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Category: Buffalo

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Back home in New York

Grain Elevators, oil on canvas, 16X20, Carol L. Douglas
I got home on Tuesday to read yet another news story about the dystopia that is America’s archetypal mid-sized city. The feral children who are the result of 50 years of public policy were rioting in the new transportation center, and this week’s police department reorganization coincided with a wave of shootings. Six shot in a pub in Gates, one dead. A man shot and killed on Hudson Avenue.
North Rochester, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas. This was the view from my studio window back in the day.
In short, business as usual, but it was like a dousing with cold water after a few days away from the news.
I’m a New Yorker, bred to the bone. But I’m also exhausted by the intractability of our problems, and I can’t think what good I do to fix them.
First Ward, Buffalo, field sketch, 4X5, Carol L. Douglas
I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve known who’ve had murder touch their lives. It’s an everyday occurrence around here and in most cities. The news media generally pays little attention unless it breaks the usual pattern of urban youths blowing each other to perdition. Not noticing it is in some ways the worst racism and classism of all.
First Ward, Buffalo, oil on canvas, 16X20, Carol L. Douglas
When we talk about the reasons for the 50-year exodus from upstate New York, we usually concentrate on economics: loss of jobs, high taxes, a government culture that stifles innovation. Seldom do we think about despair as a motivator, but it has to be part of the equation. If I can’t make it better, am I somehow helping to make it worse?
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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The changing face of Polonia

Historic Polonia is no longer a Polish neighborhood, and the workers at the Broadway Market reflect that changing demographic.
Today is Dyngus Day—the Monday after Easter—celebrated in Buffalo, South Bend, and Cleveland. It originated in Central Europe, where it is still observed, and was brought to the United States by the Slavic Diaspora.
The Broadway Market in 1906, when the East Side was a Polish and German ethnic ghetto.
On St. Patrick’s Day, all of Buffalo is Irish. On Good Friday and Dyngus Day, all of Buffalo is Polish. Historic Polonia is no longer predominantly Polish, but on Easter weekend it returns to its Polish roots.
Pussy willows at the Broadway Market.You don’t have to be Polish to enjoy a good party, but it helps.
When I was a youth, Dyngus Day was described as a sort of Polish Sadie Hawkins Day, where boys splashed water on the girls they fancy, and girls collected pussy willow and hit the boys they like. Mostly, though, it’s an excuse for a good parade and party.
Dyngus Day sign from a few years ago at the late, lamented Central Terminal on Paderewski Drive.
As usual, the origins of this festival are lost in the mists of time. In truth, it probably has more to do with the end of Lent than anything, since it always falls on the day after Easter.
If you’re in Buffalo this evening, the Dyngus Day Parade starts at 5 PM, at Corpus Christi Church, 199 Clark St. Festivities at the Pussywillow Park Party Tent start at 3 PM with music from Those Idiots. The complete itinerary is available here.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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A warp speed tour of Buffalo

Buffalo City Hall

Yesterday I took a Texan on a mad dash across Buffalo, swerving to get in as many landmarks as possible before the light faded. I remarked to her that Buffalo is a city of superb architecture. Serious students of the discipline travel from all over to see it.

