Speaking of Mansard roofs...

I just can not start a sentence with that line enough.

Okay, this is the first time I have started a sentence like that. A recent line heard our car was, "I wish you liked Mansard roofs as much as I do," from my husband bemoaning the fact that I prefer the Times Square Building to the Powers Building...but I digress.

It was a warm summer day a few weeks ago as Cynthia was touring the Preservation Division and our interns around Corn Hill. We were on Plymouth looking at some beautiful homes, fortunate to escape the DOT and Urban Renewal wrecking ball, and commenting on Second Empire style and Mansard roofs.

"Speaking of Mansard roofs," I said to no one in particular, "Did anyone watch Psycho on tv last night?" No one had. A shame.

It got me to thinking, though, about popular culture and my internal filter as a preservationist. Now, I'm not talking about overt connections, like the subject of Katie's recent article in The Landmark Society Summer Special newsletter, where architecture or historic preservation are the theme, but more how their appearance in general films, etc. piques me interest.

Psycho is a perfect example. Beautiful old "mansion" where a homicidal woman "lives" with her son. Have you ever noticed the woodwork in the house? The railings on the stairway down to the basement? The roadside architecture of the motel itself, built before the highway diverted traffic from the country roads.

Have you ever seen Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte? What a great house. I can't possibly be the only person ever to watch it thinking, "This is exactly why we have Section 106 review now, to keep these kinds of resources from being lost to highway projects." I wished that Charlotte had found some other way to kill her scheming cousin than pushing the urn onto her from the second floor balcony. Don't take it out on the house!

And Stephen King movies! Rose Red was a good story turned into a really crappy movie but who can resist a ghost story in a mansion? Not me. I watch it just for the architecture. You might not know it, considering the movies that I've listed so far, but I don't really like scary movies - but I love Ghost Ship, just for the ship. It is as if the Titanic hadn't sank but was merely haunted. Its also the closest I am likely to ever get to that kind of floating opulence.

Even modern comedies have their place in this discussion. Two ridiculous guilty pleasures - Old School and Saving Silverman - feature stunning historic craftsman style homes for the main characters. The directors are choosing these sites for the films because these houses have so much more life and style to them then suburbia. I am probably the only person to watch Old School just for the fireplace and mantle.

Casablanca for the staircase leading up to Rick's office, The Orient Express for...well...for the Orient Express, The Quiet Man for the little Irish cottages.

Yes, Laura, I am a preservation dork.

posted by Rebecca Rowe, Preservation Program Coordinator for The Landmark Society and old movie buff

Bittersweet memories and the preservation of art

Midtown Plaza. The mere mention of those two words in this city tend to generate an immediate outpouring of opinion. This isn’t an op-ed piece on whether or not I think it should or shouldn’t be torn down. This is about memories and preserving what we can....and there are some pretty spiffy photos down below too for you to enjoy.

As with most native Rochesterians, I have many memories of Midtown. This past Sunday, all these memories and more came flooding back as I stood in the cavernous courtyard of a near-empty Midtown Plaza. The fountains were dry and the escalators still. The flags of the nations still adorned the mezzanine level , displaying their colors for no one. The monorail cars sat abandoned on their tracks, no more full of the squeals of delight from the children riders. The only evidence of the grand clock was a shaded imprint on the tile floor of where it once stood.

Flashback: sweet recollections of holding my grandmother’s delicate gloved hand as we made our way through the splendor of B. Forman’s...having our traditional nosh at the lunch counter (where I could get a milkshake if I liked) ... strolling through the grandeur of Midtown Plaza to the glorious Clock of Nations, where I saw the world come to life through dance and costume from lands I one day hoped to see firsthand.

I was there last Sunday to photograph the removal of a massive ceramic mural (see slideshow of photos below). The mural – displayed on the mezzanine level since shortly after the plaza opened – is made up of over 200 individually mounted ceramic pieces. It’s one of those public art works that may have gone unnoticed, located above the eye level of the crowds that once frequented the mall. In fact, from my viewpoint as a child I thought it was wood, fashioned like the driftwood sculptures I used to make from of findings at Lake Ontario.

