Waterfalls and Ice Cream

It’s nice to have a down day, though my definition of a down day and John’s are way different. He has to worry about stuff all the time. Today we decided to drive around Lake Cayuga, with a sort of goal of going all around the lake, looking at some waterfalls, and maybe stopping at antique stores or something.

Anyway, we started out, and drove as far as Taughannock Falls which is in a state park of the same name and which is right on the highway around the lake. We walked up to the falls and waded in the river part of the way. The bottom of the river is just plain rock and has no sharp things to walk on. The water is really quite low, it usually comes over to the edge of everything you see in the picture that’s white. And the whole river is about ankle deep. We saw some people swimming, but eventually they would stand up, and we’d see that they were only in about a foot or so of water.
After we left there, we went on to a town called Interlaken which has the best ice cream in the world. I loved it.From there we drove up to the town of Auburn which has the only totally Tiffany church that has Tiffany everything. Of course, this being Memorial Day, everything was closed. I rather figured that would be the case, ad it didn’t matter to me, because I was happy with the whole driving around experience. It’s really beautiful farmland here in upstate New York.
For dinner, we went to the Ale House in Ithaca because we both really wanted a beer. I had a crab cake salad that had not only the best crab cakes I’ve ever tasted, but also had some really nice veggies in it as well, which is a surprise when a salad has some kind of good meat in it, it usually has nothing but a lame bunch of lettuce in it.

Tomorrow we drive to Poughkeepsie which promises to be be a hassle, simply because we have REALLY different ideas of how to manage a road trip. John wants to stick his nose in the map for 200 miles and always know exactly where he is on that map. I want to hope for good luck when I get near a town and see a sign. I tend to get a bit pissed when suddenly I need some information, but he wants to tell me information over and over and over again all the time we are driving. I told him to take a Xanax in the morning.

Bridges on bridges, lost in Ithaca

I think the best thing that happened was one of those funny things that you don’t mean to do. It’s like this: We were driving from Corning to Ithaca, a trip of about 40 miles, which was one of those things that John and I don’t do well because he is very obsessed about being at exactly the right place on the map at all times even when you know you’re going to be on the same road for 10 or 15 miles. Anyway, we were relatively near Ithaca and I saw a sign that said “covered bridge” so I turned off, thinking there might be a photo op. When we got there, a woman was standing in front of the bridge and a man was there with a camera on a tripod. We went down to take a snapshot, and she said, "Oh, I’ll move my cases and stuff out of the way, we’re doing a little photo shoot for a CD.”
Me: “Oh, what do you play?”
She: “Norwegian fiddle and some other stuff.”
Me: “Do you play Nickelharpa?”
She: “You know what a nickelharpa is?”
Me: “Yeah, I think they’re cool. I play hurdy gurdy.”
She: “Me too, but I’m still working on getting the rhythm section down.”
Me: “Me too, etc., etc. yada yada yada.




You get the drift. Anyway, they were using this covered bridge to make a picture for the cover of a new CD they are making. You can check out their website here. If this link doesn’t work, it’s because there’s NO www. on this web address.
Anyway, they were balancing their instruments in the “crotches” of the inside of the bridge, and didn’t really have enough people, so I stayed and stood near the hurdy gurdy in case it should fall, and the other two people guarded the violin and viola. It was just kind of fun being involved in something so silly.







Following that we headed for the museum at Cornell. It was very hard to park there, because it was graduation day. The museum really wasn’t worth it. The building is by I M Pei, and I liked it, but John didn’t. We both agreed that the collection was boring.

Then we tried to go to Ithaca Falls which is on the map but not easy to get to. Suffice it to say we tried to drive around the back of the university (my idea and the wrong way) eventually went all the way back into town and came back to a place we had missed the first time and which was about 5 minutes away (even if we’d been walking) from the museum. We did have the scenic tour of Ithaca/Cornell, though.


