...And They All Look Just The Same....

Today's blog is centered on the suburbs of the 1950's and 60's.  The post war era that brought home those fighting in World War Two as well as Korea.  As these soldiers were coming home, there came about a need to house these people as well as there soon-to-be families with the onset of the baby boom.  Another idea that arose at the same time was the idea of everybody having their own "piece of the pie", real estate.  It became common place for people to want their own piece of land with their own house and garage for their new car.  There was a large push away from renting in the "over crowded" city to the openness and fresh air of the suburbs.  As the song "Little Boxes" portrays, there was a huge movement to produce an enormous amount of affordable housing for all of these soldiers who were coming home from the wars with pockets full of money earned fighting overseas.  What ended up happening was that a lot of these houses turned out looking the same.  Each neighborhood would have one maybe two different type of house that would be erected on every lot of the suburb so every house would look the same, ticky-tacky.

Traveling along Millersport Highway, you can easily see the ticky-tacky little boxes the song is talking about.  Almost every house on that stretch of road is the same house.  Some have been added on to, like a second floor or a larger garage, but all were built at the same time and look the same.  Cape cod style house with a single car attached garage.  What I feel is kinda of funny is that my house was built in 1936, pre WWII and here is a picture:

Funny thing huh?  The definitive house of the suburbs!!  I didn't really put these two together until well after I bought this house.  Also, this is not on that stretch of Millersport, this is located in Tonawanda yet the house style is the same and it somewhat acts the same for me.  This is my house with my yard in my neighborhood.  And yes, there are a large number of capes on my street as well as in the general area.

I think Hayden's argument is pretty close.  The suburbs gave the impression that they promised certain things and then they delivered, house yard and neighborhood.  Today, however, I think the suburbs do not eliver these three things.  I don't feel that the newer suburbs deliver the neighborhood aspect any more.  Too many of these newer suburbs lose the concept of neighborhood.  The houses are too far apart that people who live next door to each other may find it difficult to actually see each other on a regular basis.  Another influence on this lack of interaction to me is the the idea of lawnservices.  Back in the 50's and 60's in these new suburbs, people took pride in taking care of their own lawns and landscaping.  These days, I can't even count how many landscape businesses are in the phone book.  With these homeowners not going out to take care of their own property, they lose the chance to interact and get to know their own neighbors.  This is why I feel the suburbs are lacking the idea of neighborhood these days.

Crime And Scandal

So, last week, Carl and I went on yet another tour of Buffalo.  This tour was called the "Crime and Scandal" tour, great name however, not so great on results.  It started with great enthusiasm from the two of us, crime and scandal the morning of Halloween, learning about how Buffalo was active in the art of bootlegging during Prohibition.  Unfortunately, I felt it came up a bit short.  Maybe this has something to do with the fact that we have been on a number of other tours over the last couple of months.  There's bound to be some repetition of facts and such between some of the tours.

Anyway, there were a number of cool things about the tour.  For example, the Calumet building used to hold the main office of the Ku Klux Klan chapter here in Buffalo, until a list of their members was "found" and released to the public.  Also interesting that this same list is one of the few ever lists of KKK membership let alone one that is still around to be researched.  And it is, it is kept at either the Erie County Historical Society or the Main Library Branch downtown.

I also thought it was pretty cool to learn that Niagara Square was the site of a triple hanging back in the day.  People, apparently, came from far away to see this type of spectacle.  What I didn't understand was that after the hanging, the bodies were taken all the way to Collins for burial.  That's pretty far away in the times of no formaldehyde!!!

All in all, a fairly educational tour.  It also happened to be the largest tour so far, about 50 people!  Unfortunately, I wish there was a bit more talk about the bootlegging and other crimes and a little less about the upcoming elections and building architecture.

Buffalo's Architecture

For this assignment I chose the area of North Buffalo.  I chose this neighborhood because I feel it has a number of the different styles we talked about both in class as well as within this week's reading.  Just from driving around the area, I noticed that there are both fancy hoses and vernacular style doubles only a few blocks away from each other.  For example, the Parkside area is full of gingerbread trim as well as Victorian style houses, also don't forget the amazing Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin House shown here:

And here is a nice Victorian from Crescent Ave. not far from the Martin house:

You can see the gingerbread trim along the top of the porch.

