NEWS ARTICLE: ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION (07/2003) BUFFALO ALMIGHTY: Eye-popping buildings bless former industrial hub, where a century of prosperity fostered great architecture and an economy in decline preserved it Terese Loeb Kreuzer - Travel Arts Syndicate Atlanta Journal Constitution Sunday, June 1, 2003 Buffalo, N.Y. This city has a reputation for many things, not all of them tourist brochure material: proximity to Niagara Falls, Buffalo wings, the Buffalo Bills, blizzards and a faltering Rust Belt economy. Nevertheless, no one who loves architecture should bypass this city --- the second largest in New York State. Buffalo is a vast outdoor museum, displaying the work of many of the greatest architects of the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. The homes and public buildings they erected are often breathtaking and always interesting. You can see some of them in the recently opened movie "Bruce Almighty," which filmed many outdoor scenes in Buffalo and shot the rest on Hollywood sets that authentically depict the feel of the city. Star Jim Carrey plays a reporter for a Buffalo TV station he often watched while growing up in nearby southern Ontario. Among Buffalo's many magnificent structures, a few stand out. The massive, brooding, peaked towers of Henry Hobson Richardson's Buffalo Psychiatric Center are unforgettable. So is the muted light that filters through an intricate stained-glass ceiling into the golden lobby of Louis Sullivan's Guaranty Building. Or the open-yet-intimate and perfectly proportioned spaces of Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D. Martin house. All these buildings were completed around the turn of the 20th century. More recently, Minoru Yamasaki's M&T Bank Building, built from 1964 to 1966 with a white facade and vertical lines, has become especially precious since the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, designed by Yamasaki several years later. Buffalo's century-long architectural glory was fueled by a robust economy. The city is strategically situated on Lake Erie near the border of Canada. The Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, made Buffalo a hub through which materials from the Midwest could be transported to New York City and the Atlantic Ocean. Grain elevators and manufacturing followed, creating great wealth. Buffalo hired the brilliant landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux --- fresh from their triumph in creating New York City's Central Park --- to design a park system worthy of the city's prosperity. The parks, with their meadows, lakes and recreational facilities, were also conceived as a refuge from the noise and stress of urban life. The work started in 1868 and took 30 years to complete. The design was the first of its kind in the country --- not just a single park, but a network connected by parkways and boulevards, which were soon lined with spacious, comfortable homes. In 1896, the awesome power of Niagara Falls was harnessed and began to generate electricity. Buffalo's rich grew richer. They built even grander homes. During those years, two of the city's former mayors became president of the United States: Millard Fillmore in 1850 and Grover Cleveland in 1884 and again in 1892. Buffalo was a powerhouse. The Pan-American Exposition of 1901, which presented the spectacle of the newly practical electric light to a dazzled world only temporarily dimmed that image. Eight million people came to the Rumsey farm, 30 minutes from downtown Buffalo, where the exposition had been installed. On Sept. 6, President William McKinley was among them. He was shot by an anarchist while attending a reception at the Temple of Music and died eight days later. Wearing borrowed clothes, Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president of the United States in the library of the Ansley Wilcox house on Delaware Avenue, now a National Historic Site. For the first few decades of the 20th century, Buffalo continued to thrive. The city's exuberance was expressed in its art deco City Hall, started in 1929 and completed in 1931. Its most prominent feature is a 32-story-high central tower, topped with brilliantly colored ceramic tiles. The architect, John J. Wade, said the building "expresses primarily the masculinity, power and purposeful energy of an industrial community." That confidence was short-lived. The Depression hit Buffalo hard. By 1936, one-fourth of the city lived on federal relief. Although there was a temporary respite during World War II, when Buffalo's plants contributed significantly to the war effort, Buffalo never fully recovered economically. As a result, many of the grand buildings of the previous century were never "modernized" as they might have been in a more affluent city. They may have been subdivided or neglected, but they remained essentially as they had been conceived, for a future generation to appreciate and restore. There were some losses, of course, most notably the Larkin Administration Building designed by Wright (1904-06), and one of the most beautiful and innovative office buildings of its time. It was demolished in 1950. Another office building masterpiece, the Guaranty building by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, was almost razed after a fire in 1974, but fortunately was preserved. The exterior is ornamented with intricate terra-cotta tiles that soar to an elaborate cornice and mask the steel girders that support the building. This was one of the earliest curtain-wall skyscrapers, as important for its structural innovations as for its beauty. The entire building has been purchased by a law firm. Elsewhere in Buffalo, surrounded by attractive but essentially ordinary houses, Wright's masterpiece of domestic architecture, the Darwin D. Martin House Complex, is being restored to its original magnificence by a nonprofit organization. The main house, with its beautifully balanced horizontal lines, is one of the finest examples of what Wright called his prairie houses --- long, low and attuned to the flat Midwestern landscape. A glass-roofed conservatory, carriage house and an open-air pergola (a covered walkway) were demolished but will be reconstructed. A gardener's cottage still stands, as does the small Barton House, built for Martin's sister and her husband. Martin was an executive of the Larkin Co., the largest mail-order house in the world, and Wright was in his mid-30s when they met and began a collaboration that resulted in the Martin House Complex on Jewett Parkway and the light-filled summer house called Graycliff, overlooking Lake Erie. One of the best ways to see the city's architecture is to walk: down Delaware Avenue with its mansions and mighty churches, some adorned with stained-glass windows by masters Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge; around the downtown banks, churches, municipal and office buildings (a brochure called "Downtown's Heritage" can serve as a guide); down Elmwood Avenue to the classically inspired Albright-Knox Art Gallery with caryatids by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and a superb collection of 20th-century art. The architectural treasures of Buffalo are riveting. They must be seen. Terese Loeb Kreuzer has written about England, Scotland, France, Italy, Poland, Guatemala, China and the Caribbean as well as about many places in the United States. She is the editor of the Travel Arts Syndicate