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.
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