the next gyration

Purl

settle, suck, sigh

cure

crank

Rise.

Like plenty of thirty-something Indiana boys at the turn of the last century, Harry Richard Wait retraced the path his father and his father’s father had taken in the years leading up to the American Civil War. Instead of heading further west, he followed his birth state’s grain to a new home back east. Harry Wait is a builder, so he goes where they’re building–brings his lady Blanch to booming Buffalo, N.Y., where he might make a name for himself. Harry R. Wait, Architect and Engineer.

The early morning is cool along the Buffalo River. It is October 15, 1906, an overcast Monday in the middle of a damp and chilly autumn, frequent rains occasionally turning into snow–the sort of weather that precedes a warm but temperamental Buffalo winter. But the weather, the boats on the river, the sound of laboring men, the slow slopping of concrete in heavy buckets, the casual clang of steel bars tossed in bundles to the ground ... Harry R. Wait hears it all distantly. He hasn’t a clue what he is about to accomplish, what events his untested calculations will set off–but Harry knows, feels the scale of the project better than anyone else, better than the men at work for him or the men who hired him or the men who hired the men who hired him.

The men will work hard; the work will be done in 10 days; the weather will hold off its worst.

The concrete starts pouring as soon as the sun breaks the smoky blue-green bank across the river. It pours for an hour without stopping. Then another. The workers know what to do without Harry’s direction: they crank, and circular wood-and-steel contraptions–called slipforms–rise slightly, leaving room in the beds for more concrete, poured at a rate that allows the concrete below to begin curing but never to harden completely. Slowly, steadily, one solid mass rises. Harry R. Wait–of medium height and build, a “medium” sort of man, the sort who never stands out in flat, open, busy places like this, without even a Larkin Company soapbox to stand on–watches the masses rise and feels it is himself rising. The forms are barely to the laborers’ waistlines, but already Harry is elevated, ascendant, enormous; smooth and wind-scorning and capacious; benevolent and terrible. The slipforms rise another inch, the shadows shift, and the hardening concrete lightens almost to match the shade of Harry R. Wait’s gray eyes.

The following appeared in the classifieds of The Buffalo Courier on Tuesday and Wednesday September 18 and 19, 1906:

“Structural draftsman for a few weeks–apply James Stewart & Company. At American Malting Company new plant, Childs St.”

Then, in the papers of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday October 9, 10, and 11, the same operation called for union structural ironworkers and union bricklayers to labor 10 hour days for an unspecified duration.

There would be no newspaper illustrator’s sketches, no screaming headlines or pithy, modest quotes to announce the construction of the American Elevator at the foot of Childs Street. The grain shipping and milling trade in Buffalo was already making too much noise: wooden silos exploding, steel silos toppling under heavy lake winds; men falling, suffocating, fighting, drowning, disappearing; more elevators rising every day; more men needed. But this was different. The American Malting Company’s project in autumn of 1906, heralded only by an inch in the classifieds, would set off revolutions in construction, shipping, the Great Lakes economies, and architecture worldwide.

One hundred and eleven years after the concrete started pouring, the silos are nearly noiseless. It’s a warm October afternoon slipping quickly into evening. Canada geese fly over in a low, loose formation, more like notes in a Charlie Parker riff than a V. Their shadows–like Dizzy’s accompaniment–seem to dip in and out of the sides of the silos; normally bone-white, now sun-sanctified to something else, an inexpressible shade of American yellow. The man at the head of our party holds up his hand and says:

“Wait a minute.”

Noiseless, but never silent. Wearing classic Levis, well-used black boots, a decorated belt, bright white button down, broad cream cowboy’s crown, and a gray mustache just barely big enough to hide his smile, Rick Smith leans out over the edge of the concrete bank. Closer to the water I hear what Rick hears: the steady hush of grain pouring out of the still active Standard Elevator across the Buffalo River and into the hold of the massive Manitoulin, a Canadian bulk carrier 202 meters long and 23 across, with a deadweight of 27,550 tons. Because of the unusual acoustics of the place–what kayakers and others familiar with the silos call “the canyon”–the transfer of tens of thousands of bushels of grain is not nearly as loud as the shrill voice of a man further up the river. He appears, tiny as a bath toy beside the Manitoulin’s humming hull, shouting nothing into a megaphone. Next, a flat barge appears, monstrous, proceeding heavily under a gargantuan riot of lake-tossed wood. Great bleached and twisted tree-wrack–mighty Manitoulin–baseball capped and life-jacketed inaction figure–and the silos all around. For a moment, the scene is exactly what it looks like: A Buffalonian pilots a boat backwards across blank greeny water, shouting urgent directions to a barge of broken trees, which obeys.