To remove the mural was no small feat. A dedicated group of volunteers took turns on a huge lift, helping to steady each piece so could Peter Monacelli could wield a giant electrical saw (I’m sure it has a better name than “giant electrical saw” but whatever) and cut through the metal posts mounting each to the wall. Each piece was carefully handed down to another group who vacuumed up years of accumulated dust bunnies and then marked the back of piece to keep them in order.

The pieces will be stored at Rochester Contemporary Arts Center (RoCo) until a permanent home can be found where the mural can be reinstalled in its original form. (How sweet is that action? Three cheers for RoCo!)

I snapped a few photos of the mural removal, and then my attention was diverted by the many architectural wonders of Midtown. Just think – it was the FIRST INDOOR MALL in the nation! Not many things can brag about being the first. Camera in hand, I went exploring. Even better, I gave my son a camera too. I wanted to see Midtown through his eyes.

The unique angles, reflective surfaces and skylights made for some definite fun. We snapped away. The lighting was wonky – sun streamed through the ceiling slats, creating shadows not very well handled with the little point-and-shoot cameras we were armed with, however we captured some semi-decent shots.

My son asked if we could come back sometime with my professional equipment and take some “really cool photos of all the cool stuff in the mall.” No, we can’t, kiddo. I’m sorry. It’s going to be torn down. A new building will be here in a few years. He was horrified....“but this is history, Mom.”

I explained about the steady decline of Midtown, about suburbs and malls, white flight and the impact on downtown. I also explained about the importance of revitalizing the area where Midtown stands, and the jobs it will create, the influx of all things positive for a downtown that desperately needs a shot in the arm.

His response was something pretty insightful ... about how that’s all good stuff but doesn’t his generation deserve to know the history of it all?

As we left, he thanked me sincerely for taking him to see it – more than just the normal grunt of acknowledgment for a teenager. I asked him his thoughts. His answer? “Because it was a part of your history that I got to see now, Mom. When things go away, we always have our memories, and now I have a memory of Midtown too...”

Kind of sums it all up, doesn’t it? Glad to see progress, revitalization and jobs; sad to see it destroyed. Either way, the magic and vision will live on in the memories, and we have some new ones made just this weekend.

Here's a slideshow of the process of dismantling the mural:




And here's a slideshow of scenes of an empty Midtown Plaza:





(All photos copyrighted, so if you want to use any of these photos, please send me an email.)

Posted by Laura Keeney Zavala, Director of Marketing

A Long-Lost Cousin in Ohio

I recently was part of a tour sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians to Springfield and Sidney Ohio. Sidney has one of Louis Sullivan's gorgeous small banks and I was glad to see it again and find it still in excellent shape.

I knew that Springfield had a Prairie Style house by Frank Lloyd Wright, but it had been in dreadful condition when I saw it about twenty years ago. Remarkably, it has been rescued. A local campaign helped out by the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, a group mostly composed of owners and curators of FLlW buildings, has managed a miracle. The house had been divided into apartments, the furniture dispersed, and the grounds neglected. It is now sparkling clean and re-planted.

The house, originally built by Burton Westcott in 1908, has some striking resemblances to Rochester's Boynton House of the same date. I was most surprised when I walked into the dining area and found their table. It has those pedestal legs similar to the Boynton's, with lanterns raised above the top on metal legs. There are two other houses, of course, with similar tables: the Robie House, in Chicago, and the Meyer May House, in Grand Rapids, MI. Both are 1907-08, as well. All the tables have differences, principally in the lanterns. The Westcott table is new, not like the others, built recently from the original designs now in the Archive. I was not sure about the finish, but the staff assured me that it had been researched. It may just be too recent to look right.

It's not surprising that any architect should repeat himself. It's dumb to waste a good idea and nobody ever said Wright was dumb.

The floor plan is quite different and there is very little leaded colored glass. A long garden wall links the house to its garage. The wall supports a pergola which covers a long walk. The plan for the original Boynton garden included a similar garden feature which was never built.

