More Wright in Buffalo: The Darwin D. Martin Complex

The Darwin D. Martin House
(copyright 2010 by Dory Adams)

Earlier this spring, we made two trips to Buffalo, New York. The first was a daytrip to tour Graycliff which I wrote about here. On the second trip, we spent several days exploring and photographing in the Buffalo area. The first thing on my list of things to see was the Darwin Martin House, which architect Frank Lloyd Wright referred to as his “opus.” Intrigued that a family owned two Wright-designed estates, after seeing Graycliff I wanted to see their main residence in the city.

The tour gave me more than a look at the interior of the Wright-designed home. I came away with pieces of a story with complex characters, an historic setting at the turn of the twentieth century when Buffalo was an industrial behemoth, motivations and complications surrounding self-made wealth, friendship, family, scandal, tragedy and loss. Now I am more intrigued than ever, and the more research I do the more fascinated I become with Darwin and Isabelle Martin, and with Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Darwin D. Martin Complex includes the main residence for Darwin and Isabelle Martin’s family, with a long open-sided pergola leading from the house to a conservatory and carriage house, as well two other houses on the property – a gardener’s cottage and the George Barton House which was built for Darwin’s sister and her family. There is also a newly built visitor’s center designed by Toshiko Mori. The main house is currently undergoing restoration, and the tour we were on was the last to go through before they were temporarily suspended until the restoration work is completed inside. Tours of the other buildings, however, will continue in the meantime.

The Visitor's Center and Gardener's Cottage
(Copyright 2010 by Dory Adams)

I look forward to returning for another tour of the house after the restoration is complete. At the time of our tour the art glass windows had been removed from the main floor, the wisteria mosaic tiles had been removed from the living room fireplace, and protective drapes divided the open living space and blocked the view down the 100-foot long pergola to the statue of the Greek goddess Nike in the conservatory that would’ve normally been seen upon entering the house.

The fact that the Martin House has been saved is a story in itself. The property had been abandoned for nearly twenty years after Darwin Martin’s death. Martin had lost most of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash and died in 1935 after several years of failing health. In 1938, Isabelle Martin abandoned the house after she could not afford to pay the back taxes. The day Isabelle Martin walked out of the house for the last time she didn’t even bother to lock the door behind her. The house stood vacant, vulnerable to vagrants and vandals and partially open to the elements, until 1955 when architect Sebastian Tauriello bought it to try to save it. Tauriello sold part of the property in order to save the rest of it. The original pergola, conservatory, and carriage house were destroyed to build three apartment buildings where they’d stood. Later, the University at Buffalo owned the main house and used it as a residence for the university president. Since 1992, the Martin House Restoration Corporation, a non-profit educational and restoration group, has worked to acquire and restore the complete property. The apartment buildings have been demolished and the pergola, conservatory, and carriage house were rebuilt on the original site.

Carriage House and Pergola
(Copyright 2010 by Dory Adams)

The Darwin Martin House was a grand and formal home where visitors were ushered into a reception room off the formal entry upon arrival. The family space on the main floor included a large open area with library, living room, and dining room, and upstairs were eight bedrooms. Darwin Martin, an executive with the Larkin Company, was a workaholic who also kept an office on the main floor of his home where business visitors could enter and leave through a separate entrance without disturbing his family.

Martin had brought Frank Lloyd Wright to Buffalo in 1902 when searching for an architect to design and build the Larkin Company’s Administration Building, which became Wright’s first commercial commission. Construction on the administration building began in 1904 and was completed in 1906. During that time, Martin also hired Wright to design an estate for his family that would include a house for his sister.

The friendship between Martin and Wright is fascinating. Both men were self-made successes who came from broken families, and both men made and lost fortunes. Darwin Martin was a friend and benefactor to Wright even during the years when Wright’s life was filled with scandal and tragedy, and he extended loans to Wright again and again at Wright’s request. By 1932 when Martin’s money was nearly gone, Wright owed Martin $70,000 which was never repaid.

Darwin Martin, who died in 1935 after a series of strokes, is buried in an unmarked grave in Forest Lawn Cemetery. Martin had commissioned Wright to design a family mausoleum for him in 1928, but could not afford to have it built after the onset of the Great Depression. By the time of Martin’s death, there was not even enough money left to put a tombstone on his grave. In 2004, nearby Darwin and Isabelle’s unmarked graves, the Blue Sky Mausoleum was built using Wright’s design.

Photo credits: Photographs copyright 2010 by Dory Adams, all rights reserved

Lost in "A Moment in Time"

Fisherman along the Ohio River outside Western Penitentiary, Pittsburgh PA (copyright 2010 by Dory Adams)

Click on image for larger view

A few weeks ago I mentioned “A Moment in Time,” a project launched by the blog Lens at the New York Times. The purpose of the project was for people around the world to take a photograph at 15:00 U.T.C. and upload it to the New York Times website as a contribution to the “global mosaic” of images representative of that moment. It sounded like an interesting project and a fun thing to do, so I wanted to participate by submitting an image from my city and to encourage others to take part as well. The project was an overwhelming success in that more than 14,000 images were submitted.

“Overwhelming” may be the key word here, as it was quickly apparent that the NYT project staff had difficulties managing the influx of photographic images and getting the interactive global mosaic up and working. The site finally went live May 11th, a week later than planned, but I’ve not yet been able to determine if the photograph I submitted of Pittsburgh is actually part of the mosaic. Because my photo is in a large category (“community”) and in one of the largest stacks of photographs (Pennsylvania is included in the northeast region which has multiple major cities), my browser freezes or crashes before I can get through that single stack. I’ve tried viewing the site on several different computers and by using both Firefox and Explorer with no luck. There are many more stacks of photographs (sorted by region and category) to view, but I’d like to see whether my image of Pittsburgh is actually included. On May 2nd, there had been problems with uploading images to the site. While I was able to upload mine on the first try late in the afternoon and received a notice that it had been uploaded successfully, I’m not sure it actually did since others have left comments on the blog saying they’d received that same message but their image was not in the stack for their region/category.

