Buffalo Unbound, page 12
The one and only mausoleum Wright designed, called Blue Sky, can be found in Forest Lawn Cemetery. It’s built into the side of a hill and consists of twenty-four crypts laid out like a staircase, with two sets of twelve crypts running parallel up the hill. My friend Russ likes to tell people that as you walk up the steps they automatically play “Blue Skies” by Irving Berlin. However, this is patently untrue, or sheer mendacity, as playwright Tennessee Williams liked to say. I tried it. Twice.
The Larkin Company administration building in Buffalo, completed in 1904, was Wright’s first commercial commission and noteworthy for its many innovations, such as a boxy redbrick fortresslike exterior; large, open interior spaces that collected light; stained glass windows; air-conditioning; built-in desk furniture; and toilet bowls suspended from the walls. Sadly, it was demolished in 1950, much to the dismay of preservationists.
Along Buffalo’s Black Rock Channel you can tour Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fontana Boathouse, while the Peace Bridge, with its five arched spans, shows off in the background. Buffalo’s West Side Rowing Club, the nation’s largest youth-based rowing club, runs a number of its programs out of the five-thousand-square-foot space. The two-story structure with red oak doors and trim and a cantilevered roof was originally designed in 1905 for a site at the University of Wisconsin but was never constructed. It’s now called the Fontana Boathouse since Buffalo native and television writer/producer Tom Fontana (Oz and St. Elsewhere, among many others) helped raise $5.5 million from his Hollywood friends, including Mary Tyler Moore, Blythe Danner, and producer Diane English. Tom named it after his father, Charles, a renowned rowing coach, and his mother, Marie, but that’s not on the building because “Take me to the Charles and Marie Fontana Boathouse” is too hard to say at five o’clock in the morning. Marie and my friend Pete lived in the same building for many years, and Marie was the office manager for my mom’s doctor—more examples of why Buffalo continues to feel like Mayberry rather than a metropolis.
Along similar horizontal lines, a filling station constructed according to Wright’s 1927 preliminary plans is currently in the works and will be housed inside an addition to the Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum. The two-story building with a cantilevered copper roof atop red and white concrete paving won’t have any gas or gum for sale. And I’m not sure it will be completed anytime soon since currently you have to phone ahead to make sure the museum is open. But it’s worth the call and the trip, not just to gawk at the marvelous old cars, but also to giggle at the crazy Snoopy and the Red Baron leather caps, goggles, silk scarves, and other outlandish getups people would don to go motoring. What were they thinking? one wonders, especially while boarding a plane alongside folks in citrus green tracksuits with appliquéd cats, bottomed off by sunflower yellow sheepskin Ugg boots or purple plastic Crocs dotted with Jibbitz flag, flower, and insect charms.
Several new best-selling bodice rippers have been revisiting Wright’s bad-boy celebrity credentials as of late. After twenty years of marriage and six children, he scandalously left his spouse for a neighbor’s wife (basically breaking commandments seven through ten in one swell foop). A few years later, a crazed servant set fire to the home they’d set up together, killing the woman and her two children along with four others. Wright married again, but his bride was addicted to morphine, so that didn’t last long. Finally, he wedded Montenegrin dancer Olgivanna Ivanovna Lazovich, thirty years his junior, who inspired his work with her theosophical leanings—speculation about the workings of the soul based on mystical insight into the nature of God. She’d also been a pupil of the Greek Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, promoter of the Fourth Way, which emphasized inner development through simultaneously strengthening the mind, body, and emotions. I suppose this is the place to mention that Wright was a Unitarian.
As a believer in the unity of all things, Wright strove to create architecture that was an expression of divinity and would engage in a dialogue with nature. The strong emphasis on horizontal lines and planes and hovering roofs suggests a belonging to the earth beneath them. And like Elbert Hubbard, he also became fond of an unmistakable “I’m an artiste” look, which involved long, flowing hair, a broad-brimmed hat, a swirling cape, a cravat, and a dramatic black cane not used for walking so much as to punctuate his sentences.