After hanging around at the falls for awhile, we went downtown. We checked out an antique shop, where I got a copy of Elbert Hubbard’s Philistine in really good condition. I also got a baby’s shoe last that I intend to bead. Don’t hold your breath on that one. We also looked at a place that carries only the work of local artisans. The little baby shoe last I bought was quite heavy, and I didn’t want to think about packing it around for another week, and believe it or not, the UPS store was open. So I gathered up a couple of glass balls I had bought and took it all into the UPS store to have it all shipped home. While I was doing that, John was interviewed by some Cornell students on some kind of school project. They asked him for a one-word description of the war. He said “Foolish.”
The last thing we did today was something I’ve wanted to do since I first heard of the place. We went to Moosewood restaurant for dinner. They have a different menu every day, always seasonal, mostly local. I think it used to be vegetarian, but now they include some fish dishes. We had a tapenade on crackers with a side of caprese, then a salad (I had creamy basil spinach dressing, John had creamy dill – mine was better.) John had salmon, which I tasted and wasn’t too impressed with, accompanied by green beans and mashed potatoes. I had Morrocan vegetable stew, which tasted a lot like a dish I make called Imam Bayaldi. For dessert we split a white cake with rhubarb, which was really delicious.

Tonight we’re planning our trip around the lake tomorrow.

Glassfest in Corning, and THE MUSEUM

Today we got up, had breakfast and went to the museum. I was as excited as an alligator at a swimming party. I'm sure people who saw me thought I was drunk because I was just going around looking crazy. The museum recently acquired the collection of a Chicago couple, Ben and Natalie Heineman, who had collected glass for the last 35 years or so. The pieces were wonderful. I have uploaded a bunch of pictures from the exhibit, but my pictures really don't do them justice. There was also a lovely display of glasswork by Tim Lazer and jewelry by Lynda Lazer in the gift shop.


Two of the pictures you see here are not part of the Heineman collection, but are now part of the Ives collection. Did I mention that because this week is Glassfest (totally unknown to us when we decided to come this weekend) they had a 20 percent discount on everything in the museum gift shop?
Five hours later we left the museum went downtown for dinner and came home. I'm a VERY happy camper. Tomorrow we leave Corning for Ithaca. We hope to see the museum on the Cornell campus, but we're unsure from their website whether or not they are open on Sundays. My main desire in Ithaca is to eat at Moosewood.

From East Aurora to Corning

I took this nice picture of Corning by night on the way home from Glassfest tonight. It's a cute little town that calls itself the Crystal City. Good name.
Friday was a slow day, and so is the internet connection in this hotel. Don’t know if I’ll finish this before it craps out again.

Didn’t do too much at Roycroft this morning, we had a really good lecture about the connection of all the various arts and crafts movements around the world. Our second lecture was about where Roycroft is headed. It seems promising.

Nice lunch – warm turkey salad with figs and then Ellen took us back to the airport where we picked up our rental car, a Mazda 3, which I finally learned to drive a hundred miles later when we arrived in Corning.
The best thing about today is that when we arrived in Corning, it turns out that they are having something called Glassfest, which is a three-day festival this weekend with street fair, glass, bonuses for buying beads, live music, etc. Tonight they had an after dark show of works using light – so most of them were neon.
The internet connection sucks in this hotel. I'm sitting in the freezing lobby finishing this and then will start the one for tomorrow (which it already is, but I have lots of stuff to show in Saturday's post about the museum. Mostly pictures.

WINDOWS & TABLES AND DOORS, OH MY

Today was a real treat. The Central Methodist Church here in East Aurora has a wonderful collection of Tiffany windows. The church was first built in 1830 or so, and looked pretty much like a craftsman foursquare house. Then in about 1890s they had grown enough that they built a cute little semi-gothic style church. By the late 1920s they had outgrown that church, but now there was division among the parishoners – the young ones wanted a more multi-purpose church, with other rooms besides the chapel., while the old guard said things were just fine as they were.



