Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette
	A worker lays sod next to the rebuilt pergola of the Darwin D. Martin House, viewed from the porch of the George Barton House.

By Patricia Lowry
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Against all odds -- crumbling and vanished buildings, a transformed landscape and a daunting price tag to make it all right again -- this lakeside city 14 years ago dared to think the unthinkable and do the undoable. The result? The restoration of the Darwin D. Martin House and the miraculous regeneration of its outbuildings, an expansive Frank Lloyd Wright-designed estate long given up for gone.

	A slideshow exploring the Wright legacy in Buffalo and a parallel revival of a nearby center for the American Arts and Crafts movement. MORE COVERAGE A rewarding visit to America's only Arts and Crafts colony
	Darwin D. Martin

Driven by a desire to make their city a must-see stop on the architectural tourism trail, Buffalonians raised $35 million in public and private funds to revive one of Mr. Wright's most important early houses and resurrect its long-demolished pergola, conservatory and carriage house.

An extraordinary act of community will might also be read as an extraordinary act of community atonement for the demolition of one of Mr. Wright's most monumental and progressive buildings, the Larkin Co. Administration Building, knocked down in 1950 and now the site of a parking lot.

The Larkin building is one of several commissions Mr. Martin was instrumental in securing for the architect in Buffalo, making it a city rich in Wright. In addition to six surviving houses in and around the city, Mr. Wright also designed a mausoleum and a two-story gas station for Buffalo in the 1920s, both unbuilt at the time. Two years ago the mausoleum was realized; the gas station will be erected next year as part of a transportation museum. A boathouse Mr. Wright designed in 1905 for Wisconsin also is being built for the first time, for Buffalo's West Side Rowing Club.

Around the country, 15 Wright projects have been erected posthumously, but the Martin House structures are thought to be the first Wright designs rebuilt at their original locations after demolition, said archivist Margo Stipe of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

When fully restored by 2010, the Martin House Complex could inject almost $20 million annually into the local economy, along with a healthy dose of community pride. But the community may have to dig deeper to finish the job: window and furniture re-creation and construction of a visitors center are expected to cost an additional $15 million.

The Martin House and related Barton House are on the same 1.5-acre site at the corner of Jewett Parkway and Summit Avenue, in the comfortably dense Parkside neighborhood laid out with gently curving streets in 1876 by Frederick Law Olmsted. This was Mr. Wright's first commission with complete aesthetic control, a large lot and a big budget, and as it spiraled from $35,000 to $175,000, Mr. Martin objected, but mildly.

Both the Martin and Barton houses are open to the public during the ongoing restoration, as is Graycliff, the Martins' lakefront summer home also being restored in nearby Derby. The Martin House Complex's gardener's cottage will open in six months; the other two Wright homes remain private.

Mr. Martin's friendship with and financial support of Mr. Wright over three decades are legendary. Lesser known is Mr. Martin's own compelling, riches-to-rags story, with an outcome that left his house in precarious limbo for decades.

The Prairie-style houses Mr. Wright designed for him were an attempt to partly reconstitute a family that had been torn apart when Mr. Martin was a boy.

"I never ceased mourning a broken home," he wrote.

He was 6 years old in 1871, the youngest of five children of farmer Hiram Martin and his wife Eliza, who lived in central New York's Oneida County. After Eliza's death that year, Hiram took his two youngest children to Nebraska, leaving relatives and friends to look after the three oldest. When he was 12, Darwin joined his brother Frank as a door-to-door salesman for the Larkin Soap Co. in New York City.

	If you go ... Buffalo, N.Y. For general architectural tourism information, visit www.wrightnowinbuffalo.com. For the Martin House Complex, visit www.darwin martinhouse.org or call 1-716-856-3858 or toll-free 1-877-377-3858. For Graycliff, visit graycliff.bfn.org or call 1-716-947-9217. For online and walking tours of Buffalo, visit www.walkbuffalo.com. For walking, boat and neighborhood tours, visit www.buffalotours.org. For essays and other information about Buffalo buildings, visit the Campaign for Buffalo History, Architecture and Culture at cfb.bfn.org. For the Roycroft Campus, visit www.roycroftcampus corporation.com or call 1-716-655-0261. For the Roycroft Inn and its restaurant, visit www.roycroftinn.com or call 1-716-652-5552.