Another major style used in the area is the vernacular doubles.  When most people think of North Buffalo they think of a lot of rental property, doubles or flats they are usually called.  I find it interesting that there are so many of these houses in the area, yet close to so many more expensive styles of houses to build.  For example, you can walk from the corner of Hertel and Colvin south on Colvin and see a great number of these doubles, yet if you walk up one of the side streets like Tillinghast, Crescent or even Nottingham Terrace, you can see so many other styles that are not on the main drag like georgian revival, victorian, prairie, bungalo and so many more.

This house is also on Crescent and it shows characteristics of both Prairie style with the somewhat low angle roof as well as Queen Anne style with the asymmetrical front and tower.

Here is one of the famous North Buffalo Double.  These houses have such a distinctive style with the front porch and door to one side, matching door on to the upper porch as well.  Another defining feature I notices was the painting of the houses.  Often times these houses are painted different colors on the top half and bottom half accenting the fact that they are two family homes.  I used to live in a house of this style on Parkside Ave. for a few years, if I can find a picture of it I will add it later.

I found it very interesting to view these houses and the area in a little bit different of a light than I have in the past.  I never really thought about why houses were put where they were.  For example, the saying  involving the term "the wrong side of the tracks" kind of fits for this area.  In North Buffalo, the houses are much bigger and made of more expensive materials on the city side of the train tracks that dissect the area compared to the houses closer to Hertel which are made of cheaper materials as well as mainly multiple family dwellings as opposed to single family.  This would allow the two families to possibly share the mortgage payments and own the house if they weren't just renting from a landlord.

The Grain Elevators

There are a few things I think of when someone mentions Buffalo to me.  The over exaggerated amount of snowfall we receive, chicken wings, the ever unimpressive Bills, the hopeful Sabres and the historic Erie Canal and the Grain Elevators.  These grain elevators were invented in the area in the mid 1800's as a way to move grain up to the top stories of the silos where it was stored along the waterfront in downtown Buffalo.  This is also why they are called elevators, because they elevated the grain to the top of the silos where it was stored until it was moved to either ships going west through the Great Lakes or, more often, to barges taking the Erie Canal towards New York.

These elevators became the primary part of the skyline of Buffalo, however, the ones we are used to seeing are only a small number of them.  Originally they were made out of wood, not concrete, but this also proved to be disastrous.  A side product of moving so much grain on a daily basis also brings so safety issues.  The dust created by some of these grains, when in a high enough concentration in the air, becomes very flammable.  So as these buildings were made of wood with such a high concentration of flammable material, many fires ensued on an almost daily basis.  There were so may of these fires that insurance companies would not insure the elevators.  This lead to concrete and brick.  The concrete was much less flammable and could therefore be insured.  I also mention brick because some of the elevators were even enclosed in a brick building.  Below is a good and only example left here in Buffalo:

Unfortunately for this one, it is in great disrepair and the owner is not putting any money into the upkeep of it.  In fact, every year, they put in a request to the city to tear it down and every year their request is denied due to it being a National Historical Site, Hooray National Historical Society!!!

Now, you may ask yourself "how do they work?"  This is a good question,  although they did greatly help in making the business of the waterfront much more efficient, they did not eliminate the need for men.  These men, mainly the Irish, would shovel the grain off of the ships and onto a vertical conveyor belt that had buckets attached to it.  This conveyor would then lift (elevate) the grain to the top of the silos and fill them from there.  Here a couple of pictures depicting the buckets and conveyor:

This tour was also very informative about a couple of things.  For how can you talk about grain elevators and not about the Erie Canal.  Because of the Canal as well as the Great Lakes, Buffalo became a crossroads for a lot of materials.  These two major waterways were the main highway of the United States before the iron horse and the railway began.  With all of this material flowing through the area, there was great need for storage.  These elevators were then invented and became used for a number of different things, mainly different grains but they were also heavily used for concrete.  In fact there is still a concrete manufacturer on the Buffalo River that uses one of the elevators to store dry concrete.  Also located on the river, right where it enters the inner harbor is a General Mills plant.  It is because of plant that I wish you had smell-o-vision through your computer.  When the wind blows right, you can smell the cereals that they are baking in the plant all along the waterfront of the Buffalo River.  It is no joke that the area smells like Cheerio's what a great smell, truly the smell of home to me.