Eventually one benefactor came forward and donated so much money that the whippersnappers got their way. They took the old church, turned it sideways on the lot and moved it back and added the new chapel as an L addition to the church. And then they put in 32 Tiffany windows. So this church is all Tiffany through and through. By this time, though Tiffany was going out of fashion and had given up the foundry where he made the glass, so the records aren’t there for the Tiffany society, or whoever gives you a higher seat in heaven, to authenticate these windows – EVEN THOUGH HE SIGNED THEM!!

Following that, we went out to a place called the Old Schoolhouse where three Roycroft artisans operate two different shops. Two of the guys gave told us about their shop, where they strive to make everything out of solid wood, the other one, Thomas Pafk, does veneering which is really quite extraordinary and makes one-of-a-kind pieces. His website shows a lot of what he’s done. .Tom Harris, the first person who talked to us, explained the intricacies of various types of woods and what made something quarter sawn, and passed around various pieces of wood. Curly maple and some other kind of maple is caused by the trees growing where they get a lot of wind and sway back and forth a lot when they are young. This changes the thickness of the rings and when it's sawn at an opposite angle, you get that curly look. The second person to talk to us is another woodworker who is also an actor and who came as if he were Herb Buffums, a supervisor in the woodshop during the heyday years at Roycroft. He was pretty entertaining, but he could have shortened his speech by about half, I think.


Our afternoon was supposed to have a tour of the furniture shop and leatherworking, but the person who was supposed to do it had to take his father to the hospital, so we had another guy forced to do it had no clue. It was hot in the room and the guy giving the example had no clue what to tell us, and clearly didn’t want to do it. The presentation was so bad it was ridiculous.

This room had some really nice graphics and stuff, though. This visit was followed by yet another wine and cheese reception in the apartment on the top floor of the building.

Well, from the outside, this building looks like it’s falling down, but the top floor is gorgeous. It’s an absolutely fabulous mix of antiques, comfortable furniture, and things the owner likes.

So tonight we have dinner, a show and tell – I haven’t decided whether to take my computer and show the A&C pix of our house or not. We have some free time and getting ready to go to dinner right now.

WE SHUFFLE BACK TO BUFFALO AGAIN

Today was another Frank Lloyd Wright day. This time we went into Buffalo to visit the downtown home of the Darwin Martin family (who owned Greycliff, which we saw yesterday.) The in-town house is much more imposing and a lot of it has been rebuilt. One of the things I have come to realize about some of this FLW stuff is that they were designs, so you can build them now, and if you stay to the exact specs, you have a FLW building. In this case, some parts of the property had been divided up into apartments, some had been torn down so apartments could be built, but the front part was still there.
When the conservancy acquired the property, they tore down the apartment building that kind of went through the center and rebuilt a long walkway according to Wright’s plans. They used the same materials as in the rest of the house, but of course they weren’t made by the same craftsmen. So it does present an authenticity question to me, at least. I found out something interesting about FLW stained glass. He had it specially made with brass & nickle (I think) came, instead of lead, which is why FLW windows don’t bow out after a hundred years. Anyway, this house is not where the rest of the millionaires lived, but in a neighborhood called parkside, which is really lovely. I just wonder what the neighbors thought as this house which occupies about the footprint of a Wal-Mart, started going up in this neighborhood. I asked the guide, but she misinterpreted my question and thought I was asking how the neighbors feel about it now as a tourist attraction.

We had lunch in one of the Olmstead parks and then had a little driving tour of Elmwood (which is near where John & I stayed and which we were able to point out tourist attractions in, making ourselves oh-so-welcome to the tour guide) then to the Burchfield Penney museum where we had a guided tour of the Roycraft and craftsman artifacts exhibit. All the Burchfields that we saw on Saturday had been taken down and sent home to their families.