At this point I’ve simply wasted far too much time trying to view my image only to have the system crash before I can work my way down the huge stack of photographs where it should be. So, I’m uploading my photograph here – and if any of you happen to see it on the NYT site, I’d be grateful if you’d copy the URL for that particular page and e-mail it to me (my address is in the sidebar to the right of this page).

There was a lot going on in Pittsburgh at 11:00 a.m. (15:00 U.T.C. for Eastern Standard Time) on May 2nd, including the Pittsburgh marathon with 16,000 participants and a graduation ceremony for the University of Pittsburgh. It was going to be a morning of traffic jams, detours, and bridge closures. The logistics of getting around the city would be a challenge. I considered photographing the marathon, but realized that most of the runners would’ve crossed the finish line by 11:00 a.m. I also considered photographing parishioners entering or leaving mass at St. Benedict the Moor Church since the gorgeous statue of the saint atop the church is a favorite photographic subject of mine, but the mass schedule did not quite jive with the designated moment.

Pittsburgh’s urban trails are a favorite aspect of the city for me, so I decided to photograph at a stretch of the Allegheny Trail along the Ohio River near Western Penitentiary that always interests me. My husband and I walk that stretch from time to time, and I’m always fascinated by the prison there. Over the past few years it has gone from closed and vacant to fully operational again. We’ve watched as it transitioned from quiet and spooky obsolescence, a big tombstone of sorts, to an active and menacing sight with gleaming new razor wire atop the walls and fences. First opened more than a century ago in 1882, the structure looks medieval. This is the kind of place you might have nightmares about, and in fact I have a recurring dream which takes place on the side street beside the tall stone wall of the prison yard where posted signs warn “no stopping or standing.”

In serene juxtaposition to the penitentiary is the Ohio River scenery. On the rainy Sunday morning of the photo project, I came upon a fisherman wearing a yellow rain slicker who was fishing from a dock just beyond the trail and the prison walls. I photographed the fisherman on the outside enjoying his leisure time while the men inside those walls served their time. What can’t be captured in the photograph is the sound coming from the prison, an echoing din of voices talking and shouting above the background noise of movement inside. That sound bounces from wall to wall around the interior of the building to the outer yard walls and eventually beyond. I was amazed by the sound and wondered how much louder it must be inside. It had been a cold winter day the last time I’d walked this trail, and except for the Christmas Day visitors arriving in the parking lot, it had been very quiet then.

Locals refer to it as Western Pen, but the official name for the facility is The State Correctional Institution – Pittsburgh. It had operated as a maximum security prison until closing in 2005, and then in 2007 it reopened as a medium security prison due to dangerous overcrowding in the PA prison system. This image of Western Pen would fit into my category of “reclaimed things” here at In This Light where I have ongoing themes of “abandoned things” and “reclaimed things.” For the purpose of the “A Moment in Time” project, it seems to fit best in their category of “community.” The penitentiary is a community within itself, and it’s also part of the larger community of the neighborhood and city, albeit a walled-in and gated one of the unfashionable kind.

The editors at Lens who undertook the project of trying to capture a single moment globally are to be commended for their efforts. It’s truly a wonderful project, and I will no doubt spend more hours browsing through the images. Perhaps the editors at Lens will improve their global mosaic so that the images on the interactive site can be searched by city instead of larger regions, so that all those who contributed photographs to the project can have their images seen.

Guest Post by Josh Wilker: "Acting the Fool"

I’ve been following Josh Wilker’s blog Cardboard Gods for a long time – not because I’m a baseball fan or a baseball card collector, but because of the stories he tells about his own life in reflecting on the cards he collected as a boy. Josh is a wonderful writer (we were classmates in the MFA program at Vermont College), and I’m very excited about the publication of his new book Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards.

He will be in Pittsburgh on his book tour: Wednesday, May 12th, 7 PM at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, SouthSide Works (510 South 27th Street, Pittsburgh, PA). For more info call the bookstore: 412-381-3600. This event is free and open to the public. Josh will be reading, discussing, and signing his book – and there’s always the possibility there will be a bubblegum-blowing contest. If you live in the Pittsburgh area, come out and join us. Tour events for other areas are listed here.

A big thank you to Josh for writing such a fantastic guest post for this week’s In This Light!

“Acting the Fool” by Josh Wilker

A few years ago, I finished a novel I’d been working on for years, tried to get it published, failed, and more or less shut all the shades and lay down and stared up at the ceiling with my stomach hurting. Now what? I knew I wouldn’t stop writing, because by then I’d already been writing pretty much every day for a couple decades, so writing was on me like an unshakeable bad habit, like nailbiting or buying scratch-off lotto tickets, but I was worried about setting off on another long writing journey that would end, as all my previous long writing journeys had ended, with me heaving a sigh and dumping a pile of pages into an increasingly tightly-packed file cabinet drawer.

The novel had been loosely based on my family’s experiences during my 1970s childhood, when my mom and my third parent, her boyfriend Tom, had taken my brother and me to the country to “get back to the land.” I structured the novel like a record album. I hoped the setup would not only be an homage to the Woodstock-era records that inspired and buoyed that hippie dream of reviving Eden but that would also justify the always risky narrative strategy of employing multiple first-person narrators: I wanted to create a web of voices in harmony, one voice in one song threading into a different voice in the next, like the voices on the greatest of the back-to-the-land anthems: Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, and The Band’s first three albums, including the one they recorded in something like an attitude of pure play with Bob Dylan, The Basement Tapes.

