A Dab of Orange on a Blue Morning Sky

7:13

Front View of Darwin Martin House

Covered Pergola and Garden

Outdoor Porch, Side View

William Mc Kinley Monument and City Hall, Buffalo

It looks like a great day, clear skies, steam rising on the lake, the roar of a bass boat, and 43 degrees outside.  We are back from 36 Hours in Buffalo and even though we were not gone long, it's nice to be back on the lake, especially in the morning, watching the sun rise.  The view from my hotel in Buffalo just does not compare.

We did enjoy yeseterday though it rained most of the afternoon.  We got a late start, just enjoying our hotel room, free breakfast bar, and lots of coffee.  I did go out for a walk, leaving Evie to shower and get ready for the day in her leisure.  I walked a circle, past some of the great buildings in downtown Buffalo, the City Hall, for one, the various circles or squares, surrounded by older buildings, the names of I was unsure.  Main Street has a free train ride down the middle of the street, which will take you from one end of the city to the other.  If you go farther, you do have to pay.  Buffalo seems to have more interesting buildings then Cleveland though it too seems somewhat empty downtown, even on a work week day,  I wonder what will happen to cities if people keep leaving though I have read that the reverse has become happening in some areas, as people leave the suburbs to return to the city.  We will have to see.

We drove up Delaware, past what's called Millionaire' Row, by amazingly preserved homes of the wealthy Buffalo capitalists from the early 20th century.  Most of the houses are now owned by law firms and investments groups.  They are spectacular.  We ended up at Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Darwin Martin House, near Nichols School campus.  It is an amazing residence and our tour guide was really good, making it worth the twenty six dollars it cost.  It was built in 1905, one of Wright's first major homes.  Martin was a millionaire who worked for the Larkin Soap company.  Wright also designed their administrative building but, unfortunately, it was demolished in 1949.  The house cost Martin a total of 175,000 dollars, not counting the painted glass windows, hundreds of them.  That would be around 10 million dollars today, I estimated.  There is a main residence, a carriage house, with a pergola leading from the main house, and a house for Martin's sister.  Both the carriage house and Martin's sister's house were torn down in the later 1930's, after Martin went bankrupt and the house stood empty for 17 years.  Apartments were put up in their place, but in the 1990's, a trust bought the house from the University of Buffalo, tore down the apartments and painstakingly rebuilt the carriage house and Martin's sister's home, so that you cannot tell the difference between the three buildings.  It's a typical Wright house, with an emphasis on horizontals, the Prairie Style as its called, so radical compared to the Victorian homes of that period, the neighborhood it sits in.  He seemed to pioneer the open floor style, where on room led to another, without doors, so different from the  numerous small rooms in Victorian homes.  He used some of the building techniques from Louis Sullivan, here using steel beams to span large area so he didnt' need walls between rooms.  We spent about an hour and half touring the buildings, well worth the time.  Before we went to the Darwin Martin house, we walked and browsed the other major shopping area, Hertzel Street, what I guess was the Little Italy of Buffalo.  Not as charming as Elmwood, mostly because of its lack of trees, but it did have lots of shops and restaurants, which made it a place to go in the evenings.

We left Buffalo around 1:30 and drove to East Aurora, home of Roycroft Inn and the home of the Arts and Craft movement.  It's a prosperous looking town, about 15 miles from Buffalo, with three large shops with arts and crafts types of furniture and lamps, the kind you would have found in Wright's homes.

We drove home in rain, getting back around 5:30.  We had an easy dinner, sweet corn and a mushroom omelette and watched a couple of more episodes of Damages.  I am reading the new Jack Reacher, so I went to bed early, so I could get back to Jack.  It's a good read, fast and easy.