Buffalo’s turn-of-the-century prosperity spawned dozens of architectural gems.
Now that heritage may help raise the city’s fortunes after decades of hard times.
By Eve M. Kahn
The Charles Rand Penney Roycroft Collection at the Burchfield-Penney
Art Center, 1994. Courtesy of the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Courtesy Buffalo Niagara CVB and Biff Henrich.
Traveler
Above The Burchfield-Penney Art
Center displays Rohlfs, Roycroft, and
Stickley artifacts, such as this Roycroft
copper vase with Steuben glass insert.
Top Though located in Buffalo, Frank
Lloyd Wright’s Darwin D. Martin House
Complex is one of the finest examples of
his Prairie School architecture.
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On a recent weekend sightseeing in Buffalo, I sprinted through the city by
car and on foot, pausing only briefly to eat—yet I still missed a dozen of the
important circa-1900 sites I had hoped to visit. It’s as if the supply of interesting
old buildings is multiplying there: “I keep finding out about ones I hadn’t
heard of,” reports Martin Wachadlo, a Buffalo-based historian who has
been studying the place for 15 years. “Everyone who’s aware of architectural history and comes to this town is blown away by what we have.”
Savvy city leaders have recognized that architecture will help sell the place to
tourists—an important source of revenue to a long-depressed local economy.
The government is not only advertising Buffalo’s skyline in travel magazines
and organizing press junkets to historic streetscapes, but is also helping fund
restorations of circa-1900 buildings, exhibitions about that era’s regional design
innovations, and even replicas of masterpieces planned but never built. (So, no,
it wasn’t my imagination—the number of Frank Lloyd Wright structures actually
is increasing.)
The Gilded Age was especially good to Buffalonians. With fortunes made
from Erie Canal and railway traffic, steel and grain mills, soap and car factories,
and breweries, local tycoons commissioned buildings from the likes of Louis
Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, H.H. Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Between
1868 and 1898, as a backdrop, Frederick Law Olmsted laid out radial avenues,
roundabouts, sunken traverse roads, lakes, and a necklace of parks. “This tall
loop of green ways and green places gave order to a city in the process of creating
itself,” wrote historian Reyner Banham in a still-definitive 1981 book, Buffalo
Architecture: A Guide (MIT Press). The designers’ high aesthetic standards
filtered down to the middle class, who built neighborhoods of Shingle Style
homes, sometimes furnished with sturdy pieces from two idealistic local
suppliers: Charles Rohlfs, and Elbert Hubbard’s prolific
band of Roycrofters (whose landmark campus in East
Aurora is just 20 minutes drive from downtown).
Remarkably little in the way of urban renewal has
damaged Buffalo’s streetscapes—although Wright’s
daringly boxy 1903 Larkin Building was razed in 1950.
The city does visibly suffer from economic woes: the
world’s largest cluster of grain elevators is largely silent,
and the population, at about 280,000, is less than half
its 1950 peak. But I’d go back anytime, even in the
notorious snows. Below are a few of my favorite sites—
all publicly accessible, and all downtown or a short drive
away. (Thanks to ongoing restorations and expansions,
many of these destinations will have even more to offer
by the time you visit them.)
The Burchfield-Penney Art Center
Opening November 22 in a strikingly-turreted new
building, this museum at Buffalo State College offers
circa-1900 paintings by Alexis Fournier and Arts and
Crafts furnishings by the Roycrofters, Charles Rohlfs,
Gustav Stickley, and Heintz Art Metal. (Elmwood Ave. and
Rockwell Rd., 716-878-6011, www.burchfield-penney.org.)
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Augustus Saint-Gaudens carved the caryatids for this
white marble temple, built for the 1901 Pan-American
Exposition at the edge of Delaware Park, Olmsted’s
largest open space in town. Though galleries are mostly
devoted to contemporary art, selections from the permanent collection of early-20th-century paintings—including
works by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec,
Thomas Eakins, and John Singer Sargent—are usually
on view, many in original frames. (1285 Elmwood Ave.,
716-882-8700, www.albrightknox.org.)