Buffalo City Hall (65 Niagara Street) is a 32 story Art Deco building completed in 1931 by Dietel, Wade & Jones. It is one of the largest and tallest municipal buildings in America, and at the time of its construction was one of the priciest. It is decorated with elaborate ceramic tile frieze-work; its interior is lavishly decorated with murals, skylights, and sculpture.
The main facade of the Buffalo Psychiatric Center.
The Buffalo Psychiatric Center (400 Forest Ave) was Henry Hobson Richardson’s largest commission, and the first work ever done in the iconic American style that would be known as Richardson Romanesque. It’s built of dark red Medina sandstone.  Ground was broken in 1871 and the project was finished in 1895, nine years after Richardson’s death. The grounds were designed by landscape architect pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed the nation’s first coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo.
Detail on the Guaranty building.
The Guaranty Building (26 Church Street) was designed by the “father of skyscrapers,” Louis Sullivan. Finished in 1896, it was one of the finest new office buildings in America, and is considered one of Sullivan’s best works.
The Guaranty incorporated the idea of steel-supported curtain walls, which allowed buildings to grow taller without additional weight. Sullivan let the support piers create the building’s design, and then ornamented the whole thing with intricate terra cotta tiles in natural and geometric motifs.
The Electric Tower
The Beaux Arts Electric Tower (535 Washington Street) was built on the model of John Galen Howard’s Electric Tower, which was the centerpiece of the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. That event was famous for two things: the assassination of President McKinley, and for being lighted by power from Niagara Falls.
The tower is covered in shiny white glazed terra cotta tiles that sparkle under its colored floodlights (currently red, white and green for Christmas). It is ornamented with molded generators and electric motors, a forerunner of the terra cotta Art Deco ornamentation with which Buffalo is filled.
Buffalo Main Light.
The Buffalo lighthouse was made necessary by the Erie Canal, and was completed and lit in 1833. It sits on an older breakwater roughly at the confluence of the Buffalo River, Lake Erie, and the Niagara River. By the early 20th century, its position was wrong as a navigation aid, and it was decommissioned in favor of an outer-harbor light.  It is built of unpainted limestone, with a cast iron lantern on the top.
Kleinhans Music Hall
Kleinhans Music Hall (3 Symphony Circle) was designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen. The acoustical and lighting research which went into the hall’s design made it one of the finest in the world. It sweeps in understated, smooth, curving lines with a minimum of ornamentation, and uses that newfangled material, plywood, to acoustical advantage. The main auditorium seats more than 2,800 people, the smaller one 900. It opened in 1940, and was the legacy of menswear magnate Edward Kleinhans.
Cargill Elevator on Lake Erie.
No tour of Buffalo is complete without at least a quick sweep past the grain elevators along the waterfront. The steam-powered grain elevator was invented in Buffalo in the 1840s as a way of cross-docking grain from lake freighters to canal boats. Buffalo has the world’s largest collection of extant examples, most of them clustered along the Buffalo River near Lake Erie.


This allowed the grain grown in Ohio, Indiana and points west to be moved to New York City and from there to the world.  

I will be teaching in Acadia National Park next August. Read all about it here, or download a brochure here. 
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Growing pain

The Yellow Christ, Paul Gauguin, 1889, is no longer the “art of the present” but it’s one of my favorites at the Albright-Knox. 
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has announcedthat it plans an addition to its venerable space on Elmwood Avenue in the city of Buffalo. While it’s true that the current 19,000 square feet of floor space is crammed, one wonders—of course—who is going to pay for the addition.
The museum’s collection contains about 6,740 works, of which it can only exhibit about 200 at a time, according to Thomas R. Hyde, president of the museum’s board. “Campus development is no longer an option; it is a necessity,” he added. “We are, in many ways, a middleweight museum with a heavyweight collection.” And then he mentioned the cracks in the marble floors of the gallery’s original building.
(Veterans of capital campaigns will recognize that last gambit: throw in some deferred maintenance and people are supposed to stop kvetching about major changes.)
Side of Beef, Chaim Soutine, c. 1925, is another of my favorite Albright-Knox pieces.
Meanwhile, gallery director Janne Siren insists that plans are still in the ‘conversation’ phase. Having said that, the board has been rattling the can for expansion since publication of their 2001 strategic plan.  “Siren took over the directorship of the Buffalo gallery shortly after city fathers in Helsinki, Finland rejected a plan he had spearheaded to build a large Guggenheim museum there using public funding,” reported WGRZradio.
In 2007 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery deaccessioned a Roman bronze sculpture that subsequently netted $28.6 million at Sotheby’s. It was part of a larger deaccessioning of works that fell outside the ‘core mission’ of the gallery, which then-director Louis Grachos defined as “acquiring and exhibiting art of the present.” Alert Buffalonians immediately wondered what that meant for their own favorite works.
The deaccession vote was approved only on the contingency that the funds raised would be used to buy additional artwork. That meant that the money from the sale would be added to the paltry $22 million acquisitions endowment. (The overall endowment of the museum was then about $58 million.)
Being from Buffalo, I first visited the Albright-Knox while in diapers. Deaccessioning the Roman sculpture and clearing that exhibition space for other work was the right thing to do. But I share the Buffalo cynical mind, and I have my doubts about the viability of this project.
Buffalo is now half the size it was the year I was born, and there’s no sign that the population drain will abate any time soon. Clearly the board is counting on tourists to make up their numbers, and with the elegant expansion of the Burchfield-Penney Art Centeracross the street, an argument can be made that an arts corridor is possible on Elmwood Avenue.

