Interesting article in USA Today (12/14/09) re: Buffalo's "re-making" itself and architectural gems.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-12-14-buffalo_N.htm?loc=interstitialskipBuffalo charges ahead into past
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
BUFFALO — This onetime "Queen City of the Lakes," now known mostly for the snowy "lake effect," wants to use its fine old buildings to improve its image. Problem is, it has old buildings in two different conditions.
• The Darwin Martin House (1906) is one of architect Frank Lloyd Wright's master works. When a two-decade, $50 million restoration-reconstruction is finished in 2011, it's likely to be among the most-visited Wright tourist sites in the nation.
• The Central Railroad Terminal (1929) is dark, empty and long stripped of its exquisite interior details — railings, signs, light fixtures. Its 17-story office tower rises incongruously in a neighborhood of small, shabby houses. Last year, the place was a setting for the TV show Ghost Hunters.
The two landmarks' contrasting prospects illustrate a question facing Buffalo and other cities that want to hitch their reputations to vintage architecture: Can an aging cityscape, often a public relations liability, be an asset?
Buffalo is known mostly for physical deterioration — closed factories, empty homes (about 15,000) and vacant lots (also about 15,000). Civic boosters believe, however, that the city can use its treasury of 19th- and early 20th-century buildings to attract tourists, residents and businesses, and to generally polish its chilly, gritty, Rust Belt reputation.
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It's an alluring idea for other old industrial cities. A few, such as Pittsburgh, are succeeding; most, like Detroit, have far to go. Peter Brink, a vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, says Buffalo has potential to be a model for the latter.
If so, the city might begin to reverse its epic demographic and economic plunge.
The population has fallen from 580,000 in 1950 to about 270,000 today. Part of the reason is the weather — each winter, Upstate New York cities "compete" for the Golden Snowball award for the most snowfall — but most of the blame goes to an economy based on making things, such as steel and cars, that are now made elsewhere.
Because there's no reason to tear down a building if there's nothing to replace it, Buffalo has benefited from "preservation by neglect." As Harvey Garrett, a neighborhood preservation activist here, sees it, "Buffalo was rich at just the right time" — 1870-1914, when great architecture was still relatively inexpensive — "and poor at just the right time" — after 1950, when many older buildings in cities with better economies were demolished.
A classic style, Americanized
Buffalo's buildings are important because this was one place, more than a century ago, where designers and builders broke with European styles and developed a uniquely American architecture. Today, when it comes to architectural tourism west of the Eastern Seaboard, "our only competition is Chicago," Garrett boasts.
The city made a believer of Brink when he visited in May. "I was blown away," he recalls. "I had the preconceptions everyone jokes about — cold winters, economic decline. But Buffalo has an amazing collection of buildings."
Eight are national historic landmarks — the government's highest designation for such structures — including three that belong on anyone's architectural bucket list:
• The Guaranty Building (1896): designed by Louis Sullivan, a father of the skyscraper. This 13-story office tower is clad in heavily ornamented terra cotta. It was one of the first tall buildings to emphasize its verticality; the piers between the windows create strong lines that draw the eye toward the top. The Guaranty was what its designer said a tall building should be — "every inch a proud and soaring thing" — and Sullivan's last before he lost his partner and most of his practice.
• The Buffalo State Asylum (designed in 1870 and built over the next 25 years): the largest structure designed by H.H. Richardson, arguably America's first great architect, and the beginning of the Richardsonian Romanesque style he later used for Boston's Trinity Church. Long closed as a mental hospital, the vast Buffalo complex — including its mighty, twin-Gothic-towered administration building — now sits empty. Preservationists are trying to turn it into a visitors and conference center.
• The Martin House: a turning point in the development of Wright's "Prairie Style" and its largest example. The architect himself called it his "opus" and for decades hung the site plan over his desk. The residential complex, much of which was abandoned, destroyed or marred by new construction, is open to the public while being restored.
Other cities have more than one building by Richardson or Sullivan or Wright, but none has a major work by all three.
Deep bench of architectural gems
Buffalo also has a deep architectural bench, including the 32-story, art deco-style City Hall; the only surviving Tiffany theater interior (at Shea's Performing Arts Center); St. Paul's Church, which Richard Upjohn, architect of Trinity Church on Wall Street, once said was the best of his ecclesiastical designs; a concert hall by Eliel Saarinen and son Eero (designer of the St. Louis Gateway Arch).
A well-preserved group of Victorian neighborhoods is connected by the largest system of parks and parkways designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, planner of New York's Central Park.
Outsiders are taking notice.
This year, the National Trust named Buffalo one of its 12 top tourist destinations, and the city was the site of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy's national conference.
It also has been selected to host the National Trust's conference in 2011. The Society of Architectural Historians is coming in 2014.
Local preservationists revel in such votes of confidence. The National Trust conference, for which Buffalo beat Philadelphia and Hartford, Conn., "is like getting the Olympics," says Catherine Schweitzer, who heads the board of Preservation Buffalo Niagara.
It's about more than just local pride. Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde calls landmark buildings "tools we can use to prod our economy." After seeing 200 visitors come for the Wright conservancy conference this fall, he wrote: "We have what it takes to stake our claim to a growing industry. … There is gold in glorious architecture."
Tourism is only part of the potential payoff. Doug Swift, a local developer and preservationist, says historic buildings make Buffalo a more enticing place for companies and workers to relocate.
If beautiful buildings grab attention, so do derelict ones.
'One of the ruins of Buffalo'
Central Terminal opened four months before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression, and was almost always too big for the amount of its rail traffic. Passenger service bypassed the terminal in 1979, and over the next two decades the vast structure passed from owner to owner.
Preservationists, who bought the terminal in 1997 for $1 and the assumption of back taxes, have been stabilizing the building and periodically open it for tours and events. Still, it's a glaring symbol of Buffalo's problems, too big, too decrepit and too far from downtown to be easily revived.
Anthony Armstrong, who works for a non-profit agency that promotes urban revitalization, calls the terminal "one of the ruins of Buffalo" that "are holding us back" by competing in the public imagination with images of progress.
So Buffalo tries to keep the focus on its good buildings, especially ones by Wright, the number of which actually has increased in recent years even though their architect died in 1959. A mausoleum and boathouse were built to his designs, and there is a plan to construct yet another unrealized Wright vision — for a gas station.