Darwin D. Martin House Complex
In this Wright-designed compound, a 1904 house for
Larkin Soap executive Darwin Martin adjoins a 1903
home for Martin’s sister Delta Barton and 1908 quarters
for the Martins’ gardener. Wright filled the grounds in
between with a pergola, conservatory, and carriage house.
(Darwin Martin was not just a devoted repeat client—
Wright called him “my best friend”—but also loaned
the architect some $70,000 that was never repaid.)
After the family lost their fortune in the Great
Depression, they abandoned the property; it was
Courtesy Buffalo Niagara CVB.
Below Monumental carvings by Augustus Saint-Gaudens guard the entrance to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, constructed
for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition.
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Courtesy Buffalo Niagara CVB and Ed Healy.
Above Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for this Rowing Boathouse was one of his
personal favorites; it was finally built in 2007, 102 years after he conceived it.
Courtesy Buffalo Niagara CVB and Buffalo City Cemetery.
Below Frank Lloyd Wright’s Blue Sky Mausoleum in Forest Lawn Cemetery
was designed for the Martin family in 1928, but only built in 2004.
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chopped up among various owners, and
the pergola, conservatory, and carriage
house were razed. In 1992, the nonprofit
Martin House Restoration Corp. began
a $50 million project: restoring the
main house and adjacent structures and
replicating lost ones. Late this year, a
glass-walled, $6 million visitors’ center
will open at the edge of the lot, offering
videos about the Martins and Buffalo
history amid vitrines of artifacts. Interior
restoration is ongoing; lost windows and
iridescent fireplace tiles are being reproduced, and some 75 pieces of Martin
furniture—seating, tables, light fixtures,
Japanese prints—are being restored offsite.
(125 Jewett Parkway, 716-856-3858,
www.darwinmartinhouse.org.)
Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Rowing Boathouse
Buffalo’s West Side Rowing Club raised
some $5.4 million to complete this concrete
structure in 2007, based on 1905 plans
that Wright had developed for University
Courtesy Buffalo Niagara CVB and Biff Henrich
of Wisconsin rowers in Madison. Though it
was never built, Wright was so proud of the
scheme that he included it in his 1910 Wasmuth
Portfolio. (194 Porter Ave., 716-362-3140,
www.wrightsboathouse.org.)
Forest Lawn Cemetery
This 269-acre oasis has Olmsted-designed rolling
terrain as well as the graves of Arts and Crafts
innovator Charles Rohlfs and members of the
Martin, Larkin, and Hubbard families. In 2004,
the cemetery realized Wright’s 1928 design for a
bleachers-like marble monument to the Martins,
called Blue Sky Mausoleum. Crypts under the
steps are available for purchase. (1411 Delaware
Ave., 716-885-1600, http://forest-lawn.com,
www.blueskymausoleum.com. Maps, guidebooks,
and guided tours are available.)
Since overgrown vegetation and 1960s additions
obscured its airy, see-through plan, Wright
scholars had long dismissed this 1927 summer
home as a minor work. Wright designed the
shorefront retreat on Lake Erie for the Martin
family; in 1951, a Catholic order converted the
house into a school, enclosing terraces, tacking
on classrooms and a giant exterior mural of
Rome, and destroying grounds designed by
landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman.
In 1997, when the property came on the
market, local preservationists scrounged up
the $450,000 purchase price. A $3.2 million
restoration is well underway; school accretions
have been removed, the Tichenor limestone
chimneystack has been rebuilt, and ruddy
Courtesy Buffalo Niagara CVB and Reine Hauser.
Graycliff Estate
Top and above Now under restoration, Graycliff, the summer home on
Lake Erie Wright designed for the Martins, is finally getting its due as a
significant example of the architect’s work.
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stucco walls—which Wright tinted with Lake
Erie beach sand—have been repaired. Shipman’s
gardens will eventually be recreated, and Martin
descendants are stocking the interior with original
furnishings, including pastel linens and fourposter beds. (6472 Old Lake Shore Rd., Derby,
NY; 716-947-9217, http://graycliff.bfn.org.)
Richardson Complex
Courtesy Buffalo Niagara CVB and Angel Art Ltd.
