48 miles. Many on the Friendship Trail Bike Path
We slept in a bit and managed to get away from Dunnville around 8. We got “temporarily confused” again since there are two different highways there both numbered “3” – one is a county road and the other a provincial highway. We managed to get it figured out and rode along the coast on relatively quiet roads.
After 24 miles we got to Port Colborne and hooked up with the Friendship Trail, paved all the way to the Peace Bridge back to the good old USA. Among the way we passed the former site of the Erie Beach Hotel. W.E.B DuBois organized the founding meeting of the Niagara Movement there as a counter to what he considered Booker T. Washington‘s more moderate approach to the fight for black civil rights.
We had to bike across the bridge that was totally jammed up with traffic in both directions! We passed a whole line of cars and trucks but then had to wait for the immigration agent to let us in for the interview. Eventually we made it through and were back on the streets of the Buffalo waterfront.
We spent the night with a former Dartmouth classmate of Maja’s who had reached out to us when she heard about our ride through the alumni magazine’s class notes. We had a wonderful time catching up with her and meeting two of her four kids.
Buffalo at one point (around the end of the 19th century) was a very prosperous shipping and manufacturing center but like most rust belt cities has fallen on harder times. It boasts a neighborhood and park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and buildings by Wright, Sullivan, Richardson and Saarinen. And the target of our visit today was the Darwin Martin complex.
We met Mary Roberts, the Executive Director of the Martin House Restoration Corporation, who gave us an in depth look at the massive effort involved with the organization and carrying out of the beautiful renovations. The house is Wright’s largest and most complex Prairie Style design from the early 1900s and was conceived as a family compound. He utilized many innovative concepts in both its design and construction.
I’ll include a few of our photos here and will post more tomorrow but for a better understanding of the house’s history and more pics you should start at these entries and go in deeper from there:
Wright’s leaded glass panels bring a kaleidoscope of color in the house from the outside as well as from electric lighting
The view down the long pergola completely and absolutely faithfully rebuilt
This beautiful built-in has two doors that open to reveal bookshelves and then the bookshelves open to more shelves behind them.
bikewright 2.0 