Traveling Abroad

Today I am going to look at traveling abroad and how different people from around the world view it differently.  To narrow this very broad topic down a bit, I am going to concentrate on Europe and the US and the differences between the two.

To start with, I will discuss how Americans perceive Europe by looking at what we would like to see when we visit.  While browsing a few websites for this assignment, I have noticed that we Americans seem to like England a whole lot.  This may be because of the lack of a language barrier that many other country's have.   A large number of tours that I saw included London, in some form or another, whether it was just a day or two or a longer stay.  Included in these few days, was an almost mandatory trip to St. Paul's Cathedral, Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, not one mention of any of Gordon Ramsey's restaurants.  Other major stops include Paris, Rome and Amsterdam for major Western Europe and Prague and Vienna for a more Eastern European tour.  Although I have not been to these cities, upon thinking of this question, I did think I would see most of these cities high on the list for tour cities.

It seems to me that most of these locations have a lot of history both in the city itself as well as art work and other historically significant objects.  London has Big Ben and Parliament, Paris has the Louvre and  Notre Dame, Rome the Colosseum and the Vatican, Prague has more art work as well as buildings and architecture and Vienna also has the art work and architecture.  This leads me to believe that Americans want to see art work, architecture and religious artifacts.  There were other types of tours as well, for example, more of destination packages like to the Alps for skiing, however I felt these were not the tours to be looking at for this assignment.

As for the other side of the pond, what are the Europeans looking for when they visit the US?  When googling tours of USA, I found something a bit interesting that I hadn't noticed looking at the European tours.  A lot of the tours for europeans around the US are much longer than I expected, three weeks and longer.  This was not expected.  Unfortunately it is true that Europeans do get more vacation time than Americans in similar places in their careers.  How I would love to travel Europe on a 65 day tour like I saw going through the US!!!  Anyway, other differences included that when tourists are coming to the US, they seem to be interested in very different things than Americans going to Europe.  Many tours included the National Parks System: Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon to name the major parks, as well as Las Vegas, LA and of course NYC.  Other tours were "coast to coast" tours spanning the entire country, these were mainly the longer tours two weeks and up.

In a nut shell, it seems that visitors from both sides of the pond like to see what they don't have when visiting the other continents.  Europeans who have at home an amazing amount of art work and history are looking for the open road and natural wonders while Americans are looking for history and art work that is not available at home.  As I have been to the MET the MoMa and the Guggenheim in NYC as well as Albright-Knox, I have also been to the Reina Sofia and Prado in Madrid.  There are very many differences between museums from either side of the Atlantic where there is just so much more to see over there.  I'm not trying to knock our system of museums here in the States, it's more just a matter of history and Europe has more of it.

Thought I would close with a picture of Picasso's Guernica.  This is his depiction of the axes bombing Madrid during WWII.  I saw this for myself when I visited Spain some years back and thought it very poignant.  Also, you will notice the large number of people looking at it, how come this doesn't happen in the States?

Here's another little side note.  Back in my blog of the tour of downtown that Carl and I took, I mentioned a building designed by Yamasaki that was a prototype building.  You guys from NYC should have gotten this one, it's the prototype for the World Trade Center.

