Page 2 of 2
Buffalo, New York
Pack up the stereo, meet at the burial ground
There is a bit of a theme to this last half of the Buffalo slideshow, and that theme is Frank Lloyd Wright. We’re starting with Wright’s Darwin Martin House, which is kind of like a gigantic Robie House built with an unlimited budget.
If I was going to write my own historical novel, something along the lines of "Devil in the White City" but without the grisly murder parts, I might instead focus on the rather interesting life of Darwin Martin from Buffalo. I'd start with his childhood (of course, you always have to start there), then I'd go into his meteoric rise at the Larkin Soap Company where he became one of the highest paid executives in the country. And of course I'd include his eventful meeting with Frank Lloyd Wright, who Martin ended up hiring to design their Buffalo headquarters, a building that has since been demolished and is now easily in my top five of buildings I wish I could have seen before they were demolished, along with New York's Pennsylvania Station, the Singer Tower and, well, I don't know, maybe the lighthouse in Alexandria (I realize that's only four buildings and not five).
Eventually I'd find myself with parallel narratives of Martin and Wright, with a good section of the book focusing on the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo, one of Wright's best. Its interior (where pictures are still not allowed) is just crazy. For example there are hidden bookcases behind hidden bookcases, Wright had the horizontal joints in the Roman brick inside covered with gold leaf, and he created a very complex plan- even the garage has over a hundred corners. I’m not including a hundred pictures of a hundred garage corners, but will instead give you a feel for the buildings and let you count how many corners are there for yourself. I was somewhere into the high sixties or so before I decided to stop counting.
In 1907 when the Darwin Martin House was finished, it cost $125,000 to build, all at a time when you could get a really, really nice new house for around $5k to $10k. What all that extra money paid for were a lot of incredibly crazy details, a lot of quality materials and dramatic spaces like this, a covered breezeway that connects the back door to the conservatory.
The Martins lived for many years in the Martin House (which makes sense), although without giving too much of my imaginary book's plot away, the Martin's did not fare especially well during the depression. They eventually abandoned the house, and it fell to other owners who demolished sections and made other changes. Since then, it has been restored and, in some cases like the conservatory, completely rebuilt based on the original plans. Even the statue (The Nike of Samothrace) is a replica from 2006, although to be fair it's not like the replica originally installed in 1906 was real either.
All together we're visiting five Frank Lloyd Wright sites in (and near) Buffalo, although three of them Wright never saw completed in his lifetime. These projects were built recently and based off Wright's original plans. The first of those three sites is this one, the Fontana Boathouse exterior (with a cameo of the Peace Bridge to Canada), a pretty dramatic building (for a boathouse) and one that was really hard to get to since most downtown roads were closed at the time for the Buffalo Marathon.
The second rebuilt building (and the third Wright site) is inside the Pierce Arrow Museum, where not only can you see old cars but you can also see a new old Frank Lloyd Wright building. This is a gas station for Tydol Gas (the really hard to read sign does actually say Tydol) that was built only a few years ago from the original design. It’s located in a busy space and is hard to appreciate, I feel it would have been far more impressive under the blue skies of Route 66 in the painted desert of Arizona than it is inside a building with all that unforgiving and distracting red and white trim behind it.
More Wright, this time at the cemetery. This was the design that Wright provided to bury all of the Martin family (each step is a dead guy), but it was also not built at the time. As you already know from the partial outline of my imaginary historical novel, Darwin Martin was a self made millionaire, although after the depression his estate ended up valued at less than a dollar, and there’s no way a Frank Lloyd Wright designed final resting place wasn’t going to cost a lot more than that. Like the boathouse and the gas station, the design was also built recently per the original plans, and they are advertising available space here just in case you want to spend $300k to $1.5M to enjoy eternity with some strangers in a Wright designed grave.
Our fifth and final Wright site is Graycliff, built as a summer home for the Darwin's and located about a half hour out of the city above the gray cliff shores of Lake Erie.
Graycliff was quite different than their main house in town- it was smaller, built 25 years later, built for about 20 percent of the other house's budget and, if the docents are to be believed (and why would they lie?), Wright actually listened to his client this time and even made some design changes based on their wishes. That’s an important distinction between the two houses, but not one you’re going to really notice or understand from seeing these pictures.
The view from the second floor terrace at Graycliff doesn't show the gray cliffs (you can't see them from the house), but it does show a great view of the lake, where (on a clearer day) you can see Canada and all the way back to the Buffalo skyline. Wright's original plan was to locate a reflecting pool between these stone walls, with the seating area located at the edge of the cliffs. The Martins didn't like the reflecting pool and forces of nature didn't necessarily care for the cliffs- over time, they eroded significantly and the seating area ended up moved into the site of the unbuilt reflecting pool.
It is with this great view of the lake that we'll end our all too short time in Buffalo, at least until I can find another excuse to talk myself into going back yet again.