***

In Across the Great Divide, Barney Hoskins writes of Bob Dylan and the musicians who would become the Band: “Without the pressure of touring or studio recording hanging over them, the motley quintet had a ball with ‘the little workshop situation’ in the basement.

“‘They were a kick to do,’ Bob told Jann Wenner in 1969. ‘Fact, I’d do it all again. You know, that’s really the way to do a recording—in a peaceful, relaxed setting, in somebody’s basement, with the window open and a dog lying on the floor.’

“[Garth Hudson added]: ‘It was relaxed and low-key, which was something we hadn’t enjoyed since we were children.’” (p. 138)

***

After trying and failing to sell my novel, I needed to find a way back to joy. I needed to play. A few years earlier, while writing another file-cabinet novel, this one about a young aimless man who worked at a struggling liquor store, I had begun writing an occasional notebook entry about my childhood baseball cards. I was living in a cabin in the woods and slowly cracking under the self-imposed strain of trying to create something brilliant with the liquor store novel, and it was only when I took a break to write about one of my old cards that this strain lessened. I found that I didn’t so much care what I wrote. I just wanted to hold a card in my hand and let it take my mind wherever it wanted to go, just like the card had done when I was a kid, playing.

***

In A Long Strange Trip by Dennis McNally, Jerry Garcia speaks about the first music he and his friends made under the name The Grateful Dead. The first gig for the Dead, formerly a blues outfit called the Warlocks, was to serve as the “house band” of the Merry Pranksters’ acid tests, those attempts by Ken Kesey and his cohorts to reinvent the world by leveling everything within and starting anew, like a child. “The idea,” Garcia said of the new music, “was of its essence formless. There was nothin’ going on. We’d just . . . make something of it.”

***

Childlike, formless playing has a better chance of occurring with musicians than with writers, first because music is more rooted at its inception in the body than in the brain, and second because music can be a creation that’s shared, an action conducive not only to play but to joy. I wondered if writing could be shared in its early stages in a way that, while not exactly like the collaborations of musicians at play, at least might free me up from what had become a stifling, overstraining solitude.

My wife and I went to Target and bought a scanner. She figured out how to set it up. My brother helped me set up a blog. I got out my box of baseball cards. I wanted to try to tap back into that rejuvenating sense of play that I’d glimpsed while living in the cabin, and also try to find a way to share it. I reached into my box of baseball cards and pulled a card out at random. It was Mark Fidrych.

Of all the cards I could have pulled out! Fidrych embodied the brief yelp of joy that is this life more than any other baseball player ever had. For one season, before arm trouble set in, he was the best and most entertaining pitcher in the American League. He talked to the baseball and bounded around the infield like a kid after a teammate’s good play and in all ways had the time of his life, as if it was all just a game he loved. All I had to do was look at the photo of him on the card and hold the card in my hand as I had done as a boy and the words began tumbling out of me like giggling little leaguers from a bus that had just pulled up to a sunny green field.

I scanned the Mark Fidrych card with our new scanner. I posted the image and the words that had rushed and tripped out of me on my new blog. I shared them.

***

As that year I spent in a cabin in the woods was coming to a close, I began to understand that I wouldn’t be able to avoid it being a failure. Time was running out. I’d written every day, and yet the novel I’d hoped to write had never materialized from the muck of the writing. I knew in a few weeks I’d be heading back to the world, broke. The weather began to get warm. I had taken Peter Guralnick’s two-volume Elvis Presley biography out of the college library. I sat on the porch of the cabin in the sun and read. There were worse things I could have done.

Years later, as I started sharing my playtime writing about my baseball cards with whoever wanted to see it, I didn’t know what I was doing, or where I was going, but I was having fun. The writing kept reaching out of that feeling of childhood play, allowing me to once again and with fresh eyes approach the subjects I’d been attempting to get down on the page all my adult life: the back-to-the-land years with my family, my lifelong bond with my brother, my years as a clerk in a struggling liquor store, even my year in the cabin. The stories in the packed file cabinet of failed pages were rising up from a state of suspended animation and flailing around, young again.

I didn’t know that I’d have that in my future as I sat on my porch at my cabin, defeated, and read fat books about Elvis. Nor did I know that all the formless playtime writing would begin to suggest a form, a book with a narrative shape, encompassing a life that had persistently announced itself as terminally shapeless. At that moment on the porch of my cabin, I was still a decade away from finishing that book, my ode to play and to my childhood baseball cards and to my holy stumble of a life.

But I do remember feeling something flicker inside me as I read about how it all began for Elvis. It’s one of my favorite stories, right up there with the story of Dylan and the Band having fun in a basement or Jerry Garcia and the boys inventing a new sound out of giggly nothingness.

Elvis came to his first full session at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios and worked late into the night, mostly on sentimental ballads that came out, despite his fine voice and sincere efforts, sounding stiff and lifeless. Just before they called it quits, the whole thing a glum failure, Elvis grabbed a guitar and started just horsing around. Instead of a ballad, he played a faster,looser song, Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right.”

“All of a sudden,” session guitarist Scotty Moore recalled, “Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill [Black] picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open . . . he stuck his head out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know.’

“‘Well, back up,’ he said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.’”

Josh Wilker at his desk

Josh Wilker writes about his life and his childhood baseball cards at cardboardgods.net. Since his first posting in 2006, his site has been featured in The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and ESPN.com. He is a winner of the Howard Frank Mosher Prize for Short Fiction and has an MFA from Vermont College. He lives with his wife in Chicago.