Black Rock

Last week Carl and I went on a tour of Black Rock.  A lot of unexpected beautiful architecture.  Black Rock originally started as its own city that was vying for the terminus of the Erie Canal.  It was a growing area with a heavily Germanic population.  Now, unfortunately, it seems like it has seen better days.  Some of the houses seem to be falling into neglect while others are doing quite well.  Near the start of the tour, we saw a house, one of the oldest in the area, as well as another house that, over the last ten years, I believe, has been totally rehabbed.  The little house in front of the church to the left has been rehabbed wonderfully while the grey house below is one of the oldest.  At least the left half.  It is a federalist style house which you can tell by the stone blocks used to top the windows instead of the same type of stone used for the rest of the house.  The right half can easily been seen as an addition.

From the beginning, Black Rock has been a working man's town and it still is.  I remember growing up thinking that this wasn't a great neighborhood to wander around in.  Definitely not an area to been seen in a non American car and I grew up driving Nissans and Hondas.  I think I was way off growing up, you know, you're never too old to learn a lesson!

OK, so, working man's town.  You can tell by the architecture that the people building these home and businesses knew what they were doing. From the churches to the fire hall, all had some beautiful art attached to the buildings.  I really liked the eaves of the fire hall as well as the red light on the building.  Not sure the light was original, but I still thought it was cool.  More reasons you could tell it's a working man's town was the fact the most street corners in the area originally had three things on them:   a grocery store, a church and a tavern.  Sounds like a good part of town to me...

The tour also included a tour of one of the former churches of the area that is now a religious center.  Inside were many different styles of the stations of the cross as well as beautiful frescos that have been restored.  Also present there were a few artifacts of a Jewish temple that had closed a couple of years ago.  I thought it interesting that the religious "border" had been crossed and the view of religious artifacts as art had been taken. I'd have to say, my favorite pieces at the center were the art deco stations of the cross with matching crucifix and candle holders.

The tour was a good eye opener for me with respect to the area.  A lot of interesting architecture as well as cool history.  Not  just a good neighborhood for the beer (Flying Bison Brewery calls Black Rock its home) or a way to get to great BBQ (Suzy Q's BBQ shack in Riverside).  Not to mention the largest collection of garden gnomes I have ever seen!!

Skylines

So, for this week's post I'm looking at skylines of cities and comparing them.  The two cities I would like to compare are New York City and Tokyo.  I chose these two cities because I have been lucky enough to have been to both of them as well as I have a few pictures of my own that are readily available instead of searching for pics of other cities that I have been to.

The top picture was taken from the roof top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC this past June and the lower was taken from the patio of my family's apartment when they were living in Tokyo.  Two very different cities!!!

To start with, NYC was considered a city by the late 1600's and has only grown since then.  It is also the most populous city in the US.  Tokyo, on the other hand, has been an inhabited area since the late 12th century (as a small fishing village to start) but not considered a city until the early 1600's.  Tokyo is now, like NYC, the most populous city in Japan.

Although both cities have been around for a very long time, their skylines are both very different.  One of the first things I noticed while traveling to both places was the architecture.  In NYC, it is very easy to spot a large number of buildings that are at least one hundred years old mixed in with newer buildings as well.  If you look closely at the skyline of Tokyo, the buildings are very different.  Most look somewhat drab and are not much to look at while some are pretty cool, like the zig-zag building in the upper left corner of the pic.  There are two reasons for this.  First, Tokyo had been almost completely leveled by the end of World War Two.  This forced the city to rebuild with fresh new structures to replace everything that had been ruined.  The second reason is that real estate in Japan, and especially in Tokyo, is extremely expensive, so the land is worth a lot more than the building on it.  This leads to landowners building cheap buildings that they plan on using for maybe twenty years, after which they will knock them down and build new ones.

Another major difference I saw between the skylines was the use of signs.  While there are advertisements all over both cities, the use of lighted signs is pretty much kept to Times Square.  In Tokyo, that same type of signs are plastered all over the city!

While both cities are huge, I think that NYC is taller.  There are many skyscrapers in both cities but NYC has so many more that are also taller.  Tokyo does have a large number of skyscrapers, but not like the original home of skyscrapers.

I feel there are many different things that can affect how a city grows, no matter where the city is located.  Some of these things are necessary for the city to grow and others just kind of happen.  Both types make any city unique.