Wright’s maternal grandfather, Richard Lloyd Jones (1799–1885), was a Unitarian minister from Wales who championed freedom of religion and political reform. The seventh of their ten children, Jenkin Lloyd Jones (1843–1918), also became a Unitarian minister, but eventually didn’t want to be identified with any established religion and built a new church in Chicago called “All Souls, a people’s church.” He believed in harnessing a common effort to improve human life, moved away from Christian sermons toward educational and inspirational addresses, and invited guests of different creeds and nationalities to exchange pulpits with him. After Jones served as a private in the Civil War and fought in eleven battles including Vicksburg, he became a pacifist and preached that war solved nothing but was merely a tool used by politicians and businessmen to advance their own agendas, which could usually be reduced to profit and power. He was also an early advocate of equal rights and opportunities for women. Seriously, with all those crackpot ideas, no wonder so many people thought the man was touched.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s father, William Wright, had been a Baptist minister, but he later joined his wife’s family in the Unitarian faith. Wright’s older half brother, William, would follow their father into the ministry. Wright’s cousin, Richard Lloyd Jones (1873–1963), was the outspoken owner and editor of the Tulsa Tribune, a founder of All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and instrumental in creating the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site. However, his reputation is somewhat tarnished for having scribed an editorial that allegedly helped incite the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot against blacks.
Frank Lloyd Wright designed Unity Temple for the Unitarian congregation in Oak Park, Illinois, which is now considered by many to be the first modern building in the world, and also the innovative, landmark First Unitarian Society Meeting House in Madison, Wisconsin. Both have undergone extensive renovations.
Wright’s best legacy of all, in my opinion, lies in his son John Lloyd Wright’s invention of Lincoln Logs, so that kids everywhere could construct their own dream houses.
Good Bones
Frank Lloyd Wright couldn’t be riding a bigger wave of popularity right now if he’d invented solar-heated homes, but his contribution makes up only a fraction of the superb local architecture. Though more commonly associated with machine shops and smokestacks, Buffalo is home to the world’s earliest skyscrapers. The ten-story Ellicott Square Building, designed by Daniel Burnham, was the largest office building in the world for sixteen years after it opened in 1896. Built in the Italian Renaissance style, it contains a majestic interior courtyard and a marble mosaic floor depicting sun symbols from civilizations around the world. Louis Sullivan’s thirteen-story Guaranty Building (now called the Prudential Building), completed in 1895, is another standout, with strong vertical lines and a heavily ornamented facade of elaborate terra-cotta designs. Buffalo’s magnificent City Hall, completed in 1931, is considered a tour de force of civic architecture and one of the most striking art deco buildings in the country. Friezes, symbolic figures, and tile work tell the story of Buffalo, at least the good parts. The center of the high-domed lobby ceiling depicts the sun, a welcome sight in the middle of December.
Free tours of City Hall are available every day at noon. I say this for two reasons. Obviously, the first is that they’re free, but the second is that the information booth seems to have fallen victim to a budget cut. Likewise, so has much of the lighting, thus be sure to bring a flashlight or wear a miner’s hat if you want to appreciate all the phenomenal detail work. And the cooling system is dodgy at best, so dress accordingly.
The grand art deco–style Buffalo Central Terminal, with its famed seventeen-story clock tower, opened in 1929 and handled more than two hundred passenger trains a day. The planners showed great optimism by including a liquor store in the blueprints, even though it was the height of Prohibition. However, the train station began operating only weeks before the crash of 1929, and with the onset of the Great Depression, followed by a decline in rail travel, it was never able to fulfill its potential. The last train departed in 1979, and the building fell on hard times. As locals like to say about a number of municipal developments, it was the wrong project in the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, standing among the glorious ruins and gazing out at the weed-choked tracks, it’s possible to imagine fedora-topped businessmen heading for Chicago, chinchilla-wrapped women on their way to New York, and soldiers shipping off to fight Herr Hitler, their tearful young brides on the platform, wondering if these young men would come back.
