Ontario, Canada and Michigan's Upper Peninsula - Wrap-up

   We had really been lucking out during this whole trip with the weather – not only had it been cool and dry most days, but we also had very little rain. When we did have showers, they only lasted for a brief time, and usually after we had done whatever activity that was planned for the day.

   Unfortunately, the atmosphere around Buffalo was a little unsettled. Although it was still relatively dry and cool, there were thunderstorms lurking about nearly every day, a situation I’m sure was influenced by the Great Lakes moisture.

   Sue and I took umbrellas with us when we went on a downtown walk on Wednesday afternoon. We parked near the Old Post Office, built in 1901 and now home to SUNY Erie Community College. The Gothic Revival structure was actually designed by the Office of the Supervising Architect, an agency of the United States Treasury Department that planned federal government buildings from 1852 to 1939. “What a place to go to community college courses!” I said to Sue.

   Architecture in Buffalo, especially the buildings constructed between the Civil War and the Great Depression, is said to have created a new, distinctly American form and to have influenced design throughout the world. Within a couple blocks we could see the gold-leaf dome of the Buffalo Savings Bank, a Beaux-Arts-style structure from 1901, designed by Buffalo architect E.B. Green...

...and the stunning terracotta decoration on the façade of the Prudential (Guaranty) Building, Louis Sullivan’s extraordinary 1896 design.

   Our main destination was the Ellicott Square Building, named for Joseph Ellicott, on whose original estate this building was erected. Ellicott was an agent of the Holland Land Company, and in 1803, he laid out the village of New Amsterdam, now the city of Buffalo. His heirs commissioned Daniel Burnham to design what became at that time the world’s largest office building.

   Daniel Burnham is a personal favorite of mine, as he designed the spectacular Pennsylvania Station in Pittsburgh. Folks from the Philadelphia area will be familiar with his Wanamaker Department Store (now Macy’s); most people would easily recognize the Flatiron Building in NYC or Union Station in Washington, D.C., among many of his marvelous structures across the country. His architectural mantra was "make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood; think big.”

   The Ellicott Square Building was completed 1896 in the Italian Renaissance style, using granite, iron, and terra cotta with a veneer of pearl-gray brick. The grand interior courtyard contains a marble mosaic floor, made up of 23 million pieces of marble imported from Italy, depicting sun symbols from civilizations around the world.

   In one corner of the courtyard is a wonderful bronze statue of Mark Twain on a bench. The great author lived in the city 1869-1871, when he was the co-editor of The Buffalo Express, which had its newspaper office on the eventual site of the Ellicott Square Building.

   We concluded our little stroll along Main Street, following the Metro Rail route, down the “sports corridor” from Sahlen Field, the home of the Bisons, the Toronto Blue Jays AAA baseball affiliate, to Key Bank Center, the home of the National Hockey League’s Sabres.

   After dinner, Sue and I went to see Shakespeare in Delaware Park, one of the largest free outdoor Shakespeare festivals in the country. Now a 44-year tradition, the organization usually puts on two productions, each for half of the summer months, Tuesday-Sunday evenings. We saw Love’s Labour’s Lost, a wonderfully funny play done very well by the cast!

   There were strong thunderstorms forecast for later Thursday afternoon, so we drove out early to Tonawanda so that we could get in (at least) a ride on the Erie Canalway Trail out to Lockport and back before the bad weather started. The first couple miles of the trail were through parks that lined the canal, and there were a few people out in their kayaks enjoying the cool morning air.

   I had scouted out our route pretty well the night before, using the Rails-To-Trails website Trail Link map in combination with GoogleMaps street view, as I knew that there were some unconnected segments of the canal trail that required some on-road “detours”. The first one came fairly early when Tonawanda Creek Road veered to the right to cut off a big bend in the canal where a cemetery was located.

   It’s a good thing I did check the route, because there were a couple points later were the trail ended with a sign simply telling you “Trail Ends” with no direction. Granted, you could generally just follow the canal and pick up the trail again, but there was a confusing area where the Tonawanda Creek and Erie Canal form a wye, and it might not be so obvious to the geographically challenged which branch of water you should be following.

   Even with my double-checking, I made a small error by taking the first of two bridges towards the hamlet of Pendleton Center, instead of the town of Pendleton, but we had an idea that we were moving at the wrong compass heading and corrected our route. I stopped to ask someone, just to make sure we were going the right way, and was amused that she was used to giving directions to cyclists in the area because of the “less-than-perfect markings”.