Please note: The Boynton House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s only building in Rochester, is a private residence that is not open to the public. While you may view the house from the sidewalk or the street, please respect the owners' privacy by not trespassing. If you would like to visit a Frank Lloyd Wright house, there are two in Buffalo that are open as museums: the Darwin Martin House and Graycliff; both are well worth a day trip!

Posted by Jean France, architectural historian and longtime Landmark Society trustee

Photo is from the Burton Westcott House website, www.westcotthouse.org/

Lightning strikes once...

How likely is it that when lightning strikes a neighborhood of several thousand homes, it hits the historic district? And how likely is it that of the several hundred historic structures it hits the one deemed the most important? And all that on the eve of the annual home tour... Well, this exactly what happened in Maplewood when on Friday, June 13 (no joke) lightning struck and severely damaged the Vanderbeck House on Lake Avenue.

The Vanderbeck House is one of the oldest and most prominent residences on Lake Avenue, and reflects Rochester’s post-Civil War expansion. Built in 1874 by Andrew Vanderbeck, a farmer and saw mill owner from Parma, it is one of the most distinguished examples of the Second Empire architectural style in the entire county.

This incident shows the inherent fragility of our architectural heritage. It is not enough to protect some of this heritage, we must protect as much of it as possible, for part of it will be lost to unpredictable events. In this particular case most of the exterior façade, the molding and dentil trim flowing around each window on the third floor, and the large hood supported by heavy consoles over the second story window were mercifully not damaged. Given adequate funding the majestic gray and red slate mansard roof might still be saved. But we should view this event as a wake up call for the entire community to advocate preservation.

Posted by Nicholas Zumbulyadis, Maplewood resident and longtime Landmark Society volunteer

The photo of the Vanderbeck House is from the National Register nomination for the house. To see the complete nomination, search the name at the NYSOPRHP National Register search website (click "Basic Criteria in the upper right; enter "Vanderbeck" in the "Property Name" field and click "Results" in the upper right; you will then have the option of viewing text or photos).

What's New is Now Old!

In a recent issue of Preservation: The Magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Trust celebrates the architecture of modernism. Last year, at The Landmark Society, we organized our regional effort to identify and protect resources of the “recent past” by structuring a committee and by co-launching Archipedia -- an interactive website –http://www.aiaroch.org/archipedia/ with the Rochester Chapter of the AIA.

Getting these actions going is exciting and we are already seeing results, with information gathering and educating ourselves to the significance of these resources. But, as the complexities surrounding the understanding of and valuing of such resources become more apparent, and as we do not yet see the “passion of the people” that would reflect a deeper understanding of this period of design, I can’t help but wonder…”a minute too late and a dollar too short?”

From where I stand, we are about 20 years behind the curve on getting the most outstanding or significant structures from the period of modernism protected in advance of the threats that already put them under pressure.

Why does that happen? Why do proponents of preservation always seem behind the curve and reactive, rather than proactive?

Multiple factors conspire: Too many resources, too few people working to protect them? Too many fires to put out distracting from the work at hand? Too many who do not see the outstanding qualities due to their day-to-day familiarities? Stereotypical ideas of what is historic?

Author Paul Goldberger frames his response to these questions in his article “The Modernist Manifesto” by stating: “I think we are not particularly inclined to value things created in our own time-we remember the world without them, and we don’t easily believe that these buildings can possibly possess the depth and resonance of “true” history.” Mr. Goldberger goes on to say, “…just because buildings were built for ordinary purposes and not created as major works of art hardly makes them less worthy of saving.”

Pick your choice and add your multitude of other reasons and here we are – now trying to catch up. I like to think optimistically and not resign myself to the soul-deadening endless cycle, but until many more of us get to understand just how critical and integrated our built environment is to our daily lives, aesthetics, environmental sensibilities, consumer trends and local/national/global economies, here we will stay.