Until nine boys in a shell break the logic of the image, and rearrange it. It is a crew team–the man in the boat their coach, guiding them between the cargo vessel and the barge. The Buffalo River–once a de facto industrial sewer–is navigable, inoffensive to the senses, and, on a late October Monday afternoon, crowded. Undeterred, a trio of recreational kayakers enters the frame to contest with the commercial boats and stringy training boys for their claim to the waterway.

On the opposite dock Rick Smith leans out with his hands on his hips, head cocked, letting the whole slow moving picture pass over and through him. “You’ve never seen this before,” he says. He pauses, and one side of his smile rises with realization. “Me, neither.”

Take away the cowboy boots and the hat. Subtract the money invested, lost, invested again. Shave off the mustache. Vanish untold tons of steel and concrete. Burn, erase, and delete every article with a headline that reads anything like “Can These Eerie, Abandoned Silos Help Save Buffalo?” Finally, drive a dark green 1973 Delta 88 Oldsmobile convertible into the river. You’re left with this: a man leaning full-body into an experience, saying, “You’ve never seen this before. Me, neither.”

That’s my biography of Richard Smith III: “You’ve never seen this before. Me, neither.”

But a Wikipedia entry would include the following:

Richard Smith III, born August 13, 1961. Heir to Rigidized Metals of Buffalo, N.Y. First impression of the silos was: “noisy.” Star squash player at Nichols School and then Penn. Globe trotter: Southern Africa, Ireland, San Francisco, Mexico–as a salesman, country-bluesman, squash pro–“various and sundry stuff.” Came home in ’98, then in ’06 bought a complex of disused and neglected grain silos. Called this “Silo City.” Hatched big plans for an ethanol operation. When corn power fell through, lost some money, but said “yes” to a succession of nutty youngsters who wanted to use his site on the cheap for their strange rituals. Wound up a kultur hero–patron, auteur, entrepreneur. Steward of a ruin, a temple, a theatre, a thriving habitat. There’s One Buffalo. There’s the Other Buffalo. And then there’s Silo City. That one’s Rick’s–you might call him the “mayor.”

All the foregoing is necessary to contextualize Rick Smith. But that line–“You’ve never seen this before. Me, neither.”–this is more precise and more accurate a description of the man. Consider this:

About a hundred people show up to what was once the world’s busiest grain port, now a ruin (in other parlance, a premises liability nightmare), to see a theatrical performance. They sit on plastic folding chairs in what appears to be an active construction site, dark for the night, while bodies move across the gravel, and prerecorded vocal and atmospheric tracks create an unsettling soundscape played against the sides of the concrete canyon. There is no discernible plot. Finally, after an hour or more, some in the audience notice that the lights in large CAT excavators far beyond the “stage,” inanimate until now, have turned on, releasing tiny pools of yellow into the steeping summer night. The machines rumble to life, turn, and advance upon the audience, claw-tipped arms aloft. Just when their threat becomes an actual, present danger, they turn–toward each other–and (union drivers, not actors or choreographers, at the controls) they begin an elaborate, mind-bending ballet.

This actually happened. Rick orchestrated none of it–but without him, it couldn’t have happened.

“You’ve never seen this before. Me, neither.”

Despite its position on the Great Lakes, Buffalo was not destined to be an agricultural hub and an industrial and commercial powerhouse. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 created the possibility for change, but even this didn’t guarantee Buffalo’s position and prosperity, as railroads soon upstaged DeWitt Clinton’s donkey-ridden and much-ridiculed ditch. But chance–and, perhaps, something in the city’s character–sustained a string of innovations that supercharged the region for more than a half-century.

Traditionally, Irish immigrants carried grain from ships to storage buildings, called “elevators.” Storage capacity and transfer speed placed absolute limits on the amount of grain a port could process. Buffalo entrepreneur Joseph Dart and mechanical engineer Robert Dunbar worked through 1842 and ‘43 on the steam-powered Dart Elevator, which would replace, or at least redistribute, human labor. “Mr. Dart. I am sorry for you,” local forwarding merchant Mahlon Kingman told his friend. “I have been through that mill. It won’t do. Remember what I say. Irishmen’s backs are the cheapest elevators ever built.”

