Millersport Highway Houses

The cookie cutter houses of the Millersport Highway suburbs appear to be representative of the "little boxes" described in the song bearing the same name. I listened to this song and found it to be extremely relative and even pretty enjoyable. It really captured what the typical American view of society looks like based on these neighborhoods.

Cape Cod style "Little Box"

These houses are all very similar. They have the same architectural stylings-- small steep roofs, symmetrical windows with the door in the center, and 1 and 1/2 stories. They are probably sitting on the same amount of land as well. Just like other aspects of American society they seem to be conforming to societal values. In fact, the entire neighborhood is patterned out in an equally segmented area, so that everyone can have their little piece of the American dream.

Some people have a little more money than others as you can tell by the size of the houses within the same neighborhood. However that doesn't make these neighborhoods diverse in appearance for some reason. Even the ranch style houses, and the raised ranch style houses and split level ranch houses, all look the same. Of course none of these houses look EXACTLY the same. The owners have decided to make them differ some how. Or as Dolores Hayden eludes to, probably the builders of the house more likely made the houses differ, to appeal more to people.  After all, nobody wants the same house as someone else. Maybe it could be a different color or have some different visual asthetics. Whatever the case the houses pictured above and the ones pictured below are very conformist and similar in the way they are built. 

 "Don't tell me that my house looks exactly like my neighbors"

Hayden's idea of the three part promise of the suburb is represented in this neighborhood just off Millersport Highway.  Although they may sacrifice some on the side of house size and nature access, the people here do reside in a nice, quaint, little neighborhood.  I'm sure everybody knows everybody and that probably adds a sense of neighborhood togetherness and security. In fact, when I was driving through this and other neighborhoods in close proximity to this one, I was probably looked upon as an outsider. I'm sure that people in this neighborhood did not appreciate me stopping near the curb and snapping pictures of their houses.

Different Pictures, Same houses...



Queen City Downtown

Last Friday I opted to take a tour of Downtown Buffalo.  Of course it was raining and windy! Anyway I really enjoyed my tour and so now I would like to share what I learned.

 

This magnificent building is the Market Arcade building.  You can see that it has an extremely elaborate facade with a buffalo right above the door. It was designed by E.B. Green, who is a very prominent architect of the downtown area. The Market Arcade building use to be an indoor mall in its heyday, which was around the turn of the 20th century. There use to be an outdoor market outside of the building but the inside is full of small and numerous window shops with big plate glass windows that make it easy to display merchandise to would be comsumers, as you can see from the picture below.

When the train system was built down through this area this mall and many other buildings were left in decline.  Many businesses here were moved to the surrounding suburbs.  It has since been a struggle to renew this area to its former glory. The Market Arcade now serves as part of the visitor center for the Preservation of Buffalo-Niagara. It was where I started my tour so it kind of served as an appetizer for the rest of my experience.  Below is a picture of the above-ground portion of the metro that comes down after the car-portion of main street ends. My tour guide let his feelings be known clearly to me as he said that the train system was one of the worst things that could happen to this area. He grew up in the downtown area and he said that the train system caused a lot of stuff to fall to the wayside during its construction.

  

This art-modern style building is called the alleyway theatre.  It has a very retro design as you can see by the rounded corners and windows of the building and also by the smooth surfaces. Inside of the building shows the same technique. 

This theatre used to be a Greyhound bus station. In the alley, shown below, the buses would come through and pick people up from the ticket office, also below.  The alley is actually how it got its name. 

We then stopped at Shea's Buffalo Performing Arts Center.  This is the most beautiful, ornate theatre of which I've ever been inside.  The inside is all marble and it has Tiffany's chandeliers. The theatre part of this building holds around 3,000 people on the floor and balcony. My tour guide emphasized that Shea's Buffalo is what draws the suburbanites into the city. Below is a picture of the interior of the lobby at Shea's Buffalo.

After this stop we walked over to the M&T Gold Dome Bank and the Electric Tower (both below). The inside of the bank was amazing. It looked like it was straight out of a movie.  All that I could think of once inside was the bank scene of The Dark Knight. Actually, my tour guide said, not too long ago, Keanu Reaves was doing some filming for a new movie about a bank robbery in this very bank! This building also impressed me with the marble interior.  On the marble itself, near the top of the dome, was a miral painting of why Buffalo was/is an important city. As I couldn't take pictures inside the bank, I think the miral was about power, industry, agriculture, and arts/history. My tour guide emphasized that the city is really trying to push the arts/history as a way to draw people back in.

