COOL STUFF
Buffalo rocks the world
By Gerald Mead; photos by kc kratt

The Irish Famine Memorial & the Grotto Shrine at OLV.

Over time, rock from around the world has found its way to Western New York. In an effort to leave no stone unturned, here are the stories behind a few of our more hard-edged immigrants.

Our Lady of Victory Basilica
In the elaborately ornamented interior of this Lackawanna landmark you will find the rustic Grotto Shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes. The Grotto is constructed of lava rock from Mount Vesuvius in Italy because the Basilica’s founder, Father Nelson Baker, insisted that this solemn area of the church be constructed of a material that was untouched by human hands.

Irish Famine Memorial
The centerpiece of this monument located adjacent to Buffalo’s Erie Basin Marina is a 12-foot tall stone—pink Connemara granite—from Carraroe, County Galway. The outermost ring of this circular memorial consists of thirty-six rough-hewn limestone blocks (representing Ireland’s thirty-two counties and four provinces) that were donated for the project by the City of Cork in Ireland. They were originally part of Penrose Quay in Cork harbor, the departure point for many Irish emigrants.

Japanese Garden of Buffalo
Located behind the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society alongside the edge of Mirror Lake, this tranquil garden was created in 1972 as a “horticultural gesture of friendship” between Buffalo and Kanazawa, Japan (one of our several international sister cites). In 1996 when the gardens were refurbished and rededicated, the city of Kanazawa donated hand carved Japanese-style granite lanterns as well as large stone benches to be incorporated into the redesign.
The Blocher Memorial at Forest Lawn & the Japanese Garden behind the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

Ellicott Square Building
There is Italian marble aplenty on the exteriors and detailed interiors of many historic buildings in Buffalo, but the Ellicott Square Building deserves special mention since its exquisite interior court designed by William Winthrop Kent, a New York City architect with ties to Buffalo, is composed of a staggering 23 million (yes, million) pieces of imported Italian marble. This stunning floor mosaic depicts sun symbols from civilizations around the world.

Blocher Memorial, Forest Lawn Cemetery
White Carrara marble, quarried from the Tuscany region of Italy and used by Michelangelo to sculpt his “David” and other works, is perhaps the most famous of Italian marbles. The exquisite life-sized sculptures of John Blocher, his wife, and their son inside this impressive granite and glass-walled mausoleum were carved (over a three-year period) in Carrara, Italy from 150 tons of their famed marble. The statues were shipped to Buffalo and installed in the monument in 1888.

The Rock Monument of Buffalo.

The Rock Monument of Buffalo
Stretching the premise of this article a bit, rocks from another world (prehistoric that is) are close at hand and in very public view. If you thought those boulders on the lawn behind the Albright-Knox were part of landscaping, you were wrong. They are actually a work in the museum’s collection titled Rock Monument of Buffalo by Alan Sonfist, commissioned by the Gallery for their 1980 exhibition “Made for Buffalo,” for which Sonfist collected boulders of stone indigenous to our region such as Lockport dolostone and Onondaga limestone from within a thirty-mile radius of the museum. The precise placement (and orientation) of the rocks echoes their actual distance/location in relationship to each other and the gallery. The artist, who consulted with the curator of geology at the Buffalo Museum of Science on the project, said he was trying to “make clear in one experience the geology of an entire area.”

Gerald Mead is an artist and educator whose childhood home had a “nostalgic” rock garden created with rocks his mother had collected from their family travels and camping trips.


SUBSCRIBE NOW

Back to the Table of Contents

Back to Top