Blue Sky Mausoleum

'''Forest Lawn Cemetery''', whose vast, manicured green space full of sprawling shade trees and songbirds was one of his favorite places in Buffalo, is the site of the mausoleum Frank Lloyd Wright planned some time between 1925 and 1928 as the final resting place of his friend and benefactor, Darwin D. Martin. Though Martin's fortune was obliterated by the great stock market crash of 1929, the Blue-Sky Mausoleum was completed in 2004 to the original blueprints, and supervised by Anthony Puttnam, an architect trained by Wright himself. An exemplary adaptation of Wright's "organic" Prairie-style architecture, the mausoleum consists of twenty-four double-tier crypts contained in sprawling, horizontal slabs of white [[Vermont]] granite embedded into a gently sloping lawn next to '''Crystal Lake''', with a stout monolith crowning its summit. The architect described his design as "a burial facing the open sky — a dignified great headstone commune to all." For exceptionally dedicated admirers of Wright, crypts are available for purchase (call for pricing and other details). As for Martin himself, he died penniless in 1935 and was buried quietly in a different grave in Forest Lawn that was long left unmarked, but was finally adorned with a headstone in 2007 courtesy of the '''Forest Lawn Heritage Foundation'''.