Just for fun, I played around with a Google Programmable Search Engine and made this. It is an unadorned search box; no bells, whistles, graphics, or logos. It drills into over 45 websites and digital collections that feature Buffalo buildings, old newspapers, genealogy, events, and other local/historic stuff.
One of these days, I’ll pony up for the full business-class subscription to WordPress so I can use a plug-in to embed this thing. Feedback welcome. It is a work in progress.
What we want to do here is help you, the person with local history, family history, or house history questions, get help from libraries, archives, museums, colleges & universities, historical organizations, government record offices, and genealogical societies; all the organizations that might have old stuff. Especially those located somewhere other than where you can visit in person. We’ll refer to them collectively as repositories.
What you think of as a simple request for information is actually a request for labor. If everything was digitized and online, then your search engine results would suffice. The repository you contact probably has to do in-person, by-hand retrievals and searches of pictures, letters, microfilm, maps, or other offline, undigitized stuff to find your answer. Fortunately, they often know of online resources that aren’t found by search engines and may be able to refer you to stuff that you didn’t know was online. Large institutions can tap into proprietary databases to which they subscribe.
Most historical & genealogical organizations are small and have no paid staff. Sometimes they don’t have enough volunteers to keep up with inquiries. Their volunteers may be staying home in the pandemic.
Having a big budget doesn’t always solve this problem. Large, high-profile institutions get a correspondingly high volume of requests. Their staff may be laid off or working from home during the pandemic. We know of an Ivy League university who rations the time librarians spend on outside inquiries to 20 minutes per request. They actually use timers.
The desire for free labor will always exceed the supply. Here are five simple tricks to make the most of the limited time that someone can commit to your question.
Reach out by email if possible.
The tweet below explains why Calling a repository on the phone may
not be the ideal way to get the information you are seeking.
| Try This | Rationale |
|---|---|
| 1. Reach out by email if possible. The information you seek probably has to be delivered electronically anyway, so you might as well start out electronically. Google the repository and use their Contact Us page. The repository will then have a legible, searchable written request to work from. They will have the correct spelling of your name and the names of the people or things that you’re researching. It prevents bouncing emails because someone incorrectly spelled out or wrote down an email address over the phone. | When you call with a complex request, you’re not only asking for someone to analyze your needs and determine on the spot if their repository can be of help, you’re also asking them serve as your stenographer. Save the telephone requests for the computer-naive, people with disabilities, and those without internet access. A repository can always ask to speak with you on the phone if it would work better for them. |
| 2. Not sure who can help you at an organization? Pick up to three likely-sounding departments or staffers to send your inquiry to. Trust them to forward it if a co-worker can better answer your question. And give it a few days. Some questions take more time than others. No one has an empty In box. | We understand the temptation to Cc everyone at the Contact Us page as an insurance policy, but it increases the chances that your inquiry will land in spam folders. It also creates extra labor for the person whose help you need. Now they have to acknowledge all the forwards from peers & superiors, which cuts into the time they could be using on your inquiry. |
| 3. Repositories need to figure out what you don’t know about X, not what you do know, in order to determine if they can help you. You do not have to have a lengthy family history narrative ready. Reach out when you’ve identified which gap(s) in your knowledge you hope to rectify. | Government record offices which require next-of-kin relationship to release certain records will let you know. At non-governmental organizations, the individual you’re researching can be your ancestor, or not. The building you’re researching can be your property, or not. No personal connection or recitation of the forebears is required. |
| 4. Focus on up to three life events, or up to three names, or up to three documents per request. For example, “Do you have obituaries for John & Mary Smith?” “Do you have pictures of these three addresses?” Less is more when it comes to getting your request filled. | No one is born knowing how to do family or house history research. Repositories know that and want to help you anyway. But if the only way you can answer questions about what you’re trying to find out about X is “Anything, anything!”, then we suggest starting out with a researcher for hire. |
| 5. When you can finish the sentence, “Well, what I’m really looking for is…”, then you’ve greatly increased the chances that someone can help you. You may even get a hug. | Example: if you want to learn where a factory was located and when it closed down, we encourage you to skip impossibly broad openers such as “Do you have anything on old businesses?” Indirect questions produce indirect answers. |
Bonus tip: Our Guide to Vital and Archival Records in Buffalo and Erie County will help you identify which repository has what you’re looking for.