This issue of Preservation, entitled Modernism: A Star is Reborn, Dwight Young reminds us about why preservation is important. Simply put, “…historic preservation is …having the good sense to hang on to something – a building or a neighborhood or a piece of landscape – because it’s important to us as individuals and/or as a nation.” Young goes on to say that preservation “…has more to do with the heart and soul and psyche…”, yet it is not that simple – it is tied deeply to aesthetics, the economy and the environment. Preservation of modernistic architecture is important because it stands as historic record to “…how we lived during this time but also represents what we valued, what we wanted, how we saw the world and our place in it.”

Modernist resources deserve to be protected.

Goldberger exhorts us to better understand the work that lies ahead.

“The critical challenge today is to keep preservation fresh and vigorous and on the cutting edge. The movement is no longer new, and maybe more to the point, it is no longer outside the establishment. With historic preservation generally accepted as a good thing in most places, we easily forget how sharply the battle lines were once drawn, how much zeal and energy and commitment this movement had back when it saw itself as challenging common wisdom, when it saw itself as a movement of outsiders combating established ways of doing things. So taking the lead on modernist preservation is a way, paradoxically, for preservationists to return to their roots, which is to say, it is a way to challenge common wisdom once again.”

We must not rush to judgment on these resources without giving them the benefit of study and evaluation. We need to gain perspective on these resources, to better determine what is significant and what is worth saving.

But we cannot do it without your participation.

Log on to http://aiaroch.org/archipedia/uccass/survey.php?sid=28 to participate in the Archipedia resource survey, or come see us when we meet in committee. Call us for more details – 546-7029. Tell us more about your favorite icon of modernism.

Joanne

Joanne Arany, Executive Director

The Landmark Society of Western New York, Inc.

This isn't the Griswold Family Vacation! Architourism.

I found this article on MSNBC.com yesterday on architourism....if I had more time today I would write a longer blog post about it, but it's almost dinner time and my stomach is growlin' so this means no waxing poetic...at least until I hit Pelligrinos for some grub.

Regardless, it's an interesting article that discusses a concept we've alluded to several times with the Recent Past project. I thought it was interesting/appropriate/whatever-enough to share on its own.

Check it out. See what you think. Marvel at Modern Architecture. Also: economic advice for "architourists"

Any ideas of what you'd like to see in terms of architourism in Rochester? I'm thinking this has a lot of potential, especially as people are taking the quickly-becoming-overused-buzzphrase-du-jour "staycations" to combat the high cost of travel in these tough economic times.

posted by Laura Zavala, Director of Marketing

A green conundrum: sustainability, density, and preservation

An interesting article from Seattle points out the need for environmentalists and preservationists to find common cause as that city pursues its strategy for a "sustainable" future.

According to the author of the article, Seattle's sustainability policies suffer from a single-minded focus on increasing density. There are clear environmental advantages to denser urban fabric: a certain level of density is needed to ensure walkability, viable public transportation, lively street life, and so on, and directing redevelopment toward a region's core reduces the pressure to sprawl outwards. The author of the article argues, however, that Seattle's pursuit of increased density comes at the exclusion of other goals, including historic preservation and the conservation of the embodied energy that old buildings represent.

The issues in Seattle are so different as to be almost unrecognizable to us in Rochester: in Seattle (and some other trendy cities) the demand for high-rent housing in desirable city neighborhoods leads developers to eye existing buildings for demolition and replacement by higher-density apartments and condominiums. Redevelopment of hot city neighborhoods has always resulted in the demolition of older buildings, but now some cities like Seattle are encouraging this process as evidence of their "green" credentials.

Unlike in Seattle, here in Rochester the resurgence of downtown housing has (so far, at least) taken the form of the adaptive reuse of existing buildings, with the exception of the Sagamore, which was built on a long-empty lot (of which there are many left to be redeveloped, as a flight over downtown or a peek at Google Earth will dramatically reveal). We have not seen the demolition of historic buildings to make way for high-density downtown housing. Instead, we have the opposite problem: although our region's population is not growing, it is continuing to spread ever more thinly across an ever-widening area, leading to the decline of existing neighborhoods in the city and suburbs.

In Rochester and Seattle the issues are different, but the point is the same: as communities think about how to be greener, a great place to start is the recognition that the existing building stock is a critical environmental resource that must not be squandered. It would be unfortunate if environmentalism became yet another justification for treating historic buildings as disposable, when in fact the reuse of existing buildings conserves their embodied energy and keeps their irreplaceable materials out of the landfills.