Kingman was, of course, wrong. When the schooner Pennsylvania unloaded the Dart Elevator’s first bulk shipment of grain (1,600 bushels or more), this early modern engineering–conjuring steam out of new shipments of anthracite coal from northwestern Pennsylvania–unloaded the hold in hours. The job would have taken Buffalo’s Irish laborers a week. The increase in shipping volume was staggering. In 1889 alone, Buffalo moved 118,273,430 bushels of grain. More innovations–in transportation, cleaning, and storage–followed. Dozens of the enormous elevators sprang up: their blank and blocky towering flanks and somber sloping roofs totally transformed the city’s character, imparting an air at once medieval and fantastically futuristic. By 1931, Buffalo boasted 21 waterfront elevators with a combined storage capacity of 41,788,000 bushels, according to a report that year. That report, the New York Times announced, ranked Buffalo the greatest grain distributing point in the United States and the largest flour milling center in the world. At its peak, the city was home to 38 elevators at a storage capacity of 47,000,000 bushels.

But those elevators were of a different sort from the ones that Dart and Dunbar pioneered.  Wooden and steel elevators made headlines statewide through the late 1800s and early 1900s–toppling, catching fire, even exploding. Concrete–an ancient, not a modern, material, the same stuff Roman laborers used in 128 CE to construct the Pantheon’s enormous dome–completed the architectural and economic transformation. Finding inspiration in Minneapolis’ first reinforced concrete elevator, built in 1900 by engineer C. F. Haglin, Harry R. Wait boldly improved upon the design in 1906–the same year the architect Harry K. Thaw shot his competitor Stanford White on a rooftop in New York, the same year Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administrative Building was completed just two miles northeast of where Wait was working. Wait’s laborers constructed the first reinforced concrete elevator on Buffalo’s waterfront–the American Elevator, at the western edge of what is today Smith’s Silo City complex. But they did not just repeat Haglin’s accomplishments–instead, they performed the world’s first “monolithic pour,” continuously pouring concrete into a slipform frame for 10 straight days. This allowed for incredibly strong concrete towers to rise higher than ever before, smooth and seamless from base to crown. Thaw, White, and Wright might be grabbing the headlines–but Harry Wait’s contribution to architecture that year was, to put it gently, comparable to theirs. Out went the boxy wooden bins of Dart and Dunbar, prone to rats, insects, and fires–now, Buffalo’s waterfront would be ribbed with concrete.

It is fitting that I speak tonight in Buffalo, a city that enjoys today as it has for the past 18 years the honor of being the capital of flour milling in these United States of America. In its role as the leading flour production and export center of our land, Buffalo serves the Nation and the world. The story of how it attained this enviable, and honored, position is testimony to the vision and the daring of many men, and to the business dynamics of a free economy. When we examine the chronicle of Buffalo’s greatness as a milling center we find recorded there the climax of an exciting and dramatic contest of men with nature, of the hard-won battle to wrest riches from the soil, and of hopes and fears intermingled with success and, yes, with the occasional failure.

All of these pages of the past, however, are colored with one dominant characteristic. It is the desire for service that burned in the hearts of those who led the industry. It continues today, that conviction of service, as it thrived in the beginning.

— Buffalo–Its Flour Milling Heritage, Harry A. Bullis, The Newcomen Society of England, 1948

“We look at the concrete as sacred,” Rick says as we explore the City. “For us, that’s what the magic is about the site.”

Walking with a slight in-turn of his left boot and a hitch in his right hip, he gives a tour of the distant past, yesterday, and the near future at once, as if they are all happening, right now, as if anything that occurred might reoccur at any moment–and as if the silos’ numberless possibilities are already unfolding somewhere inside the man-cast caverns around us.

“There,” he says, pointing, “is where Janeane Garafalo fell out of the window.” He’s talking about a stunt in The American Side, a movie filmed here. “That’s the coal house,” he says of the same building’s much earlier use. At some point, he says, it will hold the City’s first modern bathrooms. Rick has slowly and methodically built up Silo City–“living with it,” he says repeatedly, proceeding with tactile care through each and every decision.

