Martin Edic’s friend, Lucia Guarino, had the nicest stop on the Landmark Society’s tour this weekend. Her Capron Street condo in a former canal warehouse is fabulously decorated, has a perfect layout and a rooftop terrace with a great view of downtown. And she was there in person to welcome the throngs. The tour wasn’t as spectacular as last year’s but it did get us out to new Edge of the Wedge lofts, the Cub Room and Local Meat Market.
It was hard for me, an ex-Catholic, to appreciate the Claude Bragdon designed, Arts & Crafts, Universalist Church. Where is all the iconography, the Stations of the Cross, the heavenly aspirations? It was kind of fun to get into the old National Clothing Store where the new Holiday Garden Inn has set up shop. The National was always a step above Sibley’s and McCurdy’s. I remember my mom picking out a pretty adventurous sport coat for my Confirmation. I was nine or ten and had some input but she had great taste. This was a wide striped cream and maroon number making me the loudest note in the class photos.
Our First Friday route has to be rethought with the closing of Lumiere’s gallery. The photo gallery was one of our favorite stops. R Gallery, next door, had a solo exhibition of sculpture and installation by RIT alumni and Dedalus Foundation Fellowship recipient Cecily Culver. Her work “aims to shift viewer perspective and celebrate the mundane phenomena of the everyday” and it did that.
Pete Monacelli’s “Midtown Plaza” works on paper at Richard Margolis’s next door gallery looked fantastic. And on top of that Pete was holding court with a small crowd gathered around him in the center of the room when we got there, talking first about Midtown, his love of the city, and the changes he has seen in his years here. The conversation quickly swerved to Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons and then Thomas Merton’s letters to Ad Reinhardt. And then the many facets of Thomas Merton who was born one hundred years ago. Someone said, “he sounds like a Unitarian.” Please, the Catholics need all the help they can get. There is a show of Merton’s “Zen” photos at Nazareth College, up until November 4th.
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