The terminal is undergoing a loving renovation, most of the work and fund-raising performed by volunteers. We’re on Obama’s list of cities to get a bullet train one of these decades, and the idea is that, like a phoenix rising from its own ashes, Central Terminal will make a miraculous comeback. In the meantime, the building is open for tours and special events, so long as you don’t mind a draft and brownouts. And it’s obvious that locals care about the building, not just because visitors currently have to use Porta Potties, but because for the first tour a few hundred people were expected and three thousand turned up!
If you’re planning a visit to Buffalo, consider staying at the Mansion on Delaware Avenue, a Second Empire–style home built in 1869, with two curved flights of marble steps and cast-iron Corinthian columns, eighteen-foot ceilings, twenty-eight guest rooms, and enormous bay windows. It’s been converted from a dilapidated eyesore to one of the finest hotels in the country. With butlers on call twenty-four hours and a gourmet continental breakfast, a stay here would cost five times as much in Manhattan, and you’d have horns honking outside night and day.
A master plan to reuse the Buffalo Psychiatric Center near Elmwood Avenue, which looms empty and abandoned over the city’s West Side, is also currently under way. The only small stumbling block is that the city and state have no funds for such a project. Fortunately, none of this prevents locals from using the line “I’ll call and tell the Psych Center you’re coming.”
This brown Medina sandstone and redbrick building complex is an architectural gem by Henry Hobson Richardson (1836–1886), who also designed the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Brattle Square Church in Boston, which was built for a Unitarian congregation but is now First Baptist Church.
Richardson was known for employing a heavy-looking Romanesque style of soaring towers flanked by squat brick pavilions, pointed Gothic arches, and basically anything else castlelike that makes you glance around for a drawbridge over a moat and crusaders trotting off to recover the Holy Land while picking up a couple of cities and a few gold trinkets along the way. Richardson is regarded as the first of the three greatest American architects, the other two being Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. The grounds of the Psych Center were designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, famous for Manhattan’s Central Park and Buffalo’s Delaware Park. When my mom was a kid in the 1940s, it was still called the very homey insane asylum. She and her brother and sister would attempt a shortcut across the grounds to get to the Rees Street public swimming pool, but the guards usually stopped them, although this may have been because they’d occasionally pick some fruit along the way. The central administration edifice plus five separate but connected buildings and expansive grounds were mostly self-supporting, with their own laundry, bakery, and gardens. My maternal grandmother worked there as an aide in the 1950s when it was called the Buffalo State Hospital, and my mother worked there as a psychiatric nurse in the 1980s after it had become the Buffalo Psych Center.
When it first opened in 1880, the Psych Center was considered state-of-the-art care for the mentally ill. It was built on the Kirkbride Plan, which allowed for maximum light and air in narrow buildings arranged so that the residents progressed toward the administrative center as they became ready for discharge. This didn’t always go exactly according to plan, as evidenced by the fact that in the file of one of my mother’s patients she found notes made by her own mother from forty years earlier.
Buffalo is also home to a number of impressive works of public art and outdoor monuments, including statues of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (Front Park), Millard Fillmore and former mayor and president Grover Cleveland (both outside City Hall), and an exact replica of Michelangelo’s David (Delaware Park, looking out over the Scajaquada Expressway). It’s hard to imagine what Michelangelo would have to say about people getting a three-second glimpse of his masterpiece while whizzing past at sixty miles per hour.
There’s a statue of a young Abraham Lincoln sitting on an oak log with an ax at his feet and a book on his right knee, cleverly titled Young Lincoln, between Lincoln Parkway and Delaware Park’s Rose Garden, and also a large bronze somewhat older Abe, Lincoln the Emancipator, at the back of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, overlooking Hoyt Lake.