Standing not far back is a lean, weathered man in a well-worn t-shirt bearing the logo of 43North, the competition that each year gives $5 million to startups that put down roots in Buffalo. This is “Swannie” Jim Watkins, He and Rick met at the Swannie House on Ohio Street, a Buffalo tavern dating back to the city’s donnybrook days of ascendant shipping and industrial stature. Swannie is the first person to greet me when I visit Silo City. He breaks off from a group of Hollywood location scouts, smiling from behind plain round glasses and patting at a leonine beard, close in shade to the silos at a certain hour’s light, save for a mustache patch the color of crisping cigarette paper.

A Buffalo native, born May 5, 1948, Swannie was living in Allentown when he met Rick; today, he’s here nearly 24/7 as on-site steward and caretaker, based in a shed at the center of the site. Rick speaks of “living with” the site. In Swannie Jim Watkins’ case, this is not philosophy, but fact. On a later visit to the City, Swannie welcomes me into his shed, where he’s been encamped since 2001, and which boasts all the comforts of home: a TV and wood-burning stove; a fridge stocked with Budweisers, Coronas, and Labatts; an American Pit Bull Terrier named Gonzo; and a sizeable and eclectic library. Here year-round for the better part of a decade, Swannie has an intimate understanding of the silos and their environment that even Rick may not be able to match. “I’m lucky enough to see the nuances through the year,” he says. He speaks of rhythms and repetitions, patterns of geese and other wildlife, the shadows that the elevators cast on the ground and on each other.

Sitting inside his shed under a bright shop light, Swannie is the silos’ Thoreau: He rests his Corona on a cluttered workbench–ash tray, dusty coffee machine, another empty beer, bottles of sriracha and Cholula hot sauce, a hardback copy of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Book Five)–and uses a red long-stemmed candle lighter to reignite an unfiltered cigarette. Tomorrow he will host a woman filming dancers in one of the silos; he’ll also check in on an architectural student attempting to digitize one silo in Marine A. He speaks of a future performance by Buffalo soul singer Drea D’Nur; an elaborate, mysterious art project; and a new approach to Boom Days, the annual sacre du printemps that Rick and Swannie have hosted at the site since 2012, celebrating the removal of the ice boom from the mouth of the Niagara.

The volume and variety of daily activity at Silo City is staggering–and belied by the easygoing and modest manner of the people who own, operate, care for, and “live with” the site. At the same time, daily traffic is limited; much of the interest in the site comes from artists, academics, and people outside Buffalo; and few changes are permanent. The silos have formed a vortex of creative activity in the past decade, but one still gets the sense, alone among the buildings, that Rick and Swannie could leave, the poets and dancers and troubadours could fail to show up for the next event, and the site would be little changed. It would still be a ruin, relaxing back into obscurity and silence, awaiting … something.

Speaking with Swannie underscores an obvious and important contrast with the only other currently active silo redevelopment project: Riverworks, the Earl Ketry and Doug Swift food, sports, and entertainment complex further up the river, on Ganson Street. Riverworks boasts a concert venue, arcade, four bars, spacious deck, boat dock, and full kitchen. The site will soon be home to a brewery. On any given summer afternoon you might find multiple bachelorette parties, kids in tae-kwon-do suits, hockey players and curlers, roller derby dames, all milling about. Buffalonians are tying up the kayaks. They are waiting for their turn on the zipline. They are drinking juicy local IPAs under the silos–unlike Rick’s wrapped in the rich, recognizable, royal blue of the world’s best-selling Canadian pilsner, owned by the Belgian-Brazilian-English Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (trading as BUD on the NYSE): Labbatt.

Riverworks is a part of Buffalo now–it is undeniably a manifestation of something in Buffalo’s character and tastes. But so is Silo City.

He may not have hockey rinks, but Rick Smith speaks with pride and unplumbable wonder about the slipform technique of silo-building, the acoustics of his elevators, the way the German painter Anselm Kiefer reacted to them, the number of bushels some piece of scrap metal once helped to hold, or the variety of species of wildflower in his Meadows. Inside the Perot Malting Elevator he steps around treacle-black puddles–foully sweet- and sour-smelling–viscous and thick, “like molasses,” he says. It’s rotten grain. He points to a simple, clean wooden platform, no more than nine feet wide and six feet deep, in the northwest corner.

“That was the first stage we built,” he says.