Originally published in Buffalo Spree, July-August 2006, p. 150. Illustration from Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwüürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright. Perspective, ground and floor plans for the Waller Workmen’s Cottages. Plate XL (40). Published by Ernst Wasmuth A.G., Berlin, 1910.
Most architecturally-aware Buffalonians know how the Darwin Martin-Frank Lloyd Wright friendship led to commissions for the now-demolished Larkin Administration building and homes for the top Larkin Company officers. Demolished portions of the Martin House complex are being rebuilt as the site undergoes a complete restoration. Martin also commissioned Wright’s only cemetery monument, the Blue Sky Mausoleum, which was constructed in Forest Lawn in 2004, decades after the passing of the Martins.
Additional executions of unbuilt Wright designs are underway in Buffalo. James and Mary Ann Sandoro of the Buffalo Transportation-Pierce Arrow Museum are constructing Wright’s Tydol gas station, originally designed for Buffalo in the 1920s, on Michigan Avenue. Fundraising is underway to put up Wright’s ca. 1905 Yahara boathouse, originally designed for Madison, WI, on the Niagara River near Porter Avenue.
Some scholars argue that these new constructions should not be considered genuine Wright creations because the architect is not present to make the many major and minor adjustments necessary to transform two-dimensional intentions into three-dimensional structures. New sites, new building codes, new construction materials, and new techniques present challenges to authenticity. So let’s concede the point, call these projects Re-Wrights, and lead the world in posthumous Re-Wrighting.
Here is the next candidate for Re-Wrighting Buffalo. In 1904, the Larkin Company, known for a corporate culture of benevolent paternalism, commissioned Wright to design rowhouses for its workers. This was a progressive response to overcrowding and slum conditions in industrial Buffalo, decades before the advent of public housing. The rowhouses were probably planned for the vicinity of the Larkin factory complex on Seneca Street. Further research is needed to determine how and why Larkin decided to provide company housing, if a site was ever selected, why they were never built, and what materials Wright had in mind.
Wright designed little with which to compare them. Apparently the only Wright rowhouses ever to be built are the Roloson apartments in Chicago, which date to 1894 and have a Tudor-style steeply-pitched gable facades and Louis Sullivan-inspired ornament above the windows.
The Larkin Rowhouse design was first published in 1910 in Germany in the famous Wasmuth Portfolio, the publication that established Wright’s reputation in Europe. At that time, the client was identified as Mr. E.C. Waller of Chicago. In 1942, Henry-Russell Hitchcock determined that the client was actually the Larkin Company and praised the design as an early prototype for European worker housing and US defense housing. Hitchcock’s attribution appears to be uncontested, probably because the design shows such strong affinities with the Larkin building and the Buffalo prairie houses, most notably in the prominent vertical piers segmenting the façade, the low-pitched roof with deep overhangs, and horizontal bands of windows.
The Larkin Rowhouse plans survive today in the archives of Taliesin West, awaiting a licensing agreement with a visionary builder. Buffalo has all too many “shovel ready” sites and a growing downtown housing market. Let’s build the rowhouses for everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to be a Larkin company executive.
Parks officials were mortified at the malfeasance. The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Lafayette Square was cracking and crumbling only six years after its erection in 1882 during the city’s semi-centennial year. A structural review was undertaken, revealing careless workmanship throughout the foundation of the monument. The core of rubble and mortar was inadequate to the task of supporting the granite shaft and statuary, which topped out at 85′. A copper box meant to serve as a time capsule was not found in its intended chamber, but three feet lower, embedded like just another foundation stone. It had been cracked under the pressure and its contents destroyed by water seepage.
The Parks Department annual report for 1890 was candid:
The plans, the specifications, the superintendence, and the masonry — all exhibit, or imply, gross ignorance or carelessness. It is really a disgrace to our civilization that so prominent a structure, designed to stand as a memento of our patriotism to all generations, should be built so insecurely that it must be taken down within six years of its erection.
The monument was designed by George Keller, a Hartford, Connecticut architect. It was erected by the Mount Waldo Granite Company of Bangor, Maine.
