Sean Kirst: Forty years beyond Guaranty salvation, a civic toast to the soul of our city

It will be 40 years, almost to the day, since the Guaranty Building reclaimed its rightful place as a crown jewel of Buffalo.

The 13-floor landmark is an architectural masterwork by Louis Sullivan, an American genius and “father of the skyscraper,” his plans reinforced by such brilliant colleagues as his partner, Dankmar Adler, and draftsman George Arthur Elmslie. The fundamental truth about the beauty they revealed in 1896?

No matter how often you walk in, the awe never wears off.

On Dec. 15, 1983, about 1,000 people jammed inside the Guaranty to celebrate the rescue and restoration of a treasure the late Ada Louise Huxtable, legendary architectural critic for the New York Times, once described as “one of this country’s most important works of architecture.”

Those words mattered not only because they were true but because of the influential guy who read them and acted on them, as we’ll explain.

The Huxtable piece appeared in the Times on Oct. 2, 1977. During that same period, one Buffalo Evening News article about United Founders, then owner of the building, carried this headline: “Owners will seek power to raze Prudential Bldg.,” as the Guaranty was often called.

A separate piece from 1978, in the Courier-Express, used a haunting expression in assessing how much time that landmark, despite its 1975 listing on the National Register of Historic Places, might have left:

The demolition clock.

As in, the demolition clock that in 1950 claimed the Larkin Administration Building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, to Buffalo’s everlasting sorrow.

As in, the demolition clock that in 1968 ran out for the majestic Erie County Savings Bank, once a neighbor – just imagine that – to the Guaranty.

As in, the demolition clock that most recently chimed for the old Great Northern grain elevator – a towering and innovative contemporary to the Guaranty that’s now lost from the industrial skyline.

Thankfully, that clock never sounded for the building at Church and Pearl that one Austrian architect, as part of the campaign to save the Guaranty, called “this monument in the history of modern genius.”

It was the final – and arguably finest – collaboration of Adler & Sullivan, the Chicago firm whose works embraced a vertical canvas. The Buffalo connection was locked in by Hascal Taylor, a successful oilman from Stockton, near Fredonia, who envisioned a nationally memorable landmark in the heart of Buffalo.

The dream came to be in 1896, though Taylor died before his name could go on the building. Yet Sullivan, the man he hired, followed through on creating a global statement of such meaning that international visitors routinely travel to Buffalo to see this high expression of Sullivan’s creed:

Form follows function.

Peter Flynn of Flynn Battaglia Architects has served as project architect on four Guaranty restorations in the last 40-some years. He describes the façade as evoking the delicate vines of a terra cotta grove of trees, “rising above the city and blooming at the cornice.”

That baked clay exterior was restored in hundreds of places, in scalpel-like-detail, by Boston Valley Terra Cotta of Orchard Park, whose chairman of the board, John Krouse, describes the painstaking challenge as “an honor.”

That work became a soulful remedy, long after a 1974 fire on the top floors left the Guaranty at risk of demolition – peril reinforced by years of neglect.

Over the years, there had also been such mind-boggling “renovations” as smothering an entranceway of exquisite tiling with the kind of paneling that people in the 1950s and 1960s often used on basement walls. The unintentional benefit, Flynn said, was that it protected the precious work beneath.

That all-too-close-to-demolition history is now enshrined on a timeline in a first-floor visitors center created by the owners, Hodgson Russ. Last week, Zuffranieri led a tour, from basement to roof with a heart-of-downtown view, that included Flynn, originally of Cannon Design and now a partner with architect Ron Battaglia; Krouse, of Boston Valley; building operations director Nate Melas; and Hodgson Russ partner Sujata Yalamanchili.

Their guest of honor was Julia Czerniak, new dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, a pilgrim setting foot inside the Guaranty for the first time. She paused on a stairwell with a view of what Flynn calls a “prismatic” stained glass skylight and a lobby tesserae, a wildly intricate tile mosaic.

“You look up and you see the remarkable attention to every surface,” said Czerniak, absorbing it all, only a few feet away from a detailed ceiling light fixture shaped like a turtle’s shell.

After the retirement of UB architecture dean Robert Shibley, Czerniak arrived at UB last summer from Syracuse University, where for years she had overseen a center specifically focused on design and the mesh of forces that can transform upstate cities.

She was drawn here by the chance to lead an architectural school that she said combines elements of policy and real estate with a powerful vision for architectural design – elements, she said, that can be collective engines toward community growth and equity.

The Guaranty, to her, is a luminous statement that speaks not only to heritage, but to possibility.

“There is such an amazing design legacy,” Czerniak said of Buffalo.

Even in a community where Wright, H.H. Richardson and other masters worked, the Guaranty assumes the aura of a terra cotta shrine.

Terry Gilbride, a Hodgson Russ partner beginning a new role as chief legal officer with the Buffalo Bills, paused Wednesday by one of Sullivan’s gleaming elevators to reflect on the close call that only amplifies why the building means so much.

A half-century ago, the Guaranty almost came down. Buffalo’s architectural treasury has emerged as “our legacy to the world,” Gilbride said, and to level the Guaranty would have meant repeating what happened with Wright’s irreplaceable Larkin building: A civic blunder of unimaginable scale.

Instead, barely, the Guaranty survived. The lasting message of that rescue, rekindled by every visit to the building, resonates with the emotion Czerniak mentioned almost immediately, in the lobby:

Hope.

While the Guaranty was saved by many relentless true believers – far too many, unfortunately, to name each one here – the undisputed quarterback was the late Jack Randall, an associate architect in UB’s architecture school. He spearheaded an effort to save Adler & Sullivan’s Wainwright Building in St. Louis, then brought his indomitable energy to the effort in Buffalo.

The key moment is linked to that Huxtable piece for the New York Times in 1977, which sounded a widespread alarm about the threat to the Guaranty. It was read by U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a national figure with a passion for memorable American architecture.

He traveled to see the building that same week, and in classic this-will-absolutely-spotlight-the-problem-fashion, promptly said: “I would rather see Mount Vernon torn down, or the White House.”

Moynihan’s point was that those national landmarks are essentially high-profile derivatives of much older styles from abroad, while the Guaranty was an utterly American piece of vision and imagination that served as “the soul of that great city of ours.”

His persistence had a result: After much governmental and financial jockeying, the building was saved by some developers from Cleveland and New York City known as the Jeffersonian Corp. They threw a reopening celebration 40 years ago that included Randall, Moynihan, Mayor Jimmy Griffin, Erie County Executive Ed Rutkowski and more than 1,000 others.

Still, the Guaranty wasn’t financially secure until the 2000s, when the Hodgson Russ partners – understanding the magnitude of the Guaranty in Buffalo – made a decision to buy it out of foreclosure and to invest $20 million in transforming all 13 floors into the law firm’s home.

Zuffranieri said some partners argued it was the wrong move, preferring the suburbs or a new build. “But the majority felt strongly that it was the place to be,” said Zuffranieri, who described how such details as circular windows or the magnificent lobby always touch off the same reaction:

“You feel as though you’re part of a beautiful work of art, every day.”

Flynn, the longtime architect, was maybe 30 when he walked into the building for the first time. He immersed himself in learning about Sullivan, whose mother would send her child into the woods to sketch natural scenes – early training that Flynn believes blossomed into the astounding façade in Buffalo.

At 76, now intimate with almost every detail of the landmark, Flynn sees the 40-year anniversary of a great treasure’s restoration as a reminder of many lessons, but of one gift above all others:

The building, this one-of-a-kind creative miracle, is here for good.