Everyone in Buffalo is sharing a new article–about Buffalo. Touting “cheap real estate and affordable labor” as well as a diversifying economy, the reporter notes that “banks are building glass and marble towers downtown” and that “pricey condominiums” built along the lake “all have been purchased.” A local politician says that “people are genuinely sanguine and proud of the resurgence here.” The reporter also turns a keen eye south, spotting still-hot embers under the ashes of the city’s collapsed manufacturing and shipping plants. “[O]ne can see the hulking remains of the Bethlehem Steel mill ... like a set out of ‘Batman,’ full of slag heaps, idle smokestacks and dark, decaying buildings,” he writes. “But during the last five years, part of the site has been reclaimed.”

Sound familiar?

The date is July 19, 1990, and the story is running in The New York Times–not on Buzzfeed. There are no “top 10 reasons,” and the word “millennial” does not appear, but beyond these superficial points, the narrative is eerily familiar to those who have lived through Buffalo’s latest “boom”–even more so when you consider that this New York Times article came just a few months after the Buffalo News declared that our city had “rediscovered its waterfront.”

It bears repeating: the year was 1990.

This city goes through “rebirths” the way young people fall in love: as if for the first time, every time. Silo City was conceived at the tail end of a slump between amnesiac renascences. Only in fixing this process of love and neglect, hope and cynicism, squarely in sight–understanding what is always the same, and what might be different–can we make any case that Silo City is special.

Buffalo’s fortunes began to turn in the 1930s, as new transportation technologies lessened demand for the canal. Further economic and urban planning misfortunes, some within our control (NYPA, ruinous demolition and construction choices) and some not (state corporate and individual taxes, costs of labor and construction) pushed young, educated people out of the city, while drawing in the poor, as population trend data reveal. From a peak of around 560,000 in the 50s, the city’s population fell to near 250,000 (and as of this writing, that number continues to fall). Buffalo’s tax base was socked while services remained stretched out across a region built up to hold a population twice that of the city’s current size.

Will The Last Worker Out Of Western New York Please Turn Out The Light?

—Billboard near Buffalo’s City Hall, 1983

Since the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, which most agree was the death-knell of Buffalo’s shipping dominance and silo- and factory-based labor force, it has seemed like we’ve been shuffling a deck missing all its face cards. Our discourse as a community has been defined by a double-helix of high-pitched hope and knee-jerk cynicism.

Some have pointed to Rick’s silos as evidence for the latest theory of Buffalo’s rejuvenation. Rick seems to believe that a change is occurring, but his optimism is cautious. “We haven’t even begun to turn the corner yet,” he says. The first step to any sustained rebirth will happen when 25- to 35-year-olds “like where they live, think it’s cool.” Then, and only then, can we bring back the “viable businesses” that could keep them.

For the third or fourth time since I’ve met him, Rick reminds me that we’re standing in what was once the world’s largest grain port, and the world’s largest producer of flour.

“We were the best at something,” he says. “Let’s try to get back to that.”

In 1998, Rick Smith capped a long period of globe trotting by returning to Buffalo, eventually to take over Rigidized Metals, an operation at 658 Ohio Street–just past Childs–that the first Rick Smith, our Rick Smith’s grandfather, founded in 1940.

Eight years later, Rick was looking for an easement. Seeking to expand his business, Rick needed to utilize property owned by ConAgra. The head of ConAgra real estate at the time was P.J. Morgan, former Nebraska state senator, mayor of Omaha, aviation executive, industrial real estate millionaire–and, as it happened, one of Rick’s old friends. Getting an easement should have been easy–but Morgan demanded a sale. Rick paid $120,000 for three elevator complexes: Lake and Rail, Perot, and American. He paid another $40,000 for Marine A later in the summer of 2006, and bought a few more parcels from CSX over the years.

“What the hell are you going to do with these things?” he thought, even as he signed the paperwork.

Kevin Townsell–owner of the former Shannon’s Pub on Niagara Falls Boulevard, now the developer behind the 500-seat Hofbrauhaus slated to come to downtown Buffalo–went in with Rick when the pair hatched a plan to use the silos to store corn for ethanol production. Rick had also met Swannie Jim Watkins around this time.