McDonnell and Sons
When a contract was let to repair the foundation, however, it went to a local mortuary monument company, McDonnell & Sons. In rebuilding the foundation, McDonnell & Sons altered the open stepped base of the monument, creating a tight walkway around the shaft by eliminating some of the base and walling in what remained, forming stairs at each point of the compass, an arrangement which survives today.
In 1889, when McDonnell and Sons rescued the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, it was a relative newcomer to the Buffalo scene, having opened their Buffalo office only five years earlier.
McDonnell & Sons was founded in 1857 in granite-rich Quincy, Massachusetts by Patrick McDonnell, an Irish immigrant once employed as a stonecutter in the local quarries. Patrick retired in 1881, handing the reins to his son John Quincy McDonnell. In 1884 John moved with his wife and seven children to Buffalo in order to open a branch office, which came to be located at 858 Main Street, between Allen and Virginia streets Another son stayed in Quincy to manage the family’s business there.
The old McDonnell office still stands. The structure’s elaborate granite facade served as a promotion for the company’s products. An arched pediment is surmounted by finials in the shape of funerary urns. Supporting it are polished pilasters with rough-faced florets. An early company advertisement describes the façade as being “the handsomest in the United States — a recognized work of art that attracts the attention of every passer-by and excites admiring comment from all.”
As originally built only 16′ on a side and one-story tall, the showroom quickly proved inadequate for the growing company. A second story was added, and the building was extended in stages to fill the entire length of the 100′ deep lot, assuming its final elongated form by World War I. Window openings puncture the north wall at frequent intervals, washing the interior with shadowless, even light.
Significantly, the later expansion of the building — and the company as a whole — was overseen by John McDonnell’s widow Emily, John having died prematurely in 1894. After her husband’s death, Emily did something bold for a middle class, middle-aged Victorian widow with dependent children: She bought out her brother-in-law Thomas’s interest in the company.
By 1900, McDonnell & Sons had two additional local branches, another two in central New York, one in Connecticut, and one in Indianapolis. Emily served as company president until her death in 1926. In a circa 1926 company brochure, McDonnell & Sons claimed to be the largest granite firm, by sales, in the country. Emily’s obituary in the Courier-Express described her as a nationally-known businesswoman.
While tiny as a building, when read as a grave marker — itself a sign — the granite façade must have struck many as grand indeed. (In simultaneously serving as shelter and sign, McDonnell & Sons predated Robert Venturi’s building-as-sign, “Decorated Shed” coinage by 80 years).
Wealthy shoe merchant John Blocher went to McDonnell & Sons with his plans for an extravagant memorial to his son Nelson, who died shortly after the Main Street showroom opened. Other notable Forest Lawn commissions include the Philip Becker monument, the Volunteer Firemen’s monument, and the imposing Main Street entrance arch.
Other area projects include the Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry monument in Front Park, soldiers’ monuments in Springville and LeRoy, Hamburg’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, the Father Hennepin Memorial in Niagara Falls, NY, and the Laura Secord Memorial in Queenston. Company brochures also boasted of commissions for public memorials throughout the U.S. and Canada.
At some point in the 1940s, with Emily’s son James in charge, McDonnell & Sons moved out of 858 Main and into a comparatively plain brick building further north on Main Street. James died in 1951, the last family member to head the operation. In 1968, after 84 years in Buffalo and 111 years after its founding in Quincy, McDonnell & Sons vanished from the Buffalo Polk Directory, the annual “City Directory” of households and businesses.
The old headquarters building was continuously occupied until 1978. It is now vacant. The city acquired the building last year in a tax forfeiture. The building is structurally sound, but needs new mechanical systems, roof work, and windows to bring it up to current city codes — work estimated at $150,000.
This monument of a building — some neighbors call it the Mausoleum Building — is more than a pretty face, as finely cut and polished as the day it opened 112 years ago. It represents a telling slice of Buffalo’s architectural, social, and women’s history.
©Cynthia Van Ness. Originally published in the Buffalo Preservation Report, June 1996. Advertisement courtesy of 1891 Buffalo city directory. The building has since been remodeled as The Granite Works. A sales brochure from the company is online at Archive.org.
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