After our visit to the Burchfield Penney Museum we took another little bus ride and walked around the ship museum at the old terminus of the Erie Canal. I’m really glad John and I went to Lockport, because there’s nothing here suggesting the Erie canal anymore. Then we went to visit Forest Lawn. Forest Lawn is a big cemetery in the middle of Buffalo, but when it was started it was a new idea – a sort of all purpose cemetery, instead of one associated with a church or a family estate – and it was three miles out of town. We saw a few graves of the rich and famous, and a mausoleum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Darwin Martin family, but only built much later and not actually for them.

However, the interesting one was a marker, very large with this interesting story:
John Bocher was a man who created the last that shoes are made on. He did this either right before the civil war and made not only shoes that were in sizes, but had a right and left shoe. He sold them to the Union army and became fabulously wealthy. They only had one son, who fell in love with the cleaning girl, and of course dad didn’t like that. So he sent the son off to school for a year, and while he was gone, he had the Irish cleaning girl deported. The son came home and was surprised and disappointed to find that the love of his life was no longer in the family home. He became sick (there’s some suggestion that this may be an illness he acquired during his absence) others suggest he had a broken heart. In any case, he ailed for about a year and died. The father had this built with a few little showings of how important he was. The wife’s shoe is showing, which a Victorian lady’s shoe wouldn’t do, the son’s foot is prominent in the way it is the first thing you see when you look at it. Some people say the face of the angel (which I didn’t get in the picture) is the face of the Irish maid, and there is a claddach and some other Irish symbols around the angel.


Oh yes, right as you come up to this place there’s a lovely cement couch to sit on.


Our last stop was dinner at the Pearl Street Grill. I thought the whitefish and veggies I had were really good. And they had free beer.
Then back on the bus and home again, home again, jiggety jig.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT DAY

This morning we jumped up and went to Graycliff, a Frank Lloyd Wright designed house on the shores of Lake Erie, in the town of Derby, which is another suburb of Buffalo. The place was designed for Darwin Martin in 1925. He was a partner in the Larkin Soap Company, which Elbert Hubbard had previously been a partner in, before he sold his shares and started Roycroft. Wright had built another house for Martin in Buffalo,

but Martin’s wife didn’t like it because it was too dark and she had carte blanche on this house. Apparently Wright was more amenable to things she wanted than he was for any of his other clients because Martin was one of the people who constantly supported Wright and lent him money when times were bad. Greycliff is named for the grey cliffs on the edge of Lake Erie and the house is built to frame views of the lake. The house originally cost $75,000, and was sold to a religious order in the 50s for $53,000. They added buildings, and made some changes but the Wright foundation (whichever one it is that manages this place) has $4 million to make repairs and restoration. When the religious order decided to give it up, they sold it for $400K which still seems like a steal, and they seem to have $4 million for the restoration. I’m continually surprised by how much all these non-profits just throw these amounts of money around that they seem to have. There is also a tower that goes down to the lake for picnics and the like. A footbridge goes out to it, but it is suffering the effects of erosion. The Wright society has been successful so far in keeping the bridge from actually falling down, in case at some point they can actually fix it, but if it falls down before they can figure out what to do, they won't be able to fix it at all, because it would then be new. ********

We had lunch at a place called Hoak’s which is right on Lake Erie, and is famous for its Heck bread, which is some kind of a roll that’s really salty on top. We had ordered ahead, and had ordered salads (which came with the top covered with an 8-inch square of beef, an 8-inch square of ham, an 8-inch square of beef, an 8-inch square of jack cheese and an 8-inch square of cheddar. There was a decent amount of lettuce on the bottom and a few good tomatoes. Overall, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the place, but I imagine if we had ordered off the menu it would have been a bit more fun. One of the disadvantages of going with a tour group.

We had some free time this afternoon, so John went up to rest (he’s still not feeling very well) and I took a walk downtown. It was slightly more interesting than when we went to town on Sunday, but only because the thrift store was open. I did get a nice picture of Vidler on the Roof. Vidler is the owner of the five and dime and there’s a statue of him on the roof of the store. Cutesy.