They called this endeavor “RiverWright.” There was talk of an $80 million investment, employment for up to 65 people, production of 110 million gallons of ethanol. The plans fell through, though, and Rick has to assume all of RiverWright’s debt–well over $1 million, he says–to retain complete ownership of the properties. The silos looked more and more like Quixotic windmills of the Industrial Age–and Rick, El Gaucho de la Triste Figura. The only justification for his purchase at that point was that the site had returned to “local hands.”

But locals have not historically been the silos’ champions. Calls for the demolition of some or all of the silos waxed and waned throughout the later 20th century (notably in 1976, when Laverne “Butchie” Regelin Jr. fell to his death in the remote Concrete Central Elevator, another Harry R. Wait accomplishment, and Buffalo’s single largest silo complex). For many Buffalonians, the silos represented tragedy, expense, and an ever-present bitter reminder of past glory, comfort, and stability. For still others, they were merely part of an unappealing landscape. “It’s important to hold on to symbols of the past,” said Patrick M. Marren, Buffalo’s Director of Economic Development, to the New York Times in 1984, when Rep. Harry J. Nowak and others were again calling for the silos to be demolished. “But how many symbols do you need?”

Observers outside the region saw something else. Leading exponents of European modernist architecture effused about the elevators in their publications. Major fans included Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus; Erich Mendelsohn, pioneer of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne; and Le Corbusier, who effused that “the American grain elevator and factories” were “the magnificent FIRST FRUITS of the new age,” and declared that “THE AMERICAN ENGINEERS OVERWHELM WITH THEIR PRECISE CALCULATIONS OUR EXPIRING ARCHITECTURE.” English architectural historian and UB professor Reyner Banham called the silos an “Industrial Stonehenge,” while others compared them to the pyramids of Ancient Egypt.

You can get from Buffalo to the Bauhaus in one easy move.

—Reyner Banham

Landscape architect Lynda Schneekloth, who arrived in Buffalo in 1982, approached Rick in 2011 about using the silo complex for a cocktail party for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual meeting in October of that that year. At this point, Rick was still without any long term plan for the silos. But the enthusiasm of the attendees–people who knew something about restoring or “activating” abandoned or neglected sites–so impressed Rick that he began to imagine radically different uses for his concrete resources.

Your ruins are better than my ruins.

—Anselm Kiefer

Rick and Swannie both point to a second pivot. This happened when local academics Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian brought the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko to the site, in October 2012. The way Swannie tells it, the party had been conversing in English the entire time, until they progressed a few steps into the Perot Malting Elevator–where Yevtushenko stopped, and without transition released a torrent of Russian poetry. “His smile keeps getting bigger,” Swannie recalls, smiling himself at the memory. The poet began to switch back and forth between English and Russian verse–his own and others’–committed to memory, testing out voices, phrasings, against the complicated acoustics of the place, a cavern pocked with metal funnels like stalactites. “What a great space for the spoken word,” Swannie says–choosing and shaping even these words carefully, as if the space itself demanded it. It was then that Rick and Swannie realized the site’s potential–not just to interest historians and preservationists, but as a place to make new, vital art.

Despite all the attention from architects and artists, the bulk and efficiency of the silos are impressive for a reason simpler and more profound, one easy to forget when you’re focusing on the acoustics or the influence of Buffalo’s waterfront shapes on, say, the Fiat factory at Turin-Lingotto. “This was once where Buffalo met the world,” I muse to Swannie as we walk the site. He quickly interjects: “And fed the world.”

If Rick and Swannie had begun to realize the site’s potential in 2011, 2012 would be the watershed year for a series of artists and arts advocates–young, daring, wonderstruck–who would discover the site, and, with Rick and Swannie’s blessing and support, bring thousands more Buffalonians to rediscover this part of their city and history–and, in some cases, to imagine here a different future. It started when Buffalo restaurateur and developer Mark Goldman, best known as owner of Allen Hardware and the developer behind the restored Calumet Building on Chippewa, sought to use the silos for an arts project he called “Against the Grain.” In August 2012, Goldman brought many artists and arts groups to Marine A: there, the silos formed “chambers” with space for each artist or collective to mount a separate performance or installation, while allowing the audience to progress without interruption through the whole experience.

One of these groups was Torn Space Theater, founded by Dan Shanahan and Melissa Meola. Torn Space returned on their own and have been back every year since, creating “public rituals” that, as their tagline promises, “push the boundaries of performance.” (They were the force behind the excavator ballet I described above.)

