Decline
Following the loss of the family fortune, due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Great Depression, and subsequently Darwin Martin's death in 1935, the family abandoned the house in 1937. Martin's son, D.R. Martin, had attempted to donate the house to the city or the university to be used as a library but his offer was rejected. By 1937 the complex had already begun to deteriorate, the walls at the front of the house were crumbling, and the conservatory hadn't been used for several years due to a leak in the heating system. Over the next two decades, it remained vacant, was considerably vandalized, and deteriorated further. In 1946 the city took control over the property in a tax foreclosure sale. Purchased in 1951 by the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, with plans to turn the complex into a summer retreat for their priests, it remained empty. Coincidentally 1951 was also the year Graycliff was sold to the Piarists, a Catholic teaching order. The complex was purchased privately in 1955 with the Martin House converted into three apartments, the grounds sub-divided, with the carriage house, conservatory, and pergola demolished, and a pair of apartment buildings constructed in the 1960s. In 1967 the complex was purchased by the University at Buffalo, for use as the University President's residence. The University continued the sub-division with the Barton House sold in 1967 and the Gardener's Cottage soon after. The University attempted restoration of the Martin House, although this consisted mainly of slight modernizations, several pieces of original furniture were located. The complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and then became a National Historic Landmark in 1986.
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Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)