Reclaimed Things: Braddock, PA

Edgar Thomson Works, Braddock, PA
(copyright Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved)

(Click on any image for larger view)

My interest in Braddock was first sparked by the work of my husband, who’d begun photographing the last working blast furnace in the Pittsburgh there. What began as early morning images of the Edgar Thomson Works turned into an exploration of the town, and it wasn’t long before I started joining Kevin on these outings.

Braddock News
(copyright 2009 by Dory Adams)

Braddock is an economically depressed town just outside Pittsburgh along the Monongahela River. In the 1950s and 1960s, the town was thriving with a bustling business district. Since the 1970s, the town’s population has plummeted from nearly 20,000 to 2,000 residents. The town is a mix of tidy homes and abandoned properties with dozens of derelict buildings marked for demolition, particularly in the area known as “The Bottom.” While the Edgar Thomson Works is fully operational, there is not much left of the business district except empty storefronts. The town doesn’t even have a grocery store. Earlier this year, the town’s hospital shut down.

Isaly's, Braddock, PA
(copyright Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved)

Paradoxically, at the center of this ruin and decay is a thriving organic urban garden. With the massive steel mill looming behind it, Braddock Farms stands on a vacant city block with dozens of raised growing beds and a greenhouse. Managed by Jeff Jaeger and entering its third growing season, the garden is a project of Grow Pittsburgh. The nonprofit organization’s mission is teaching and promoting urban food production, and it employs members of the Braddock Youth Project. Braddock Farms sells fresh produce directly from the garden to the public at the farm market at 6th and Braddock Avenue. Pittsburgh area restaurant chefs are regular customers.

Braddock Farms
(copyright 2009 by Dory Adams)

Braddock has a rich and interesting history as the site of Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill, which was built in 1875 and still operates today, and the site of the very first Carnegie free library. That library, which housed a swimming pool, gymnasium, and music hall, was once slated to be demolished but is currently undergoing restoration. Mayor Fetterman lives across the street from the library in a warehouse he converted into a loft with additional living space on the roof using converted Cosco shipping containers.

Mayor John Fetterman welcoming audience
at "Wood-Fired Words" reading
(copyright 2008 by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved)

Braddock’s recent political history is interesting, as well. In 2005, John Fetterman won the mayoral election by a single vote. Fetterman, who has a degree in urban policy from Harvard University, came to the area in 2001 to work for AmeriCorp and Pittsburgh’s Hill House. His successful grant writing led to additional outreach projects at Braddock to help at risk youth obtain general equivalency diplomas and find jobs.

Fetterman was an outsider who adopted the town. To show his commitment, he has 15104 (Braddock’s ZIP code) tattooed on the inside of one forearm. On the other arm are the dates of five murders which happened under his watch as mayor. He’s a startling figure – beefy, 6’ 8” tall, with a shaven head and a goatee. Inside that rough-looking exterior is the epitome of optimism. He sees what he refers to as a “malignant beauty” in the town, and he perceives change not as a negative thing but rather as an opportunity for reinvention and repurposing. He sees the possibility of luring start-up companies and eco-friendly businesses to the town. Fossil Free Fuel, which retrofits vehicles to run on vegetable oil, is one such business that came to Braddock in 2007.

In November 2009, Mayor Fetterman made the cover of The Atlantic as one of the 27 people on the magazine’s “Brave Thinkers” list (the list also included President Barack Obama). He is a politician to the core, but one who believes in sweat equity and often has his own sleeves rolled up and is not afraid to do hard physical labor himself in an urban pioneer sort of way.

I met Mayor Fetterman in October 2008, at an event celebrating Braddock’s newly built community oven. Braddock residents and Pittsburgh area guests gathered that evening on an empty lot along Braddock Avenue where the wood-fired brick oven is located for fresh baked bread and pizza topped with fresh veggies from the Braddock Farms organic garden. Among those milling around the oven and noshing on pizza was documentary filmmaker Tony Buba. Not that I recognized his face (although I certainly recognized the name), but because someone said loudly, “Hey, Tony Buba!” Buba grew up in Braddock and returned to it after graduating from college, seeing the onset of decline and understanding that the town was his subject matter to document. The oven-firing event was in collaboration with a fiction and poetry reading organized by Sherrie Flick of the Gist Street Reading Series, which presented “Wood-Fired Words.” The reading was well-attended, and I noticed Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book critic Bob Hoover in the audience.

Braddock Community Oven
(Copyright 2008 by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved)

Braddock is interesting photographically because it’s changing. Things could go either way for the town, but efforts are being made for a positive outcome. Each time we stroll through town to photograph, we find change – something gone, something new.

Braddock Street Art
(Copyright Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved)

One of my favorite things is to discover public artwork around town. Mayor Fetterman has enlisted the artist community in his efforts to reach out to the Braddock youth. Some of the installations are temporary, such as the paper cutouts by street artist Swoon which are pasted to buildings around town. Others are permanent installations, such as a 10-foot walkway mosaic of glass and tile depicting a pond with marine life. The mosaic was built by teens in the Braddock Youth Project under the guidance of sculptor James Simon. Funding for the mosaic project came from multiple sources, including a federal Housing and Urban Development block grant, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and Braddock Redux (Mayor Fetterman’s nonprofit). James Simon also worked with the community youth to build a new welcome sign for Braddock.