Richard Moe, President of the National Trust, may have said it best: "It makes no sense for us to recycle newsprint and bottles and aluminum cans while we’re throwing away entire buildings, or even entire neighborhoods."

(photo of New construction in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood by Chuck Taylor, www.crosscut.com )

Posted by Katie Eggers Comeau, Advocacy Coordinator

HISTORIC PRESERVATION, IT TOUCHES YOUR LIFE EVERYDAY!

Most people are deathly afraid to participate in fundraising. Yes, it is rather intimidating to ask people for money, but I find it rewarding to raise funds for a cause I believe in. And, I believe in historic preservation! How could I not get excited about raising funds to help protect the beauty of the city, parks and countryside which I enjoy every day?

We recently sent our members a request for support which illustrated examples of how historic preservation touches our lives every day. How many of us have savored a breakfast burrito at the Public Market, ridden the Denzel Carousel, kicked a volleyball at the beach or relished a martini at Restaurant 2Vine?

Rebecca Rowe, Landmark Society’s Preservation Program Coordinator eloquently described on this blog her walk to work each day. Besides the obvious health benefits, Rebecca is fortunate to walk through such beautiful neighborhoods on her way to work. And just think of the destination, the Hoyt Potter House! I thank my lucky stars every day that I am fortunate enough to work in this beautiful building, in this beautiful neighborhood. What would be here if members of The Landmark Society had not been working diligently for over 70 years to make sure future generations can connect with and enjoy our past?

So, don’t feel too sorry for me if you think my job is hard, it’s not. But you can help make it a lot easier by giving to The Landmark Society’s Spring Appeal! Your support means so much and will allow members of The Landmark Society to continue our good work.

And, by the way, how does historic preservation touch your life every day? I would love to hear about it, post your comments and I will share them in my future blogs.

Susan Latoski
Director of Development

My big news debut

Today I had the honor of going on the news to talk up the House and Garden tour, which takes place this weekend.

I was super nervous, and of course today happened to be about 9,000 degrees in the shade and humid so my hair is super frizzy and I'm about wilted. I didn't know some of the answers but I think I covered pretty well. In all it was really fun! Perhaps not the most inspiring of performances, but I certainly hope it at least gets some more people interested in checking out the tour this weekend! It should be a fantastic tour and I'm sure it will be a success.

Clicky here if you want to see the news spot.

And if you want to go to the Tour, head out to Lamberton Conservatory tomorrow at 10 a.m. to get your ticket. You won't be disappointed!

Historic Tours! Tours! Tours!

You’re off on an adventure when you travel with The Landmark Society!

As one of the oldest and most active preservation organizations in America, The Landmark Society of Western New York prides itself on offering travel steeped in history, architecture and cultural heritage. With over 20 years experience of planning and hosting tours, who better than The Landmark Society to guide the way to unique, interesting and fun destinations?

We offer a tremendous variety of extended trips to locales outside of New York State, as well as many day trips intended to explore the amazing adventures to be had right here in our own back yard.!

We spend countless hours searching for extraordinary destinations, places and activities that showcase exceptional features off the traditional beaten path. All our tours are distinctive, fun, totally worry free and personally escorted to ensure you have the time of your life!

We create a warm and friendly atmosphere where you can meet new friends and enjoy a group atmosphere, yet still feel extremely comfortable and have the freedom to enjoy independent exploration. Many of our traveling friends have been traveling with us for over 20 years and have made lifetime friends in the process. When so many travelers continue to return, we know we are doing things right!

Read what some former tour-goers have to say:

“We enjoyed our experience and met some special people!”

“Wonderful! This is a first time experience traveling with The Landmark Society. I will certainly sign up for another tour.”

“Wonderful trip with wonderful memories.”

We are proud of our quality tours in the historic destinations we choose. Join us on our next excursion and discover for yourself why our tours remain so popular.

Happy Travels!

posted by Cheryl Corsi, Director of Member Services