Daniel J. Witek charged with stealing documents from the Buffalo History Museum

A few days ago, federal authorities arrested Daniel Jude Witek, 50, and charged him with stealing approximately forty letters and postcards from the Buffalo History Museum's A. Conger Goodyear Papers collection and attempting to sell them to a New York City autograph dealer.  The theft came to light when the dealer contacted the Buffalo History Museum in an effort to verify that the sale was aboveboard.

Witek was a Buffalo History Museum volunteer, and the complaint against him filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York indicates that he also had ties to several Buffalo-area public libraries. He is known to have used two aliases:  Daniel Mountbatten-Witeck and Walter Payne.

Witek has been released on his own recognizance pending trial.  One of the conditions of his release is that he must not visit the Buffalo History Museum, several other Buffalo-area cultural heritage institutions, or "any public or private establishment where rare books are."

Private collectors and cultural heritage professionals who suspect that Witek may have stolen items from their collections should contact the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation at 716-856-7800.

For your convenience, here's the criminal complaint against Witek.  It's an interesting little document.

Criminal Complaint Against Daniel Jude Witek 2013-05-23 by blweddle

And here's the document outlining the conditions of Witek's pretrial release:

Daniel Jude Witek Conditions of Release 2013-05-24 by blweddle

A walking tour of downtown Buffalo

Earlier today, I taught a digital preservation workshop for the Western New York Library Resources Council (WNYLRC).  I couldn't have asked for better hosts or for a better group of attendees, but by the end of the day I was absolutely drained.  I didn't want to spend the late afternoon and early evening vegetating in front of the TV in my suburban hotel room, so I headed into Buffalo -- a city I've driven through on countless occasions but have rarely had the chance to explore -- to check out the city's built environment. 

It's painfully evident that Buffalo has suffered hard times -- vacancies abound downtown and the East Side, the neighborhood separating downtown Buffalo from the suburb in which my hotel is located, is home to a striking number of boarded-up buildings and urban prairies.  However, it's also plain that Buffalo is an architectural gem.  Its downtown is home to a striking number of buildings that any city would be proud to claim as its own.

 Case in point:  the Electric Tower, formerly known as the Niagara Mohawk Building.  This white terracotta Beaux-Arts beauty was designed by James A. Johnson and was completed in 1912.

 This vacant former Waldorf Lunch building at 5 East Huron Avenue is much more modestly sized, and it may not look like much in the harsh sunlight of late afternoon . . . .

 . . . . However, when you get close to it, you see all kinds of fascinating details: a stunning typeface, subtle contrasts between matte and shiny metal, sleek Art Deco lines that would be right at home in Miami's South Beach neighborhood.

 Downtown Buffalo is home to a significant number of Art Deco buildings, most notably its City Hall (see below), but the former Buffalo Industrial Bank building at 17 Court Street is one of my favorites.  This not particularly good photo doesn't do it justice.

 It's only when you start examining its decorative details that its beauty snaps into focus.  Look at the frieze depicting the "gods of industry" between the second and third stories . . . .

 . . . . And this decorative metalwork at street level.

 The Liberty Building at 424 Main Street sits diagonally opposite the Buffalo Industrial Bank Building.  Designed by British architect Alfred Bossom and finished in 1925, it's unusual in that it's a) neoclassical in style and b) has two replicas of the Statue of Liberty sitting atop its roof.

 Both replicas were sculpted by Leo Lentilli.  One faces east, and the other faces west.

 As noted above, Buffalo City Hall, which dominates Niagara Square, is an Art Deco masterpiece.  It was designed by John Wade with the assistance of George Dietel and completed in 1931.  Owing to the strength and position of the late afternoon sun, I wasn't able to get a good picture of the building's front (you'll find a good one here), but even the back is spectacular.

Everywhere you look, interesting details pop out, among them the columns at the front entrance and the friezes by Albert Stewart.

The decorative tiles on the building's tower are stunning.

The statue of former Buffalo mayor and U.S. President Grover Cleveland that stands at the building's northwest corner was festooned with flowers; interestingly, the statue of former U.S. President Millard Fillmore situated at the building's southeast corner lacked any decoration.

