Reader Submission Eric Stenclik:
Preservation Buffalo Niagara (PBN) and the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site are joining together to host the Delaware Neighborhood Tour of Homes to be held on Saturday June 25th offer. In addition to the mansions open to view last year on this tour, an additional six spectacular mansions have been added to the open house. This tour started last year and was a smash hit, selling out 800 tickets. This year’s tour offers another stroll into the gilded reception rooms and marble floors of a legendary era, a time when Buffalo wore the homes of Delaware Avenue like sapphire rings on an elegant finger. Limited tickets are available at www.BuffaloTours.org and they sell out fast.
The massive growth of Buffalo after the Civil War came to an opulent head around 1901 as Delaware Avenue became one of the most celebrated streets in the country. Few avenues could rival its standards for attainment and pedigree. In the July 1904 issue of House Beautiful Virginia Robie wrote:
Delaware Avenue is to Buffalo what Euclid Avenue is to Cleveland, Summit Avenue to St. Paul, Commonwealth Avenue to Boston, and the Lake Shore Drive to Chicago, –with this difference, that Delaware Avenue is more beautiful. Many of the dwellings on this famous street have the character of country houses.
(Francis Kowsky, “Delaware Avenue” in The Grand American Avenue 1850-1920. Ed. Jan Cigliano and Sarah Bradford Landau. San Francisco: Pomegranate Art Book, 1994).
Four of these “country” homes can be seen on this tour, and this year there are some surprises. The Clement house, now the American Red Cross, sports a mammoth two-story oak paneled music room festooned with hand cast German silver chandeliers. But on this tour you can see beyond this grand public room to the private spaces of the Clement family: the sleeping quarters of the children, more intimate and familial, where whispered late-night conversations took place above the social formality of the music room soirées. The Knox house next door is a study in restrained grandeur. Its marble staircase has a flowing, almost liquid elegance whose supple form I have not seen equaled in New York, Newport, or Charleston. Book lovers will want to see the private library that was the seed of the University at Buffalo’s Lockwood collection: head to the Jewett Richmond home, built in 1888 with a masculine Tudor library that housed later owner Thomas Lockwood’s rare books.
The most regal homes of Delaware are now offices and non-profits, but the surrounding streets are filled with homes still used for their original purpose. One of these streets, Oakland Place, is the site of four of this year’s tour homes this year. This street is possibly Buffalo’s strongest link to its patrician past. Today it is the home of a former Buffalo Bill and the Catholic Bishop, but its roots go deep into the soil of WASP aristocracy. The homes seem to pose for each other at the same time they exude relaxed comfort and a restrained but confident taste. Oakland, Summer, and Bryant Streets (along with North) were traditionally offshoot enclaves of Buffalo’s social elite, whose main artery was always Delaware Avenue (in 1931 Buffalo had 1,317 families in the Social Register, more than Cleveland). This caste system today has mostly faded away, but echoes linger more in Buffalo than most cities; walking these streets can conjure the feeling of having stepped into an old photograph. On Oakland, the correct posture of the homes’ exteriors foreshadows the refined living quarters that you will pass through on the tour. The Oakland homes this year are more intimate in scale–one was built as an elegant carriage house studio, another as an urbane townhome with paneled library. One of the more whimsical residences is a pert row house ingeniously carved out of the center of the 1897 Pomeroy-Mitchell mansion. It’s an impressive lesson in how gracious living can be rendered on a small scale within historic homes.
Back on a larger scale, 155 Summer Street, a circa 1914 Tudor Revival manor house, should not be missed. It has a dramatic pickled oak staircase hall and elaborate plaster crown of scrolling vines and fruit. And most steeped in time of all these properties, the anchor for this haunting time travel is the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site, the former Wilcox mansion where a U.S. President was sworn into power. A National Historic Site, it has a newly unveiled carriage house annex and an excellent tour experience. It is one of the most historic and beautifully done small museums in the East.
As I walked the neighborhood this spring scouting out homes for the tour, I realized more than ever how haunting a close look at this neighborhood can be. Delaware Avenue is beautiful, but it’s a ghost of what it was a hundred years ago, when homes such as Frank Goodyear’s palace at Delaware and Summer, or H.H. Richardson’s baronial Gratwick House next door, laid a banquet of residential urban elegance. These were very public homes, not sequestered in gated suburban precincts, but squarely facing the public to be judged and hopefully deemed worthy of affection and admiration for their beauty, their originality, or their sheer charm. We relish the imposing stature of the grand homes of Delaware, but it’s instructive to remember and honor the fabled ones that were demolished. Imagine the avenue with these homes intact and you will be sobered by how much we’ve lost, and hopefully inspired to guard what remains, which you can see in detail on this tour.
Enjoy this tour not only through the lens of nostalgia, but with an eye to what lessons in taste and design we can import from that gilded era into the next chapter of Buffalo’s fascinating urban design and history. Your ticket fees will help Preservation Buffalo Niagara and the Theodore Roosevelt Site continue their work to sustain the elegant heritage of your city.
Eric Stenclik is a trustee of Preservation Buffalo Niagara and a Delaware neighborhood resident.
The Delaware Neighborhood Tour of Homes is June 25, 2011 from 10 am to 3 pm. Buy tickets in advance for $25, non members or $20, members of PBN or the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site. Tickets are $30 day of the event. The tour starts at the Wilcox Mansion.
Also note that a related free lecture about the history and architecture of the Delaware Mansions will be held at the Wilcox Mansion on June 15 starting at 5:30 It is free for anyone purchasing tickets to the tour. You can pick up your reserved tickets there or purchase them that night. Parking will be available in the TR Site/Bank of America lots on the 15th.