More Braddock Street Art
(copyright 2009 by Dory Adams)

Mayor Fetterman values the creative class and knows that urban renewal often begins through the artistic community, partly because artists are looking for cheap studio space. Once artists move into an area, there’s a tendency for it to become a hip and trendy spot to live – and then, of course, the artists can no longer afford to stay there and have to find another neighborhood with cheap rents.

One of the buildings bought by Mayor Fetterman now houses Unsmoke Systems, a gallery and art studios, which opened in July of 2009 as an artist cooperative. “Gold in Braddock,” a new exhibit by artists from around the country, just opened at Unsmoke Artspace and runs through June 5, 2010.


The story of Braddock as a mill town is an old one. Thomas Bell’s novel Out of This Furnace, which is set in Braddock, tells the multigenerational story of Slovak immigrant workers in the mills. Published in 1941 and out of print for many years, it was rediscovered and reissued in 1976. Since then, it has remained in print and is on many college syllabi as required reading. Perhaps a new story of Braddock is in the making, one with an environmental and creative class twist, and with a triumphant ending.


Photo Credits:

• "Edgar Thomson Works" copyright Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved
• "Braddock News" copyright Dory Adams, all rights reserved
  
• "Isaly's, Braddock, PA" copyright Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved
• "Braddock Farms" copyright Dory Adams, all rights reserved
  
• "Mayor John Fetterman" copyright Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved
• "Braddock Community Oven" copyright Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved
• "Braddock Street Art" copyright Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved
• "More Braddock Street Art" copyright Dory Adams, all rights reserved
  

"Gold in Braddock" at Unsmoke Artspace
May 1 - June 5, 2010:

Abandoned Things: Love Canal, New York

I first saw Love Canal, a modest suburban neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York in May of 1983. I’d been visiting my friends Walt & Ruth in Buffalo, a stopover for a few days when traveling from Chicago to Boston by train. Walt, a photographer who’d been a classmate of mine a few years earlier, wanted to show me the neighborhood he’d been photographing which had been built atop an industrial waste landfill. It was one of the spookiest things I’d ever seen – a true modern day ghost town of boarded-up houses on street after empty street.

I regret that I didn’t photograph the neighborhood that day. We’d simply done a drive thru on our way to another destination – probably Niagara Falls. I have photographs of Walt & Ruth posing like tourists in front of the falls, but I don’t have a single shot to document the abandoned homes and school at one of the biggest man-made environmental tragedies known.

Last week, I returned to see what remains at Love Canal. There’s not much left to photograph now. A fence now surrounds the most toxic section, the containment area where the 99th Street Elementary School and the homes nearest it once stood – until evidence of the chemical dump they’d been built upon seeped into basements and storm sewers, and formed puddles in yards and the school playground during a particularly rainy period in 1976.

The elementary school and some of the neighborhood homes had been built on a chemical dump site where Hooker Chemical Company had buried drums of toxic waste from 1942-1952. The dump site was an old canal, a project begun in the 1890s by William T. Love (thus the name Love Canal) but never completed. Hooker Chemical Company buried an estimated 22,000 tons of chemical waste in 55-gallon barrels in the partially dug canal, and then sold the land to the Niagara Falls School Board in 1953 for one dollar. Among the chemicals buried there were dioxin, benzene and other substances known to be carcinogenic. Included in the deed was a disclaimer stating that the land had been used for chemical waste disposal and notification that the sale of the property released the company of responsibility or liability for future damages. In 1955 the 99th Street Elementary School was built on that property and new homes were built on the adjacent land.


I’ve written previously about memory images. Since 1983, my only images of Love Canal are those visions stored in my brain. Fortunately, the University of Buffalo has an extensive archive which includes records, a newspaper database, and a photo database of images available online with images of the school, homes, and toxic waste barrels. Looking at these photographs, I was surprised to find the homes were more modest than I remembered them. Even more surprising to me is that I didn’t even mention seeing Love Canal in my journal (I searched for an entry when trying to pinpoint the date of my earlier visit).

How could I not write a single word about that experience or take a single photograph? Granted, this was before I was writing seriously, and my journaling efforts were more of a general account of my days than a place to explore thoughts and feelings. I was a reader back then, and not a writer. But I did carry my camera with me nearly everywhere I went, and yet I didn’t use it. I do recall feeling overwhelmed by what I saw, but instead of trying to record it I simply rode away.


Last week as my husband and I drove around the vacant lots of what had once been a community, I tried to align what was left with my memory of what had been there 27 years earlier when I’d ridden on those same streets with Walt & Ruth. Outside the containment fence are blocks where children once skateboarded and rode bikes and played games. All that remain now are street signs, fire hydrants, and sidewalks with driveway cuts leading to overgrown yards where houses once stood. Inside the fence, the sidewalk continues past acres of ground where vent pipes jut up at regular intervals amid a feeble landscaping attempt using shrubbery along the edge of a slight rise. In the distance a single building, which I believe is an EPA Treatment Facility, is located deep inside the fenced area. Underground behind the fence, an estimated 2,000 tons of chemicals are still buried.


While my husband and I walked along the streets outside the fence, another car circled the area. Later, I saw the driver and passenger stop and get out to shoot a photograph. Were they like me? Or were they former residents? What would it be like to return to this place if it had once been your home? And, I couldn’t help thinking about our recent visit to Centralia, PA where there had also been other visitors at that site. Are we becoming environmental disaster tourists?

Memory is fallible. The images in my memory don’t quite match the photographs in the database at the University of Buffalo’s Love Canal Archive, but luckily those images exist and are available for all to see. Memory images are not as accurate as those captured in negatives and slides. Instead, they’re a little more like the latent images on undeveloped film. I imagine there are lots of other photographs out there of Love Canal, including those of my friend (and I’ve been badgering him to dig those negatives out of his files). These are important images that document the demise of Love Canal, particularly because memory itself is so unreliable. It’s amazing that only a few years before the school and homes were built on that contaminated site, it was still being used as a dump site. What were people thinking? This had not been a distant history; it was the recent past. The time line from the construction of the elementary school to the destruction of the neighborhood occurred within a single generation.