La Maison de la Crau (The Old Mill), Vincent van Gogh, 1888, is another Albright-Knox piece that can no longer be termed ‘of the present.’ 

But that doesn’t address the question of how it will be paid for, or where the expansion will go. The Albright-Knox is landlocked, with Delaware Park at its front and Elmwood Avenue by its back door. Any kind of significant expansion would infringe on its parking lot, its neighbors, or the park.
1957-D No. 1, Clyfford Still, 1957. The Albright-Knox has a large collection of Still’s paintings. Last time I was there, I noticed how many 20th century paintings needed conservation. It’s not as sexy as expansion but still necessary. 
I await future developments with great interest.

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Jesus was an Anarchist

W.W.Denslow) who illustrated the first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was a Roycrofter.
This week, in honor of Dyngus Day, I’m concentrating on my home town, Buffalo, New York.
On the southern fringes of Buffalo lies the village of East Aurora, which was a center of the turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts Movement called the Roycroft.
The Roycroft was founded by Elbert Hubbard. After achieving success as traveling salesman for the Larkin Soap Company, he eventually came to the firm’s Buffalo home office, where he was an innovative and successful employee.  A visit to England exposed him to William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. After returning to Buffalo, he founded a short-run press based on Morris’ ideals. This press was called the Roycroft Press and the movement would eventually take its name.
Hubbard was a self-described anarchist and socialist living in one of America’s capitalist boomtowns. In A Message to Garcia and Thirteen Other Things, Hubbard wrote, “I am an Anarchist. All good men are Anarchists. All cultured, kindly men; all gentlemen; all just men are Anarchists. Jesus was an Anarchist.”
But don’t dismiss that statement as quaint.  The same year that A Message to Garcia was published, President William McKinley was assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz on the other side of Buffalo. Anarchism was a threat to American culture on a par with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism today.
Elbert Hubbard may have described himself as a socialist, but he was clearly a genius at marketing and branding. The double barred cross and circle logo was a logo used by the Roycroft artisans to identify their products. It came to signify the Roycroft movement, used only on authentic Roycroft pieces. Even today it commands a premium.
“I believe John Ruskin, William Morris, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoy to be Prophets of God, and they should rank in mental reach and spiritual insight with Elijah, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Isaiah,” Hubbard wrote.
Somehow Hubbard managed to stay on the popular side of outrageous. He was a brilliant promoter. His championing of the Arts and Crafts movement attracted craftspeople to East Aurora, where they formed a community of almost 500 printers, bookbinders, furniture makers, and metalsmiths. Their creed was taken from John Ruskin, and it’s hard to argue with: “A belief in working with the head, hand and heart and mixing enough play with the work so that every task is pleasurable and makes for health and happiness.”
Roycroft was one of several rugged faces used around the turn of the century, when the Arts and Crafts Movement was in vogue. It was inspired by the Saturday Evening Post, and came by its current name when it was adopted by Elbert Hubbard for the Roycroft Press.
Hubbard and his wife were killed in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. The movement struggled on under the management of his son, but without Elbert Hubbard’s charisma, it foundered and closed.
The Roycroft Campus consists of fourteen buildings in the center of East Aurora. This complex has National Historic Landmark Status and includes the Elbert Hubbard Roycroft Museum and the Roycroft Inn.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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America’s most beautiful city

Buffalo’s City Hall. Finished at the start of the Great Depression, it raises a fist to the world. Its tile bands and frieze work are characteristic for Buffalo architecture.
This week, in honor of Dyngus Day, I’m concentrating on my home town, Buffalo, New York.