 The Electric Tower was a very cool building. It was designed after one of the non-permanent buildings of the Pan-Am Exposition held in Buffalo in 1901. The Pan-Am Exposition not only showcased the power of electricity and new technology such as X-ray, it probably helped Buffalo become rather imfamous for a while as it was during this exposition that President William McKinley was assassinated.  Subsequently, this also allowed for Pres. Teddy Roosevelt to take his oath in this city.

After a walk around the architecturally mind-blowing governmental part of downtown (below),

Buffalo City Court- Brutalism

 

Buffalo City Hall- Art Deco







Buffalo Federal Court- Very Modern and actually curves to adhere to the street







we stopped at the Gauranty building, which also blew my mind.  This building really speaks for itself. It is so amazingly elaborate that I took about 20 very similar pictures of both, front and rear, facades of the building. I also took some pictures of the inside as well.

The inside of this architectural gem matches the outside. Even the back, underneath part of the stairs is very detailed.

Buffalo should be considered one of the most historical cities in the U.S. The historical value of just the downtown is immense. It has very rich architecture and almost every building I went to has its own unique story. This tour was amazing and very fun, although it was raining and windy the whole time! I suggested to the tour guide that maybe people do want to come back to the city and enjoy what it has to offer.  Ignoring all of the current economical problems though, maybe its the weather we outsiders dislike.

Housing Styles of Tudor-ville and the Georgian Avenue

Coming from North Campus heading to South Campus on Niagara Falls Blvd I turned right.  It led me into a bunch of different neighborhoods where I could not really assess the housing type.  Just a lot of smaller cookie cutter type houses that everyone bought to have their own slice of the "American Dream."

I travelled over to Englewood Avenue which by chance led me to Cortland Ave, which then led me to some side street neighborhoods unknown to me. 

I went down and around this area and did some exploring of the different housing types and I found some interesting things.

I encountered a lot of different but very similar houses using the "Tudor Revival" style. 

I found 3, 2-1/2 story houses within a couple lots from each other, that looked like they were built around the same time period and owned by the same class of people, most likely middle class.  After perusing through realtor.com, my guess is that they were built some time between the 1960s and 1980s since they looked fairly new and unweathered on the exteriors, and also because other houses in the areas dated around mid 1960s.

What makes these "Tudor Revival?" Well for starters the facade of the houses were mostly a split level, half timbred style that was only somewhat different among all three houses I photographed. The half-timbering, you could tell, was purely ornamental and held no strucural value. They all had some sort of gothic feel to them with the darker color scheme. These houses also had an assymetrical design that was readily noticeable. The gables of the roofs were overlapping and jutting out from each other. The roof itself was steeply pitched and so was the roofing over the dormers. The long narrow windows also fit the mold of Tudor. Upon zooming in, the photo reveals the plank door with diamond pane windows  that also shouts "Tudor!" This house above also has the Tudor arch entryway.  

Pardon the stop sign but heres one more example.

On the other side of the street was this masterpiece "Colonial."

What a pretty house! To me this was the best part of my adventure today.

I think this house probably fits the "Georgian" or "Colonial Revival" type. Mainly because of its symmetry of the six pane windows and how the paneled door is the most prominent and ornamental part of the facade. The architecture of the door was really neat.  It boasted elaborate entablature which included tooth-like dentils, decorative pilastors (flattened columned supports, greek in style) and even a crown like cap. This house had a symmetrical hipped roof that I thought looked really cool with its dentil carved underside.

It may be just my opinion but owning this house says, "I want what everybody else wants but I want mine to look better."  

A house similar to this one and in close proximity is from 1963 and is selling for about $147,000. Thats not a hefty price tag in these hard times, but maybe still out of range of many working class families like mine I'm sure.  Its probably owned by a white collar middle class family that has jobs in the city or suburban offices or something "American" like that, as it embodies ideas of tradition.

These two architectural styles seemed to dominate this area. Again I must reiterate that I feel it was a traditional middle class neighborhood and that maybe most of these people worked in the city but wanted to own their own house outside of all the chaos. This neighborhood is a short distance from some of the nicer looking schools, and has access to many surrounding ammenities such as parks, resturants, and stores within a couple miles. Its approximately a 15 minute drive from downtown Buffalo (perhaps where they work). It seems like the perfect place to live and raise a family.