There is an ongoing long term observational study which follows the long term health effects of former residents who choose to participate in it. More information and other reports can be found at the New York State Department of Health website.

Perhaps last week’s Earth Day has me thinking about Love Canal again. I’d heard an NPR story on the radio about this being the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. That show noted that the first Earth Day occurred on April 22, 1970 and had been intended as a singular event, and that the EPA had not even existed until then. Hard to imagine. Even harder to imagine how reckless and naïve we were about our land, our water, and our air. Let’s hope our collective memory improves.

Photo Credits: All photographs copyright 2010 by Dory Adams

Further Reading:

• University of Buffalo Archive Links

• EPA History of Love Canal

• New York State Department of Health

• Western New York Legacy Digital Collection

• University of Buffalo Love Canal Collection

• Love Canal Declared Clean

Saving Frank Lloyd Wright's Graycliff

Graycliff (copyright 2010 by Kevin Scanlon)

Frank Lloyd Wright speaks to me. At least his houses do. And I am envious of anyone who lives in one. Yes, I know they are notorious for leaks and other functionality issues. This is a case where form trumps function. Living in a Wright house would be living in art.

I’ve toured Wright’s most famous house, Fallingwater, in every season and it never fails to amaze me. There are places in nature that stir a similar sense of belonging for me, such as coastal Maine and the northern coast of California. I get that same feeling when I enter a Wright house: I belong here; this should be mine. This feeling of connection was one of the architect’s goals. Wright designed his homes to become part of the landscape surrounding it, using indigenous materials to integrate the building with the site. Early this month I made my first visit to Graycliff, which overlooks Lake Erie just south of Buffalo, New York. Guess what – that one should be mine, too.

Some Wright-designed homes remain in the hands of private owners. Writer T.C. Boyle, whose latest novel The Women is about several of FLW’s romantic liaisons, owns and lives in a Wright home. Built in 1910 for George C. Stewart, it was the first Wright home built in California and the only one there in the Prairie style. If you happen to be in the market for a Wright-designed home, here are a few that may still be available.

My favorite novel about Wright is Nancy Horan’s deeply researched and beautifully crafted Loving Frank, based on Wright’s scandalous love affair with Mamah Cheney after he’d been commissioned by Cheney’s husband to build a house for their family in Chicago’s Oak Park neighborhood. Horan’s home was on the same street as the Cheney house, and her walks past it inspired her to write the story. It took Horan seven years to write Loving Frank, and her focus on Mamah Cheney (who had previously been little more than a footnote in Wright biographies) shows a fascinating and intelligent woman who boldly took great risks and made difficult choices, particularly in an era when women did not even have the right to vote.

I’m always struck by how modern Wright’s houses were for the era in which they were designed. In fact, they still seem modern today, nearly a century later. Despite its yet to be restored interior, Graycliff shares that modern ambiance. Graycliff was the summer home for the Darwin and Isabelle Martin family. Their main residence, located in Buffalo where Darwin Martin was CEO at the Larkin Company, had also been designed by Wright. The Martins lived a Wright lifestyle year round (I’m just a tad envious, but won’t dwell on that here). When Darwin Martin commissioned Wright to design and build Graycliff, he instructed Wright that this one was to be Isabelle’s house and that it was her wishes that would have to be satisfied. Isabelle’s eyesight was failing and she wanted a house filled with as much natural light as possible. Rows of glass doors and floor-to-ceiling windows on Graycliff’s main floor bring light through the house and frame the view of the lake. As we approached the house by walking down the front driveway, our gaze was drawn to those windows where we could see straight through the house to the lake. I was already in love with Graycliff before I set foot inside.

Frank Lloyd Wright was notorious for his disagreements with clients over what he had planned for them versus what the owners actually wanted built. Isabelle Martin was firm in her demands, and for the most part FLW complied. Having worked with Wright previously on their Buffalo house, she had experience on her side and had figured out how to handle him. When he balked at a request or told her that it was not possible, she would declare that surely a man of his genius could figure it out.

The tour of Graycliff’s interior was particularly interesting because restorations are underway by the Graycliff Conservancy, which managed to purchase the house in 1999 with backing from The Baird Foundation to guarantee the $450,000 mortgage and provide another $200,000 toward restoration. The outside, with the exception of the sunken garden on the cliff side of the house, has been restored and now they have begun work on the interior. The Piarist Order of priests, who owned the property from 1950-1999 and established a boarding school there, had built an addition onto the front terrace for a chapel. These alterations have been removed and the house restored to its original configuration. Walking through the house I imagined what it would be like to live there. I saw exactly which sunlit corner of what is known as the fern room would be my writing space, and could envision my desk pushed against a window there with a view of the garden and lake. Upstairs, the long gallery above the front terrace would make the perfect library, with a long row of bookshelves along the interior wall.

When the priests put Graycliff on the market in 1996, there was little interest in it except for the lakefront property. In fact, an upscale housing development now stands within a hundred feet of Graycliff on land which was once owned by Dexter Rumsey, from whom Darwin Martin had originally purchased the parcel of property for Graycliff. There was some question of whether enough of Wright’s design elements had survived under the alterations made by the Piarist priests for the estate to be worth saving, but fortunately the group that became the Graycliff Conservancy investigated and confirmed that the bones and details were still intact and worth restoring.