H.H. Richardson’s first major commission was
this state-run asylum, where long wings for
patients’ rooms, flanking a twin-towered administration core, maximized sunlight and breezes.
The state government has allotted $80 million for
stabilization of the long-abandoned building and
its conversion into—well, that has not yet been
decided, though one definite future occupant is
an architecture museum and visitors’ center. (400
Forest Ave.; exterior only is accessible.)
Left Architect Henry Hobson Richardson designed
the Buffalo State Hospital between 1870-1896;
Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux
planned the grounds.
Opposite The terra-cotta façade and clean vertical
lines of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler’s
Guaranty Building (1895-96) are nothing short
of breathtaking. Inside, ceilings are ornamented
with art glass set in bronze-plated cast iron.
To Learn More
The exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Buffalo Venture runs through January
10, 2009 at SUNY Buffalo; see page 14.
Classic Buffalo: A Heritage of Distinguished
Architecture, by Richard O. Reisem
(Canisius College Press, 1999).
Spirit of the City, a permanent exhibition, replicates the feel of the 1901
Pan-American Exposition though artifacts,
hands-on displays, and recreated architectural follies and fragments—including
a surreal replica of an amusement-park
doorway: a 35-foot-tall woman’s face
(Buffalo and Erie County Historical
Society Resource Center, 459 Forest Ave.,
716-873-9695, www.bechs.org).
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buffalo (PBS documentary, 2006) – DVD available free
through www.wrightnowinbuffalo.com.
Buffalo’s Delaware Avenue: Mansions and
Families, by Edward T. Dunn (Canisius
College Press, 2004)
www.olmstedinbuffalo.org
http://buffaloolmstedparks.org/
www.visitbuffaloniagara.com
www.wrightnowinbuffalo.com
www.buffalotours.org
www.openairbuffalo.org
Buffalo Architecture: A Guide, by Reyner
Banham et al (MIT Press, 1981).
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Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House:
Architecture as Portraiture, by Jack Quinan
(Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).
Oakland Place: Gracious Living in Buffalo,
by Martin Wachadlo (Buffalo Heritage
Unlimited, 2003).
Go Buffalo the Roycroft Way
The landmark Roycroft campus in East
Aurora is just a 20-minute drive from
Buffalo. The Roycroft Campus Corporation
sometimes offers Buffalo-based events, and
an annual Roycroft-based conference called
The Connection explores the Arts and
Crafts riches of New York State, often with
an emphasis on Buffalo (call 716-655-0261
or www.roycroftconference.com).
In collaboration with Elderhostel, the
Foundation for the Study of the Arts
& Crafts Movement @ Roycroft offers
periodic regional tours (1-800-454-5768
or www.elderhostel.org).
Restored in 1995, the Roycroft Inn makes
a great stop, overnight or for a meal
(716-652-5552 or www.roycroftinn.org).
Courtesy Buffalo Niagara CVB and Hodgson Russ.
Guaranty Building
In 1895, the architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler
“showed the world how a tall building should be done,”
says Tim Tielman of the Campaign for Buffalo History,
Architecture and Culture. Their terracotta-clad Guaranty
Building flares outward like tree branches along its
160-foot-high cornice; the exterior and interior are riotously
ornamented with Celtic interlacing, vines, seedpods, and
seaweed-like encrustations. Since 2002, a law firm, Hodgson
Russ, has lovingly tended the place. (26 Church St.; lobby is
publicly accessible.)
I know, I told you it was torn down in 1950, but mourners
have preserved a 20-foot-tall fragment of its brick base and
installed a plaque. A nearby remnant of the factory has been
converted into offices with exhibits of Larkin memorabilia
as well as photos of the Wright building. (Larkin Building
fragment: in parking lot, corner of Seneca and Swan Streets.
Larkin exhibits: first floor gallery, Larkin at Exchange
Building, 726 Exchange St.)
The author is grateful for the help of Betty and Peter Pavlakis,
proud lifelong Buffalonians; Edward Healy of the Buffalo Niagara
Convention and Visitors Bureau; Kristen Titus of Resnicow
Schroeder; and the Martin House Restoration Corporation.
Courtesy Buffalo Niagara CVB and Ed Healy.
The Larkin Building
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