A math whiz with a strong work ethic, Mr. Martin at 13 moved to the company's Buffalo office as a bookkeeper. Developing innovative accounting solutions such as the card-ledger system that kept track of mail orders, Mr. Martin rose through Larkin's ranks and by the early 1900s had built a million-dollar fortune.

His connection to Mr. Wright came through another Larkin executive, William Heath, and Martin's own brother William, for whom Mr. Wright was designing a home in Oak Park, Ill., in 1902. On a trip to Chicago that year, Martin saw several Wright-designed homes as well as his Oak Park studio. In late 1902, Mr. Martin asked Mr. Wright to design a home for his sister Delta and her husband George Barton. If that project went well, a commission for the larger Martin house next door would follow ---- and perhaps the Larkin Administration Building job as well.

By 1912, Mr. Wright had completed the Martin House Complex, the Larkin building (his first commercial structure) and homes for Mr. Heath and Larkin accountant Walter Davidson.

The Martin dwelling is the largest of those houses. Crafted from Roman brick that emphasizes its horizontality, the house has deeply overhanging eaves that promise both real and psychological shelter. The entrance is underplayed but immediately inside, Mr. Wright ratchets up the drama with a long vista that binds the house to nature and to art -- a view through the pergola to the conservatory and its statue of Nike, now being replicated.

To the left is the reception room, where visitors sat before a radiant fireplace with its sunburst arch of bricks. To the right is the long, open sequence of rooms: library, living room, dining room. In the living room was the house's great showpiece: the jewel-toned glass mosaic fireplace depicting a wisteria vine in effusive bloom. It does not survive but will be re-created next year.

About 75 of the Martins' original furnishings survive, including Wright-designed tables, barrel chairs, dining room chairs and a sofa; other pieces will be replicated. A few have been moved back into the house.

Also still to come is the $2.6 million re-creation of most of the house's 260 art glass windows, many in what has come to be called the "Tree of Life" pattern. In the interim, some of the windows have been covered with transparent reproductions of the design, a surprisingly effective simulacrum from across the room.

The windows and the roof's overhanging eaves increased the house's sense of privacy, but they were the bane of Mr. Martin's wife Isabelle, who suffered from failing eyesight. Her dream home was their lakeside house, which Mr. Wright designed for her in 1927 with an abundance of natural light.

Two years later, the Martins' financial underpinnings crashed with the stock market. When Mr. Martin died in 1935 at age 70, Mr. Wright still owed him almost $70,000 that was never repaid. Isabelle stayed on for two more years in the house, which sat vacant and deteriorating until its rescue in 1955 by architect Sebastian Tauriello, who used the basement for his studio. But he also sold off some of the land; in the 1960s, the pergola, conservatory and carriage house were replaced by three apartment buildings.

The State University of New York at Buffalo purchased the Martin House in 1967 for use as its president's house. The present owner, the non-profit Martin House Restoration Corp., formed in 1992 to oversee its revival, which has been guided by Hamilton, Houston & Lownie Architects of Buffalo. The house's 350 volunteers work as caretakers, speakers, tour guides and clerks in the shop, temporarily set up in the Barton House. The $9 million glass-walled visitors center designed by Toshiko Mori is expected to open in 2008.

The open-air Blue Sky Mausoleum that Mr. Martin commissioned from Mr. Wright for his family now holds 24 crypts that step down a slope in pairs in Forest Lawn Cemetery. Mr. Martin's isn't among them; he is buried nearby in an unmarked grave. But the house he gave to Buffalo stands as his living memorial, testament to a timeless collaboration between architect and patron and to a community's determination not to let it slip away.