“Against the Grain” was in many ways a model for “City of Night,” which would come to the site the following month. A small group who called themselves ELAB (Emerging Leaders in the Arts Buffalo) wanted to do something a little more daring than the “art parties” they’d been throwing in some of Buffalo’s other abandoned industrial spaces. Dana Saylor, artist and preservationist, brought the group to Silo City. With little in the way of a pitch, Rick and Swannie greenlighted what would become City of Night, a multidisciplinary arts festival that drew 3,000 attendees its first year. The ELAB leaders–Dana Saylor, curator Marissa Leyner, Tara Bystran Sasiadek, and former 464 gallery owner Marcus Wise–were amazed and exhausted. “Before that we never had more than 500 people” at an event, Tara recalls. Though rising insurance costs drove the group to another site in the First Ward in 2015, for three consecutive years the unprecedented celebration at the silos drew bigger crowds–8,000, then 15,000–and drew the eyes of artists locally and nationally to the site.

The poet Noah Falck moved from Dayton, Ohio to Buffalo in 2012, taking his current job as Education Director at the Just Buffalo Literary Center. Noah’s experience at the first City of Night glommed to ideas about arts events already buzzing around his head, and with help from Just Buffalo, Rick, and Swannie, he created the Silo City Reading Series, which three times each summer brings a visiting poet, a local poet, a visual artist, and a local musical act to Marine A for a transporting performance-experience. (I performed with Mathias Svalina, the filmmaker Mary Helena Clark, and the band Cages in June 2017.) Major poets including Ocean Vuong and Morgan Parker have been featured and all have left the city amazed. Now, scores of poets from around the country reach out to Noah each year to inquire about performing here, in Buffalo, at Silo City.

Torn Space and the Silo City Reading Series, at least, will be back in the summer of 2018. Both Shanahan and Falck have found ways to offer “new perspectives” on the spaces they occupy–but both depend on the uncanniness of the silos for the force of their performances, and returning to the same site each year, even as large, dynamic, and modular a site as this, poses a risk of overfamiliarity–or, as Swannie puts it, “burn-out.”

Even if these well-known recurring events were to “take a break” from the site, though, it’s clear that a half-dozen new projects would soon “unfold” in the silos. After all, the Silo City website already hosts over 50 “Silo Sessions”–video recordings of individual poetry and musical performances from every conceivable genre. Meanwhile, as we tour the site, Rick mentions that three movies are currently filming here: Purge, Clover, and Wolfboy. I’m reminded then that the silos have already been endlessly photographed, sketched, and talked about for 100 years. I grew up hearing stories from the scoopers who battled well-fed rats here; I broke windows and dropped to the floors of these great grain bins to explore them as a teenager. Still they are uncanny–in part because of what they are and, it seems, always will be, and in part because of the new perspectives that wave upon wave of creative new admirers brings.

Rick defines his philosophy of stewardship as an openness to “the next gyration.” Whatever that is and whenever that comes, as Swannie puts it, “We’ll be here.”

Gleefully, Rick bends low and twists a metal knob. Water concusses against the side of a white basin. “Running water at Silo City,” he says. “Take a picture of that.” The mustache can’t hide this smile.

After 11 years, and at enormous expense, Rick has pumped clean water to the American Office Building, built in 1931, at the heart of Silo City–something the site hasn’t seen since the 60s. We’re standing in the future Duende, what will soon be Silo City’s first bar and restaurant. The name is the Spanish word for a quality of inspired, soulful passion associated with the arts (like the original sense of the word “genius,” but sexier), featured in Federico García Lorca’s essay “Theory and Play of the Duende.” Late-day light floods in from tall and wide windows, painting the boot-worn floor and highlighting some features that establish the space’s inimicable charm: a tall wooden card-filing cabinet with drawers the perfect size for wine bottles; front doors carefully treated to preserve forever the mottled forest green and hydrant yellow of multiple paint coats; an altar-like bar built from Perot and Marine A steel, and wooden workbenches dating back to 1906. Draftsmen called in the Courier classifieds that year would have traced their whittled pencils over papers spread out across this wood, realizing Harry R. Wait’s designs; great, doomed men leaned here, left hats here, bruised themselves and spilled Buffalo-brewed beer here; they devoted not one special thought to this table. I can almost hear them. At the same time I can almost hear words like “mixed use,” “reactivation,” “sustainability,” and “cross-disciplinary,” the shibboleths of the new class who will roughly trade their dreams across this wood. I can almost smell the saisons and goses and a sharp resiny tang as a bartender holds a Bic to a thyme sprig to smoke a craft, seasonal cocktail.

