City’s architectural heritage can be found in far corners of the world or as museum artifacts
By Michelle Kearns
News Staff Reporter
Buffalo News 1-31-10
Cynthia Schwartz went to a mountaintop cafe on the other side of the world and found a piece of Buffalo.
As she looked through her camera lens on the lights that once illuminated the Central Terminal, she was stunned by the size and beauty of the frosted panes in silvery frames.
The staff at Cafe Deco in Hong Kong looked on as Schwartz snapped away.
“They all thought we were just lunatic tourists,” she said.
Since the boom times of the last century, Buffalo’s grand old buildings have been torn down to make way for the new, sometimes just a parking lot. While most demolitions disappear, often to landfills, some of old Buffalo has scattered and resurfaced — near and far.
The new owners of these pieces of old Buffalo say the city’s grandeur transforms their new addresses with soul and beauty — from the Hong Kong cafe to a room in the American Wing of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; and from a summer retreat in Fort Erie to a new home in Colden built with salvaged pieces.
“It surprises us how often we bump into a piece of Buffalo in some strange corner of the world,” Schwartz said.
Migrations persist.
Last summer, Memorial Auditorium’s demolition crew gave hundreds of chunks of broken limestone walls to people who wanted the sparkling stone for gardens and as mementos.
A similar kind of scattering happened in the decades before the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House, which now relies on some replicas. Half of its 394 art windows and panes are missing or have been found in private collections, and museums from San Francisco to Chicago.
“We give up at a certain point,” said Mary Roberts, executive director of the house. “Sometimes things are just gone and you don’t know where they are.”
A Georgia congregation disconcerted some people this past year with plans to buy and move the East Side’s 1902 St. Gerard’s church.
“People search out quality and beauty … It’s an age-old tradition, moving things around,” said Peter Kenny, a Metropolitan curator. “It’s actually a very flattering thing that Buffalo has had people peeling things off.”
More research would lead to more discoveries, he said. In the book “Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvage,” British author John Harris chronicles the relocation of centuries-old room paneling, doorways and fireplaces. Many left England for mansions of wealthy Americans, such as William Randolph Hearst, who bought tens of thousands of salvage pieces from 1900 to 1935.
“It goes on and on,” Kenny said.
Mansion to museum
The oak entryway from the innovative Metcalfe mansion, once on North Street behind Delaware Avenue’s Butler mansion, filled a gap in the Metropolitan’s chronicle of architecture history.
The 1884 house, built for a banker’s widow by the famous architects McKim, Mead and White, didn’t isolate guests in a vestibule: The alcove welcomed visitors with benches, a hearth and sliding doors that opened to other rooms. This, said Kenny, is a natural segue to the next exhibit: An airy, open 1914 Frank Lloyd Wright living room from Minnesota that went one step further and left out walls.
“Buffalo can strut its architectural stuff here, where a lot of people get to see it,” said Kenny. “These things are bittersweet.”
Georgia’s Mary Our Queen congregation has been raising $15 million to replace its simple, square church with the stained glass and stone of St. Gerard’s. Even though a park is proposed for its current East Side site, people worry that the corner at Bailey and East Delavan avenues will be bereft.
“I wish it could be kept,” said Frank Kowsky.
Kowsky, a retired Buffalo State College art history professor, was part of a preservation group that successfully petitioned in 1980 to delay Delaware North’s plans to demolish the Metcalfe mansion. Shortly before it went down, Kowsky took a visiting Metropolitan curator to look.
The place was dingy, with brown paint on its terra cotta shingles. Yet, the inside was intact. “They’d used it as a boardinghouse,” said Kowsky, “but they hadn’t spent the money to ruin it.”
Delaware North agreed to let the museum have house parts.
“Better that something’s there, than nothing at all,” said Kowsky, who worked to have the dining room and library rebuilt in the college’s Rockwell Hall and on view by appointment.
Thirty years ago, Delaware North insisted on a parking lot — where a fountain and garden have since been added — because it fit with the concession company’s use of the nearby Butler mansion as headquarters, which the University at Buffalo now owns.
Kowsky still rescues places: He just helped get the state preservation board interested in saving the East Side’s Willert Park housing complex embedded with Depression-era sculpture of people at work.
“Old buildings look shabby and unimportant, but if you look beneath the surface you will find they were once very important,” he said. “It’s like finding a diamond under the dirt.”
Art deco treasures
A controversial former owner of the Central Terminal infuriated city preservationists in 1992 when they discovered he’d sold every one of the station’s ethereal lights. There were wall sconces, short lights perched from the wall and tall doorway sentinels. When restaurateur and architect Graeme Reading spotted some at a Manhattan antique shop in 1993, he bought six shorts, $6,500 each, and two talls, $15,500 a piece.
“They were just so extraordinary in their design and their beauty,” he said.
As he planned his first Cafe Deco restaurant, which opened in 1994, Reading thought art deco’s warm elegance would stand out among Hong Kong’s glassy skyscrapers.
Style — there are Cleveland bank doors and an oyster bar from Paris — contributed to the success of the cafe, he said.
“The power of the design is so strong that it’s making people comfortable now,” Reading said.
Until about a year ago, when he got an e-mail from a Central Terminal advocate, Reading thought the Buffalo station was gone. “I feel good and bad about this,” he said of the lights. “I’m not against the idea of returning these.”
Perhaps, he said, he could donate one and help procure replicas. He commissioned 40 copies from China when he opened two more cafes, in Hong Kong and nearby Macau. Now that a third is in the works, and there are plans for six in the next few years, he will need more of the lights himself.
“I can tell you, they would make that room look absolutely sensational,” Reading said of the terminal.
At Point Abino, Ont., a beach house has a sweeping lake view from a porch that once looked out over the Pan American Exposition — “in a setting of beautiful trees and flowers,” a travel guide said. After the fair, the Wisconsin house, with dark pine paneling, was sold and moved across the lake, perhaps in pieces by ferry, from what is now Nottingham Terrace.
“The history has always been an important part of this,” said Gretchen Alcock Hayden, as she gave a tour of the house her father bought around 1965.
It helps her, her sister and two brothers stay connected. “It’s our favorite place,” she said. “Even though my family lives all over the place, this is what we consider home.”
New from old
Melanie Wolski went online to look for old house parts a few years ago, soon after she and her new love, Buffalo native Bill Wolski, married and decided to start life together by building a house in Colden.
To find ingredients that would add soul, she searched for building salvage shops like ones she’d known in Toronto until she found Buffalo ReUse, the nonprofit that dismantles houses and sells the parts.
Now she walks on honey-hued floors “harvested” from a house on Rumsey Lane. She likes how the banister’s newel post is worn where long-ago people must have rubbed. Arched windows frame a view of the ski hills.
Her favorite is the red bathroom door. To see the original lipstick color she kept along with brass numbers, door knocker and letter slot, is to know her new life has roots. She smiles to think of the lady who she heard spent most of her life using it for a front door.
“It’s just like a little Hobbit door,” she said. “I’ve sort of welcomed the past into the house.”
She is pleased when friends say this house seems older than it is. From here, her marriage to Bill, her first online date, feels solid and deep.
“It just seemed so — as if it was meant to be,” she said.
mkearns@buffnews.com