We had a tour of the old blacksmith shop today, which became a print shop and is now undergoing restoration and is mostly a gift shop with really, really nice (and expensive) stuff. But it’s all made by craftsmen and it’s all real quality stuff.

After that tour we sent to Ellen’s house (Ellen being one of out tour guides, a former president of the historical society, a Roycrofter, etc., etc.) She lives in an original Roycroft house which they have added an “arts and crafts” addition ontoELLEN the back which I thought was really nice but which John didn’t like much


We had a very nice wine and cheese event there. In her back yard, the neighor’s garage is one wall of her back yard, and they painted a mural on the garage. Very simple, and done over lap siding.

Our dinner at the hotel tonight was a pasta buffet which was really good, and followed by an awful concert by teenagers from the Waldorf school, and then a discussion of the Olmstead-designed park system in Buffalo. It was a marginally interesting presentation to me, though probably more interesting to people who live in Buffalo. It really is a string of jewels system, but many of the parks have been allowed to go downhill. Buffalo is the only city in the U.S. whose entire public park system is managed by a non-profit corporation.

We took a short walk afterwards and stopped by Millard Fillmore’s house, which I walked right past when I was looking for it the other night.


Just a note, if you click on the pictures, they will come up bigger in another window. I still have not managed to make the pictures show up where I want to in the blog.

A DAY AT ROYCROFT AND ENVIRONS

Today we had a walking tour of the Roycroft inn with Dan Brunson, who's one of the docents. We started with a tour of the campus (which basically means the hotel). The buildings have been built over a number of years and have been connected by a long porch going around the front. The main lobby is a big, flat-roofed building with no pillars or anything. And this building was built when there were no I-beams available, so the ceiling is held up like a bridge, with cables. The main room is a very Frank Lloyd Wright type room, with murals all around by Alex Fournier. The other buildings, all of which have housed the printing shops at various times, are built in the William Morris-championed English gothic style, with trusses all through the ceiling.
Dard Hunter was one of the most talented people who ever came through here. He arrived as a young man, even though he had been invited NOT to come because Hubbard preferred to hire locally. However, once he got here, he was wonderful and recommended by his teachers in every class he took. Many of his designs are rather iconic Arts and Crafts designs. Here he designed lamps, windows, signs, and made a representation of the north wind on top of the chapel.

Then we had a tour of the campus with Kitty Turgeon. Then we had a tour of the campus – all the buildings that have been associated with Roycroft over the years – by Kitty Turgeon, who is a walking repository of information about A&C both here and worldwide. She does tend to drift from what she’s saying, but it’s simply because she knows so much. It’s like when you do an internet search for something and you find all these other things you never knew existed. At one time, Kitty owned this place. Dorothy and Ellen, our other two Elderhostel "guides," own other historic places in East Aurora. In the course of our stay, we apparently go to practically everybody's house in town for wine and cheese at some point or other.


We also visted the Elbert Hubbard Museum which is a house that was built for one of his craftsmen, and when the craftsman's widow was 100 years old, she donated it to the city or to the historical society in return for their paying for her care -- and she lived another 6 years.
Following that visit, we had wine and cheese at Kitty’s house, which is a museum itself. She has tons of Roycroft furniture, and just a bunch of stuff. The effect is terribly cluttered, but very interesting. This is a house that Alex Fournier (the painter of the murals in the lobby) lived in – or at least half of it is. At some point two different buildings were combined into one house. So her bedroom upstairs is the former studio and has a giant skylight (about 6 ft. square) and a high ceiling. Plus, she has a huge walk in closet/slash dressing room.

Dinner tonight was supposed to be slow food grown locally. Apparently the meat loaf and eggs were fresh local products, but I seriously doubt that the tomatoes, zucchini, string beans, potatoes, or berries were. It’s too early for that stuff at home,and definitely too early here. Tasted good though.

Tonight we had a preview of the Darwin Martin house, a Frank Lloyd Wright design, which we’ll see on Wednesday.