martinhouseclr

122 DARWIN D. MARTIN HOUSE // CULTURAL LANDSCAPE REPORT lawn. These trees all appear to be unintended vegetative growth, beginning during the peak of abandonment at the City’s tax-foreclosure acquisition of the property. Succeeding maintenance of the landscape, likely on an extremely limited basis on behalf of the City, and somewhat more thoroughly during Sebastian Tauriello’s ownership, would have probably ignored these trees as an expected part of the landscape design. Likely due to mounting maintenance costs, Sebastian Tauriello subdivided the remaining land of property circa 1955. 260 A property encompassing most of the main house was kept by Tauriello, while the remaining parcels were sold to a developer who, in 1962, demolished the conservatory, garage and pergola and built three apartment buildings known as the Woodward Gardens. 261 The pergola was truncated just beyond the Martins’ interior hallway and closed in. A survey prepared in 1963 by Krehbiel and Krehbiel Engineers shows the various parcel boundaries at the time. [Fig. 115, 116, 117] The survey reveals that both the landlocked parcels behind 147 and 143 Jewett, as well as the roughly 28-foot wide strip of land running north-south between the original Martin House property and Victorian house at 143 Jewett, was in fact owned by Martin and thus Tauriello. The 260 National Register of Historic Places, Inventory Nomination Form: Darwin D. Martin House, George Barton House, Gardener’s Cottage, Buffalo, Erie County, New York, National Park Service , United States Department of the Interior, 3. 261 Ibid., 4. survey also indicates that the area subdivided off and sold included a relatively sizable portion of land along the original western boundary, part of which contained the western porte-cochere support and foundation. The land area seems to have been required for vehicular access to a parking area supporting the apartments, and indeed, it served as the vehicular access to the apartment complex. With the demolition of the structures, any landscape associated with the conservatory, garage, and pergola would have been removed, including the significant elms on that area of the property and most probably the Barton House elms. The elms that did remain on the property, including one of the earliest planted near the European Beech west of the driveway as well as the elm at the south end of the Summit terrace, seemed not yet impacted by the scourge of Dutch Elm Disease making its way through the northeast at this time. However, as is clear from summer season photographs taken as documentation for the National Park Service’s Historic American Buildings Survey, both of these remaining elm trees were in decline in 1965 and dead by 1969. Likely their death was due to Dutch Elm Disease, made even more susceptible due to the stress brought on by apartment construction /soil compaction. In fact, by the date of the HABS survey, only one street tree elm remained in existence and was visually in poor health. Though the garage, conservatory and pergola were removed it does become clear by the 1965 HABS photos [Fig. 118-122] that Sebastian Fig. 115, top Rear of Martin House, looking east with truncated pergola after demolition, photo c. 1969. Fig. 116, bottom Map of apartment buildings overlaid onto former Martin House arrangement, prepared with DEIS, 2000.