This past week I made my fourth visit to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. It is still one of the most romantic spots I know of, though I was a bit turned off by a few new developments there. The first, and this is becoming a world-wide trend, is that they have stopped allowing photographs inside the home. This is not because photos damage anything, but because of the time it takes for 15 amateur photographers per tour to take photos of everything with their cell phones and point and shoots. Your typical point and shoot camera is incapable of taking a sharp no flash picture in the low light conditions inside the house, but people try anyways, and I guess it slows down the tours (I'll blame dipshits with cell phones for this one). The second off putting thing is that the trustee of the house and property, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, has started using the tour as an opportunity to solicit memberships with their group. This is tastelessly done at the end of the tour as the guide directs you into the "servants quarters" that have been remodeled into a sitting room with a large plasma TV. For the next five minutes guests are forced to watch a promotional DVD about the organization and then a woman asks everyone to join. This might be ok if the tour was free, but my third and final gripe is that the 40 minute tour costs $22 per person! It wasn't long ago when you could go to an amusement park all day for less than that. The Conservancy also has legal language on the back of each ticket that makes it illegal to post photos of the house on a blog. The more hits I get, the more likely I'll get sued. Tell a friend.
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