By Steven Dietz:
The Delaware Neighborhood Tour of Homes has sold out!
The residential architecture of Buffalo enjoys national attention, and yet we locals take for granted the beauty and taste that fills our avenues and streets. We bustle down Delaware Avenue in our cars and think we know the houses and their styles. But do we really know much beyond their majestic surfaces, or anything of the joy and suffering they’ve sheltered for a century or more?
Not unless we stop to savor these houses with their strong personalities and shifting moods. Most of us only imagine entering these homes and leaping into their histories–how they were built, and for whom, and with what values. This Saturday you can more than imagine; you are invited to reflect on eleven beautiful homes from Buffalo’s late 19th to early 20th century in The Delaware Neighborhood Tour of Homes. Of the many fine tours of Buffalo architecture this summer, I think this one will leave the finest signature of an exceptional period in Buffalo’s domestic architecture. In fact, I invite you personally to come inside the homes of Delaware Avenue and Oakland Place, including the home where I live with the spirits of 116 summers past since this home was built, the foundation dug out and laid by hand. I have tales from three centuries–the 19th, 20th, and 21st–of eccentric or successful or simply famous people in this house, including a former first Lady who spoke from our staircase.
The tour has been carefully crafted by the good people of Preservation Buffalo Niagara and the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site. It takes place Saturday August 21st from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and is now self-guided. You will have a chance to meet some of the homeowners, hear their restoration stories, and relish the wide ranging styles, from an 1870s Italianate on Oakland Place to Grace Millard Knox’s masterpiece at 800 Delaware (currently Computer Task Group). The mansions on Delaware now house non-profits, firms, and agencies. But each of them has breathtaking grandeur, including the baronial library of the Lockwood House, which sported one of the finest private libraries in the country (now happily ensconced at UB’s Lockwood Library), to the ebullient marble staircase of the Knox house, which has the air of a Medici Palace.
On Oakland Place, the tour acquires a more intimate, evening cocktails feel. These are homes still privately lived in, and yet they retain the formal graciousness of a time when houses of the well-to-do were designed to privilege beauty over all else. There are turns from one room to the next where the eye catches a stunning new pattern of leaded tracery on a window sash. Or where the ceiling height blossoms into an exquisite, almost confectionery crown molding. John Cowper , the man who built City Hall, built his own home on Oakland Place in the 1920s. The living room walls are some four centuries old. Disassembled from Monmouth House in Wales, they are reincarnated in a grand 1920s drawing room. That’s re-use with a late gilded age touch.
Yet what makes Buffalo’s residential architecture so irresistible is the great spectrum we enjoy, from charming brick workman’s cottages, to stout shingled Queen Annes, to the gilded age hauteur of the Knox and Goodyear homes. In this tour, the accent falls on the gilded. But as Buffalo re-imagines its future, and as we prepare to host the National Trust Conference next year, a steady look at this elegant grandeur is maybe the tonic we need as we measure what we’ve lost and what we’ve gained in this city garlanded by such beautiful homes yet wounded by tidal changes of fortune. It’s a poignant story, and there is no better place to feel it than in the plastered, marbled, hand carved rooms of the Delaware District.
To Purchase Tickets: In advance, tickets are $25 ($20 for members of the TR Site or PBN). Tickets can be purchased at the TR Site, 641 Delaware Avenue or by calling 852-3300. Purchase online at www.BuffaloTours.org. If still available, tickets on the day of the tour are $30 and will be sold at the TR Site starting at 9:30.
Lead photo: Knox House
2nd photo: Richmond-Lockwood House, Library mante
3rd photo: Knox House