Mathematically speaking, for each time he passed through Buffalo, Lincoln ended up with a statue. The first visit was on the way to his inauguration in February of 1861. Buffalonians had voted for Lincoln, but not by a large margin. Still, most people dropped what they were doing and rushed to Exchange Street Station to catch sight of the president-elect. “Women fainted, men were crushed under the mass of bodies and many others had their bones broken. Once out of the depot every man uttered a brief ‘Thank God!’ for the preservation of his life. More with personal injuries were carried away and the fainted women were recovering under a free use of hydrant water,” according to the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser. Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln hosted a reception at the American Hotel and the following day attended service at the Unitarian church with Millard Fillmore and his wife.
The second visit was under very different circumstances, following Lincoln’s assassination five days after the Civil War ended. His westward funeral procession stopped in Buffalo on April 27, 1865, where the president lay in state in Saint James Hall at Washington and Eagle streets.
Living Here in Allentown
No, not that one. Our Allentown is a neighborhood just north of the heart of downtown Buffalo known for its antique stores, galleries, clothing boutiques, restaurants, and “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection,” as Allen Ginsberg so aptly put it in Howl. “What’s shaking, Daddy-O?” may have segued into “Whassup, Dude?” but it’s still where one goes to sip coffee while discussing the influence of German Romanticism on postcolonial theory.
Now a historic preservation district, the area has been host for more than fifty years to an art festival the second weekend of every June that should not be missed—and isn’t by most Buffalonians, based on the throngs that turn out. They come in cars, on buses, bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles, pulling wagons, and pushing strollers with cup holders. There are so many wheelchairs, canes, and crutches that you might accidentally think a Lourdes satellite shrine was offering a special on healing. More than a few long-haired, sandal-clad festival wanderers bear a passing resemblance to Jesus, so those awaiting the return of the Messiah may have to devise a questionnaire.
Over four hundred artists from around the country exhibit their pottery, metal sculpture, jewelry, furniture, blown glass, birdhouses, wooden toys, fountains, embroidery, handcrafted cutting boards, and oil paintings that you’d be proud to hang in your living room. There are stained glass flip-flops, black soap, hemp T-shirts, magic towel holders, and framed photos of puffins in every position imaginable but still suitable for a family audience. People in this country must be positively hoarding wind chimes based on the vast supply and selection.
The culinary fare is probably not for those who thrive close to the bottom of the food chain or think that Food, Inc. was the best documentary film of 2009. Long lines form in front of stalls selling Philly cheesesteak, roast beef on weck, Italian sausage, pizza, curly fries, fried dough, Italian pastry, deep-fried Twinkies and Oreos, onion rings, and funnel cake. The most outrageous offering is at a stand carrying not only barbecued wild boar, but alligator po’boys. When asked if it’s real alligator, as many festivalgoers do, a server points to the six-foot gator roasting on a spit over on the sidewalk.
Exhibitors sell their homemade bread-and-butter pickles, pickled beets, and soy candles (eat or burn?). Catering to the locals, an artist offers carved wooden and metal Buffalo napkin caddies, key holders, welcome signs, and coatracks. There’s an abundance of tie-dyed, beaded, and flowing clothing that will guarantee that you can pass as a folksinger. Booths offer henna body art to brighten up pale Buffalo skin and chess lessons for the high-minded.
But the real appeal of the Allentown Art Festival is the bohemian bonhomie. People run into friends and stand around talking and laughing for hours. Casually dressed locals stroll past stalls accompanied by bandanna-wearing mutts. Buskers send out swirls of jazzy riffs on saxes and clarinets and then pass the hat. Artsy types create mythical scenes with sidewalk chalk. Performers take their acts into the street, costumed as knights, reciting poetry, and dancing to boom boxes or just the music playing in their own minds. Enterprising neighborhood residents find it an ideal time for weekend porch parties and tag sales. A few cops mill about drinking cups of joe, also running into friends and having a grand old time while keeping Allentown safe for yakety yakking, Mohammedan angels, and hydrogen jukeboxes.