   The width of the path narrowed greatly once out of the park areas, but it was all paved, though the quality of asphalt varied. When we pedaled onto a very new section of trail that was cleared of the trees that are pretty much a constant presence along the canal, we noticed the sky becoming really dark to the north. We were hoping it was moving off, based on what the weatherman had predicted.

   We reached Lockport in time to see a motorboat pull out of lock 35 and just before hearing the first rumble of thunder.

   Locks 34 and 35 bypassed the old Flight of Five locks that carried boats a change in 60 feet of elevation at the Niagara Escarpment. The five locks are currently undergoing a restoration project that will allow tourists to ride a replica canal boat through the Lockport landmark.

   Sue and I took refuge in the local library for an hour or so, until the storm blew over. The temperature had dropped about ten degrees, and it wasn’t that warm in the first place, so we were dreading a cold, wet ride back to Tonawanda. Fortunately, things cleared up nicely, and but for a couple miles of splashing through puddles, the wind and sun helped to dry out our riding surfaces fairly quickly.

   My original plan was to do a bit of exploring and ride back to Buffalo on my own, and I was glad the weather was giving me a break, though the wind was kicking up and waves of clouds had me thinking I shouldn’t dally! I first rode into North Tonawanda to find a couple more train stations and immediately noticed the corner light posts had carousel horses attached to them.

   On Thompson Street is the Herschel Carrousel Factory and Museum, which sits nicely along the city’s Heritage Trail that runs diagonally across a few blocks on the former right-of-way of the New York Central Railroad. The museum had a few kiddie rides operating outside for the summer.

   I did a sharp turn to head down the short trail and was surprised to find a boarded-up interlocking tower. This structure would have housed a towerman who controlled movements between the two intersecting railroads (in this case the NYC and Erie) with signals and perhaps operated a switch or two in the area, using large, powerful levers. Interlocking towers used to be all over the country, until the operations became automated and were controlled from a distance at a railroad’s division headquarters. Most towers were eventually demolished, so finding one still standing, especially when tracks are no longer in place, is a bit rare.

   Just over the Erie Canal, in the town of Tonawanda, was the excellent Tonawanda Rails To Trails, an excellent newly-paved route with attractive plantings and road markers that included upcoming intersections and the distance to them. My only complaint would be that it is fairly short, as I turned west at its terminus on Kenmore Avenue after a little less than five miles.

   I made a left turn on Starin Avenue, into the Central Park section of Buffalo, to find a train station with an interesting history. Once a property of the Buffalo Cement Company on the Belt Line railroad, the station was leased by the New York Central. The railroad carried freight and passengers for about thirty years and helped the neighborhoods grow around the perimeter of the city during the early 1900s.

  Use of the Belt Line faded with the development of trolley routes and the increased use of automobiles, and of the original nineteen stations that were on the railroad, this is the only one that remains. The structure was sold to the Boy Scouts in the 1920s and was used as the headquarters for Troop 12 until after World War II. The station is now a private residence.

   I made a right turn on Amherst Street, then a right on Summit Avenue to reach the Martin House Complex designed by the great Frank Lloyd Wright. The series of connected buildings, constructed 1903-1905 for the family of businessman Darwin D. Martin, his sister Delta and her husband, are said to be the most important project from Wright’s Prairie School era.

   I thoroughly enjoyed the day’s ride, despite the rain break, and realized that, as I made my way past the entrance of the Buffalo Zoo in the northeast corner of Delaware Park, that the worst hill I encountered the whole way was the spiral bike/pedestrian bridge that carried the park trail over the busy Scajaquada Expressway! An additional plus was that, except for the local neighborhood streets, nearly the complete route was in a designated bike lane or on a pathway completely separated from traffic.

   Sue and I enjoyed our last vacation evening at a completely gluten-free restaurant outside of Lockport, and I collected some pastries and baked goods for the ride home the next day. We changed things up a bit from the usual New York Southern Tier drive along Interstates 86 and 81 to the PA Turnpike, and opted for the developing I-99/U.S. 15 corridor through upper-central Pennsylvania. The mountains around Tioga State Forest were beautiful, and the lighter traffic (but really not much slower) on the state highways in anthracite coal country made for a comparatively relaxing return home.