The Buffalo City Court building immediately southeast of City Hall.  My first reaction upon seeing it:  "People of Buffalo, you have my sympathies."  The building, which was completed in 1974, exemplifies the much-reviled Brutalist style of architecture, and it doesn't harmonize well with City Hall, most of the other buildings that face Niagara Square, or the elegant white memorial to President William McKinley, who was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901.  However, as I walked around Niagara Square, it kept catching my eye.  As an abstract form, it is kind of interesting; I'm just grateful that I don't have to work inside it.

 Even though the curved exterior of the Michael J. Dillon U.S. Courthouse, which opened last year and is a certified "green" building, echoes the curvature of Niagara Square (which is more a traffic circle than a square), it also seems badly situated: it flanks the northwest corner of City Hall.  It's a nonetheless a refreshing change from the bland neoclassicalism of all too many newer federal government buildings, and in a different setting it would be nothing short of stunning.

A few blocks southeast of City Hall stands another architectural masterpiece:  The Prudential Building (formerly the Guaranty Building), which was designed by eminent Chicago architect Louis Sullivan and his colleague Dankmar Adler.  Completed in 1896, it is an early and superb example of the steel skeleton skyscraper.

Two of the building's exterior walls are covered with terracotta tiles, and the decorative elements incorporated into these tiles are astoundingly beautiful.

An unanticipated burst of rain brought my sightseeing to an abrupt end, but also brought a delightful surprise as I was driving back to my hotel.

I love spending time in Great Lakes cities -- I grew up outside of Cleveland and find the architecture and geography of all of the Great Lakes cities familiar and comforting --  I wish I could spend some more time here.

Larkin Building: business processes and the built environment

Newsweek recently published an intriguing article by Cathleen McGuigan that contrasts Frank Lloyd Wright's first and last major buildings: the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, which he began designing in 1902, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which was finished in 1959.

The Larkin Building was demolished in 1950, and to this day preservationists, architectural historians, Wright buffs throughout the world, and civic-minded Buffalonians mourn its loss. As images (here, here, and here) of the building reveal, Wright masterfully extended his Prairie style, which he developed while designing private homes, to a mammoth commercial space. In keeping with the company's unusually open corporate philosophy, the building's interior was dominated by an airy, well-light atrium, and Larkin Company executive sat at desks situated on the ground floor; as a result, clerks and other workers stationed on the upper floors could readily observe their bosses at work.

However, from an archivist's or records manager's point of view, the most fascinating things about the Larkin Building is that its design consciously reflected the business processes of the Larkin Company, which made soap and other laundry and bath products and sold them via mail order. McGuigan emphasizes that Wright's design ensured that the building "worked like a machine": the masses of orders that arrived each day were sorted in the basement, taken to the uppermost floors, and then distributed -- in some instances by workers on roller skates -- to the army of clerks who worked on the lower floors.

Wright's workflow-specific design was both innovative and extremely influential, but I wonder whether it helped to precipitate the Larkin Building's demise. Re-engineering such facilities can be extremely challenging, and some corporations and communities -- particularly those experiencing long-term economic contraction -- may not have the resources needed to do so.

As one of the Wright experts McGuigan interviewed noted, many of the day-today tasks associated with processing mail or Internet orders can be performed by a single person using a desktop computer. Given that there is no longer a pressing need to accommodate the physical movement of paper records, it's possible to configure employee workstations to meet the space available -- and physically separate the workers who process orders from those who pack and ship the boxes containing the desired goods. Such infinite flexibility might ultimately produce some great architecture, but for the most part it's likely to produce a vast number of charmless cubicle farms. However, given the utilitarian nature of many 19th- and early 20th-century mail order facilities, the cube farm trend might not be as objectionable as it might first seem.

Wright himself apparently took the destruction of the Larkin Building in stride: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, a former student of Wright and the current director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, told McGuigan that Wright was deeply pleased that three contractors were needed to demolish the building.

Readers interested in the history of the Larkin Building, Buffalo's industrial past, or good Web 2.0 content should be sure to check out the second reader comment that appears at the end of the article. It politely and knowledgeably corrects a couple of factual errors that crept into McGuigan's article. (Why can't all reader comments be this well-written and well-informed?) It will also take you to submitter Chris Hawley's superb blog, The Hydraulics, which focuses on the history of Buffalo's oldest industrial area. The Hydraulics is a great source of information about Buffalo's industrial past -- and a great example of how to blog about local history.