On past, Buffalo builds its future

BUFFALO -- The image of a decaying industrial city that gets snowed under every winter is one that residents have long tried to overcome.

By looking past a half-century of decline to Buffalo's gilded age, a grass-roots movement has seized on a legacy of architecture, history, and art, aiming to transform the city into a cultural destination.

The restoration of a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, the 1905 Darwin Martin House, anchors an effort to draw affluent culture-minded tourists and rebrand the city. Enough architectural gems survive from the late 1800s and early 1900s to bolster its image, said New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger.

''It's an extraordinary and, in many ways, beautiful city," he said. ''It also has huge and difficult problems, and this alone can't solve them." But its architecture ''makes Buffalo unique, and gives it amazing potential."

Buffalo is the only city other than Chicago with buildings by Wright, H.H. Richardson, and Louis Sullivan, American architecture's three pioneers. Its historic buildings grew around the country's oldest coordinated park system, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who later planned Boston's Emerald Necklace.

As the Martin House restoration, begun in 1992 with private and public money, winds down, workers are re-creating three surrounding Wright structures -- a conservatory, a carriage house, and a covered walkway -- that had been demolished. A planned visitors center next door, slated to break ground next year, will inform tourists about Wright's work, which includes three other area homes -- the publicly owned Graycliff House, which is a summer lakefront home also under restoration, and two private city residences.

Downtown, the restoration of the Erie Canal Harbor, the historic link between the Great Lakes and New York City, anchors a $50 million waterfront revitalization, funded with federal, state, and local money.

Buffalo's leaders, struggling with financial problems, hope an improved image will boost the city's growing biotech industry. The Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, run by Nobel laureate Herbert Hauptman, recently opened a research facility downtown -- part of a $150 million campus that will include the state's Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, as well as the Roswell Park Cancer Institute's Center for Genetics and Pharmacology.

Yet with city and county governments so cash-strapped that the state monitors their spending, promoting Buffalo's cultural heritage won't be easy. Funding for the Buffalo Niagara Convention and Visitors Bureau has been slashed in half, scaling down next year's publicity campaign for the Wright complex, Erie Canal Harbor, and the revitalized Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

''It's terrible timing," said bureau spokesman Ed Healy. ''We have some amazing pieces of Americana here, which are unrecognized for the most part, and we need some assistance to get the word out."

A growing public appreciation for the city's cultural pastiche led donors to contribute half the $28 million cost of restoring the Martin House, said John Courtin, executive director of the Martin House Restoration Corporation.

Courtin likened the buzz over the Martin complex and the visitors center, designed by Harvard's Toshiko Mori, to the era when Martin gave Wright all the money, space, and freedom he needed to fulfill his vision.

''Mori's visitors center is probably the most important new building in Buffalo over the last quarter-century," he said. ''She's a very talented architect, and we're trying to do now what Martin did with Wright 100 years ago -- invest in someone who's not yet a household name, but shows great signs of promise."

Mori, chairman of Harvard's architecture department, has designed a building costing that will cost $7 million, Courtin said, money that has come from private donations.

The restoration of the Erie Canal Harbor, where immigrants disembarked for the West and Midwestern crops were sent east, features the unearthed cobblestone streets and commercial slip, along with the old Central Wharf. As the canal's Lake Erie terminus, Buffalo prospered as the first Great Lakes boomtown.

The city grew rapidly, but the Great Depression quickly devastated it. Darwin Martin, Wright's loyal patron, went bankrupt, and his family eventually abandoned his house. The Larkin Building, the headquarters of Martin's soap company, was demolished -- what Goldberger calls ''one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism in history."

Buffalo had to learn to appreciate its cultural legacy, said veteran preservationist Tim Tielman, of the Campaign for Buffalo History, Architecture and Culture, a preservation group. The campaign to restore the Martin House actually began decades ago, but public indifference stalled it, he said. Now pressure must be kept on politicians who can be distracted by the city's financial woes, Tielman said.

''We've come a long way . . . and now Wright, Richardson, and Sullivan are household names here," he said. ''The public gets it. But our business and political elite still aren't very sophisticated in these matters."

When the Canal District was uncovered during excavations in 1999, Tielman and others campaigned to preserve it. Tielman also led a campaign to save another neighborhood's cobblestone streets from being paved over. Volunteers removed and re-laid the cobblestones so that city crews could place new water lines underneath.

The campaigners dubbed the neighborhood the Cobblestone District, a name that stuck and drew residents to its redeveloped buildings.

''People are paying high rates to live in old warehouses downtown -- you couldn't conceive that happening 10 years ago," Tielman said.

As Buffalo's steel, automotive, and defense industries crumbled, economic decline actually helped preserve old buildings that would have been knocked down in the name of ''urban renewal," had the city kept growing, Mori said.

''It's just a beautiful city to drive around," she said. ''It may not be doing well economically right now, but that shouldn't stop it from having big visions."