There is a very 1950s looking chain link fence at the cliff precipice that would surely make Wright rant and rave in his grave. The docent for our tour claimed the fence dated back to the Martin family because they had young grandchildren who played there. I can imagine Frank saying one good 60-foot tumble will teach the little rascals to stay back from the edge and demanding that the fence be removed. Wright was known to place demands on the families living in his houses right down to the arrangement of the furniture and personal belongings. Surely he would have objected to a fence impeding the flow of the sightline he had designed with the sunken garden and esplanade leading from the terrace to the cliff – particularly a fence as ugly and utilitarian as that one. Wright had originally planned for steps to be landscaped into the side of the cliff to the beach below, but Darwin Martin hired a different builder to construct a metal staircase instead, which still stands but is in serious disrepair.

Stairs to the lake at Graycliff
(copyright 2010 by Kevin Scanlon)

The administration building for the Larkin Company in Buffalo was also designed by Wright. However, it was demolished in 1950 and a parking lot is now at that site. One low wall still remains, but there is nothing particularly interesting about it except that serves as a shameful reminder of that architectural loss.

Wright’s architectural grammar was one of horizontal lines and cantilevered terraces, continuity of interior and exterior space, and undivided rooms opening into one another. He literally took us out of the box with his thinking – the house was no longer a box of rooms. He was also a flamboyant character and lived a life of stories. It’s no wonder that writers and readers find him interesting. His life had everything that makes a good tale – conflict, drama, beauty, tragedy, romance, lies, suspense, mystery, and even murder. Even his houses reveal great stories.

Photo Credits:
Photographs of Graycliff, copyright 2010 by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved, used by permission


Around the Blogosphere

Congratulations to Paul Harding, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction last week for his novel Tinkers. This win is particularly poignant for the small press, Bellevue Literary Press, and its editor Erika Goldman – and for Jonathan Rabinowitz, editor at another small press who turned down the project but who nonetheless championed the book by bringing it to the attention of Goldman.

Experience 78th Street Studios

78th Street Studios, Cleveland
(copyright 2010 by Kevin Scanlon)

(click on images for larger view)

Dan Bush, owner of 78th Street Studios in Cleveland, got it exactly right when he turned an old brick industrial building into an arts complex of galleries and studio space. The American Greetings Building, which had previously housed the greeting card company’s creative studios, has been re-purposed and revived. The 78th Street Studios recently launched a new monthly event called “Third Fridays” to their events calendar. The third weekend in April the galleries, studios and businesses will hold an open house on Friday evening (April 16th, 5-9 PM) and Saturday afternoon (April 17th, 3-7 PM). Located at the outer edge of the Gordon Square Arts District, 78th Street Studios is easy to find with plenty of free off-street parking available on the premises.

We first heard about 78th Street Studios last year through news of the photography exhibit “Look Out Cleveland: Photographs of Bob Dylan and The Band” at Kokoon Arts Gallery. Those photographs turned out to be the work of Kokoon owner Bill Scheele and his brother John Scheele. I wasn’t able to join my husband and a friend on the day they drove to Cleveland to see the exhibit. When they came back talking enthusiastically about everything – the photographs, the building, the galleries, and even Bill Scheele himself who’d spent time talking with them about his photographs and the years between 1969-1976 when he worked as the equipment and stage manager for The Band – I realized I’d missed out on something wonderful. I had to go see it for myself.

In late January, I made my first visit to 78th Street Studios. Our first stop that day was to view Bill’s photographs which were then on exhibit at Visible Voice Books in the nearby Tremont area of town. Later that afternoon, we met up with Bill at his gallery to chat. He was generous with his time as we talked about his diverse background in the arts, his work in the music industry, and about the metamorphosis of Kokoon Arts Gallery. This will be the first in a series of several posts based on that interview which will run from time to time over the next few months.

Bill Scheele and Dory Adams at Kokoon Arts Gallery
(copyright 2010 by Kevin Scanlon)

The 78th Street Studios complex is interesting in itself for the re-purposing of the buildings where it is housed, blending industrial ambiance with the making and exhibition of art. “A lot of people aren’t used to coming to what looks like a giant factory building,” said Bill Scheele, “and yet when they come in and they see everything that’s going on they’re totally in awe – and nicely so. It’s like discovering a magic world to explore in this crusty shell.”

Kokoon Arts Gallery has been part of the 78th Street Studios since 2007. In describing the challenge of getting the word out about the unique experience there, Scheele said: “We’re still trying to attract people and get them to know that we exist. We have three of the finest and longest-term galleries in this building with myself, and Ken Lesko, and Bill Tregoning. We all handle quite a different array of work than, let’s say, you’ll find in Tremont. Tremont is more of an upstart artist’s type of gallery area. Nothing wrong with that – I’m not saying that. But it’s a different type of approach. We also have the Legation kids down here now at the end of the hall, and they handle more of the younger crowd as well. So we’re getting more of a mix, and that’s what I like. We’ve got the recording studios here and some music business people, a magazine publisher, individual artist studios and even some people actually living and working in the building, as well as the galleries, a frame shop, and two different auction houses. We have a real array of people that I don’t think anyone else can hold a candle to, and it’s all essentially under one giant roof. That to us is what makes us different than other arts areas in town. So, these are several of the reasons I like it here: (1) there’s a diverse group of people in action here; (2) it’s frankly easy to get to once you know it; and (3) there’s immediate parking that’s free.”