A few years ago, an architect friend of mine seemed strangely excited to be visiting Buffalo. Since I grew up there, I take it for granted. It was interesting to see it through an informed visitor’s eyes.
The story of Buffalo’s architecture starts with economic boom. By the turn of the last century, Buffalo was the eighth largest city in the United States, a major railroad hub, and the most important grain-milling center in the country.
A postcard of the lake at Delaware Park, circa 1906.
All that money meant that some of the nation’s most important architects were hired to work there.  Its parks and parkways were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Fans of New York’s Central Park will find echoes of it in Buffalo’s lovely Delaware Park.
The Guaranty Building (now called the Prudential Building) was an early skyscraper designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler. Completed in 1896, it is a combination of modernism and the terra-cotta ornamentation that is so prevalent in Buffalo.
Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building is covered in warm red terracotta tile.
Frank Lloyd Wright built the Darwin Martin house in the city. His Greycliff, a summer estate south of Buffalo, has been restored to its former glory. Sadly, his Larkin Administration Building (where my mother once worked) was demolished in 1950 to make a truck stop.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building is now gone, but other examples of his work live on.
H. H. Richardson designed the massive, Romanesque Buffalo State Hospital in 1870. He was working along the principles of psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride, who believed in a philosophy of Moral Treatment for mental patients. The building itself was meant to be curative, with sunshine, beauty and fresh air aiding in treatment.
Buffalo Insane Asylum.
Kleinhans Music Hall was endowed by the owners of a men’s clothing store in the city. It was designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen and is widely considered one of the best music halls in the United States.
The grain elevator was invented in Buffalo in the 1840s by Joseph Dart and Robert Dunbar. (Since the grain would be moved along by packet boat on the Erie Canal, this is also an early example of cross-docking.) The Buffalo waterfront is now infested with hulking remnants of these from various periods, which seem to fascinate industrial historians. I would prefer a beach, myself.
Then there is my personal favorite: City Hall. Finished in 1931, it is a fist raised to the world. At 378 feet in height, it is one of the biggest municipal buildings in the United States, and its location on Niagara Square (which is, of course, a circle) makes it tower over the cityscape.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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It’s Dyngus Day in Buffalo

A Dyngus Day dousing.

Today has the makings of a party: Lent is finally over and it’s supposed to be fine, with temperatures in the 70s. Most of the detritus from the family Easter dinner is cleared away. If I were still in my hometown of Buffalo, NY, I would  go over to the East Side this evening  to watch the eighth annual Dyngus Day Parade.
Dyngus Day is always celebrated on the Monday after Easter. From its local Polish roots, it has expanded in Buffalo to attract thousands of out-of-towners to the historic Polish area of the city. It is the world’s largest Dyngus Day celebration, having grown into a week-long festival of parade, polkas and pierogi.  
Dyngus Day postcard.
This is, ironically, closing the circle with its historic roots. Historically, Easter Sunday touched off a week-long festival celebrating the end of Lent, but the 19th century saw it cut back to a single day, Easter Monday. (Those darn Protestants and their work ethic!)
In the Old Country, boys threw water over girls and spanked them with pussy willows on Easter Monday and girls did the same to boys on Easter Tuesday. When I was growing up, however, Dyngus Day was considered a sort of Polish Sadie Hawkins Day. Since it’s an evolving tradition, I don’t really know what they get up to now.
Dziady śmigustne, Muzeum Etnograficzne w Krakowie. In parts of southeastern Poland, beggers would appear dressed in straw suits. Their faces were hidden behind masks and they would grunt. This was to commemorate the rescue of survivors of a Tatar raid whose tongues were cut off and faces disfigured. For some reason this tradition hasn’t extended to Buffalo.
The pussy willows are a stand-in for the palms of Palm Sunday. Many words have been expended on the meaning of the water-dousing, but here in the far north, Easter Monday or Dyngus Day is very likely to be the first warm holiday of the year. Why not throw water?
Not everyone gets into the spirit of the thing, and periodic attempts have been made to shut it down over the centuries. In 1410 it was forbidden by the Bishop of Poznań in an edict which instructed residents not to “pester or plague others in what is universally called Dingus.”