Bill Scheele at Kokoon Arts Gallery
(copyright 2010 by Kevin Scanlon)

It was, indeed, easy for us to get to the 78th Street Studios from our first stop in Tremont – even though we’re out-of-towners and not that familiar with Cleveland. Bill spoke of how the river has become a great divide of sorts which Clevelanders are reluctant to cross. We have a similar situation here in Pittsburgh, but with more rivers forming geographic divisions. “It’s intriguing to people as they make their way here,” Scheele said. “They don’t always find it easy, even though we’ve got banners up and we try to direct them and say there are banners at 78th and 80th Streets at Lake Avenue, so you just come down either road and you’ll find that within the block you’ll see a big parking lot and that’s our big building. One of the things that immediately appealed to me was our big parking lot here. I’ve done things throughout this town in different places, and parking has always been one of the predominant prohibitive issues.” Bill emphasized that the 78th Street Studios are actually part of the Gordon Square Arts District, but located at its western edge instead of in the heart of the business district. “Something that we’re glad of is that merchants in the Gordon Square Arts District, which is at 65th and Detroit Avenue – essentially a little bit more than ten blocks east of us – are beginning to refer people to our building,” Scheele said. “Gordon Square Arts District has made a lot of noise about what they’re doing, and we’re still part of that even though we’re not right there. Now people are starting to be referred to this building by merchants down there, and that’s what we want to hear. There hasn’t been that much of a connection yet, and it’s been a frustrating problem and goes back to that thing about not being right on the street.”

Bill Scheele at Kokoon Arts Gallery
(copyright 2010 by Kevin Scanlon)

Word of mouth is a powerful thing, and the buzz about the 78th Street Studios is catching on. “That’s what we need,” Scheele said. “We need this link to the fact that frankly this area, Detroit Shoreway and Gordon Square, are very much evolving over the last few years. Tremont’s not that far away, and it’s also on the near west side of Cleveland. So, finally the west side is offering Cleveland something of a cultural attitude for the first time. Cleveland Public Theater was actually the first entity in the Gordon Square / Detroit Shoreway area to start out about 25 years ago with a performance theater type of venture. They’re probably the oldest arts residents in this region.”

Bill showed us the floor plan of the building which included the new studio spaces and discussed the vision for future development of space. “This building has sort of had different uses over time,” Scheele said. “This area is a total of 20,000 square feet. It used to be a Corian counter manufacturing company, so it’s basically just empty and open space. There are restrooms and an exit entry here, there’s a little build-out here and here. What Dan Bush, the owner, has started to do is build out these first four areas as artist studios. They’re already paid for and they’re almost totally completed. This area might be for some further build-out, to begin to keep attracting artists here with very affordable workspace. Then this area is going to be left open for various events held here. The auction companies here have used it and there have been some benefits held here. I keep pushing for some sort of social lounge area, so people can hang out and get a cup of coffee or maybe go and get a drink. I think people would feel inclined to mingle a little bit more. We now need a place where there can be a gathering. So, I think this (taps fingers on floor plan diagram) is a good effort to continue to keep the building evolving in different ways.”

Before we left, we bought a print of one of Scheele’s photographs (a birthday gift to me from my husband). It was difficult to decide which print to order, but I was particularly drawn to an image of Levon Helm that seemed fitting in light of our March road trip to Woodstock for a Midnight Ramble at Levon Helm Studios.

If you live within driving distance of Cleveland, I hope you’ll make your way to Kokoon Arts Gallery (located on the second floor) at the 78th Street Studios and see what’s happening there. Say hello to Bill for me, and tell him I’ll be back soon to pick up my photograph and see what’s new.

Kokoon Arts Gallery at 78th Street Studios
(copyright 2010 by Kevin Scanlon)

Kokoon Arts Gallery presents a diverse stable of artists salon-style, including historic Cleveland School artists Frank Wilcox and Paul Travis; natural history artists William E. Scheele, Robert Hainard and Mary Wawrytko; contemporary painters Alfredo Arreguin, Lee Heinen, Randall Tiedman, Michael Prunty, Lee and Keri Gortz, ceramics by Andres LeBlond, Joseph Blue Sky and Donna Webb; prints, photography and computer graphics by Karen Kunc, Darren Waterston, Richard Taylor, Paul Jacklitch, Michael Nekic and William G. Scheele.

Photo credits: Photographs copyright © 2010 by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved, used by permission

Around the Blogosphere

• Be part of the Global Mosaic on Sunday, May 2nd at 15:00 hours U.T.C. (Coordinated Universal Time, previously known as Greenwich Mean Time) by taking a photograph of where you are and sending it to the New York Times. Details at Lens. (For fellow Pittsburghers, this would be 11:00 a.m.)

• Charming story about photographer Ansel Adams by Jim Hughes in “Ansel Adams, A Warm and Generous Man” at The Online Photographer. Kevin and I have always wished we could’ve visited Ansel’s house in Carmel to see the green flash over the ocean at sunset, a phenomenon Adams wrote about in his books. Looks like we could’ve just dropped in for cocktails to watch it with Ansel himself, if we’d been bold enough!

• I’d like to visit this library: “Keith Richard, librarian” (via Moby Lives). Yep, that Keith Richards.

Featured Book

Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards comes out tomorrow. I’ve been looking forward to reading this one, not because I’m a baseball fan (although I did have a thing for watching Pirate Andy Van Slyke in the early 1990s – truly poetry in motion, in centerfield or at bat) but because I’ve loved reading about Josh’s coming of age at his Cardboard Gods blog over the past few years. Full disclosure, Josh is a pal and MFA program classmate of mine. He’ll be doing a guest post here at my blog next month. You can listen to a podcast of an interview with Josh on NPR radio’s Only a Game, read a review at Pitchers and Poets and buy Josh’s book at your favorite bookstore or online at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or IndieBound.