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Art is what’s left when you take all the function out

One of the biggest quality-of-life problems in Western New York cities is the number of abandoned houses. The city in which I live (Rochester) aggressively destroys them. About five years ago, Buffalo launched a program to tear thousands of them down. At $16,000-20,000 a clip, these demolition programs put a strain on already-diminishing tax bases.
I was born in Buffalo in 1959. My home town and its neighbor, Niagara Falls, have 49% of the people they did that year. Rochester has done slightly better, but still has only 63% of its 1959 population.  The houses they’ve left empty are a danger to the communities left behind.
“You gotta get rid of all those shacks that have been run down to the ground, that are endangering property values, that are endangering people’s lives. They can set fires in them, drug dealers stash stuff in them,” said David Franczyck, Fillmore District Councilmember.
A vacant city lot redeployed as a dahlia farm in Rochester.
In the past five years, Buffalo has torn down about 4,600 houses. My ancestors came through the German neighborhood on the East Side; this neighborhood is now as depopulated as your basic farm town.
What happens with these vacant lots? A few are maintained as urban gardens by neighbors, but the  majority are grassy lots that look like missing teeth in the urban grid.
Artfarms billboard.
In Buffalo, a group called Artfarms is encouraging artists and farmers to design large-format sculpture for the East Side’s vacant properties and nascent urban farms.
This fledgling program received a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts last April. Whether it can grow a viable program remains to be seen, but since it’s my home town, I wish it the best.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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The Witty City

The restored Hotel Lafayette.
My home town of Buffalo, NY is certainly one of the most beautiful cities in America. Each time I return, it’s in better repair.
Take the Lafayette Hotel, where I stayed this weekend. I remember it as a dilapidated building with one room open to the public. Local and out-of-town acts played the Lafayette Tap Room, using the former lunchroom as their Green Room. It was as if Father Time had locked the lunchroom door in 1960, not even bothering to clear away the dishes. I had lunch there yesterday; it is exquisitely restored to its 1911 grandeur. In contrast, the ballrooms, lobby and bar are all flamboyantly Art Deco in character.
Bar at the Hotel Lafayette.
Future Buffalo men watching the Bills from the mezzanine at the lunch room of the Hotel Lafayette (now run by the Pan American Grill people).
Next door is the former Adam, Meldrum and Anderson headquarters. There is a streak of whimsy in a city that maintains signage for a department store that’s been gone since 1994.
AM&A’s dress ads on Washington Street.
1912 Electric Tower.
Down the street is the Electric Tower, built in 1912 as a copy of the electric tower at Buffalo’s Pan American Exhibition. It is a Beaux-Arts confection of white terra cotta tile, an outstanding example in a city full of terra cotta architecture.
Buffalo’s City Hall
My favorite building, of course, is City Hall, which appears to be giving the finger to the world. In 1929, it was designed with a passive cooling system that took advantage of the prevailing Lake Erie breezes. Trendy, huh?
Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I, Built to Live Anywhere, at Home Here (2010-2011, Nancy Rubins)
Somehow, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery has managed to continue obtaining fine work, despite the economic woes Buffalo has endured for the last half century. It has acquired an exuberant mash-up of aluminum canoes by Nancy Rubins for its front lawn. In a northern city threaded by fantastic waterways, it’s somehow topical (although, as the title indicates, that’s beside the point).
Across the street at the Burchfield-Penney Art Museum, there’s a son et lumière projection called “Front Yard.” Mercifully, it was cold, so our windows were rolled up. Thus we missed the soundtrack, which is computer-generated from local weather station readings. At the opening, “viewers were treated to work by ’70s heavyweights Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits and Steina Vasulka,” reported Colin Dabkowski in the Buffalo News. (The visuals change constantly.)
That’s so Buffalo—centered around the weather and redolent of the age of mullets. All it needs is a paean to Lou Reed (dead yesterday at age 71) and a reference to sports and it would be the perfect Buffalo experience. But don’t think I’m critical. Both installations are more thoughtful and grounded than the anodyne sculptures by Tom Otterness acquired by the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, which are redolent of nothing more than a tag sale in Manhattan.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!