Slowly, the gyre is tightening. The upstairs is empty, but Rick is already calling it “The Lyceum,” and he points to a corner that will hold the Kerry (Smith) Grant reference library, containing all the papers its namesake, former UB Dean of Arts and Sciences, left to his cousin, Rick. The building opens out into a surrealist cocktail garden, dotted with funnel-like elevator parts tipped upside down and turned into tables from which guests face a breath-stopping view of the entire silo complex; hedges, controlled but still possessing a spirit of wildness, taper off to a single point, a freestanding door. “The door to everywhere,” Rick calls it. With that kind of attitude, there’s no reason to rush. (For just one example, Rick and Swannie Jim spent weeks pacing a detached and semi-enclosed bar space to decide whether they would use wood or concrete for the floor.) “We’re living with the site,” he keeps repeating.

Rigidized Metals–what Rick sometimes calls his “wrinkle tin” operation–began with an act of visionary innovation. The first Rick (“Stainless”) Smith sought to texturize lightweight metals suitable for aircraft. Within just a few years of his attempts at this kind of metalcraft the country would need his innovations, and a World War would fuel the company’s earliest growth. Rick (“Sky”) Smith II returned with his young son (Rick III) from Canton, Ohio to Buffalo in the 1960s to join Rick the Eldest at Rigidized. Sky was an innovator and a principled gambler, too, and expanded his father’s transportation-focused business to include architectural and industrial applications.

The third Rick Smith to head Rigidized Metals has pursued everything from the intellectual property for the metal boxes that keep “Meals on Wheels” warm to acoustic architectural components and large artistic installations. Silo City has proven an ideal laboratory, backdrop, and catalyst for that innovation. One of the site’s most impressive features is a 22 foot honeycomb-themed “elevator” for bees–Elevator B–a collaboration between Rigidized Metals and five master’s students from UB’s School of Architecture and Planning, sparked when Rick stumbled upon an enormous bee colony behind a boarded-up window on the complex. The new home for the colony–which has won accolades and attention worldwide–would look just as appropriate floating through the Kuiper Belt as it does among the silos, bees darting in and out of triangular openings on its six stainless steel sides. Inside, a glass-and-wood structure raises and lowers the colony, allowing a beekeeper or a visitor to enter and stand directly beneath the benevolent vibrating mass.

“We want to step on the site, but do it lightly,” Rick says. Elevator B is a perfect example, but really everything here demonstrates this philosophy. We’re standing near a new fauna-friendly landscaping installation along the river. He points to an arc of dark metal embedded in the bank: “This used to hold up 67,000 bushels.” Now the bands, mined from the silos, hold up new plantings, the work of area middle school students. Next he points to a high blank wall where–encouraged by new experiments at Rigidized involving high-quality photography being executed in metal–he would create a steel-structured outdoor photo gallery with rotating exhibits. Almost to himself, Rick adds, “It’s never going to be finished.”

But just as soon as these words pass his lips, he’s leading the way across the site to another project, another place, another angle.

And it’s not all about concrete and art parties. Before we leave, Rick insists on introducing Josh Smith (no relation) and showcasing yet another side of the Silo City enterprise. We stand in a gravelly parking lot, at first unremarkable save for a line of beech trees that ends in a squat rust-colored transmission tower–Tesla Tower, the terminus of Dyosowa Trail, a pedestrian entrance to Silo City from Ohio Street. “Dyosowa,” Rick tells me, comes from the Seneca Nation tradition, and was a word describing the lands around Buffalo Creek–it means “land of the basswoods.” On the opposite side of the lot Elevator B stands amidst a riot of greenery, loud with animal and insect life.

Josh, who arrives at the site in a red pickup close to dawn most days, is a landscape manager for PUSH Blue, the sustainable landscaping arm of People United for Sustainable Housing Buffalo. He came to Silo City four years ago looking for a place to store compost from a PUSH project on the West Side–and he stayed. Since then Josh has been at the center of every landscaping and ecological project at the silos, from creating a pollinator garden around Elevator B–2,000 two-inch native wildflower plugs–to a bioswale beneath the otherwise ordinary-looking parking lot.

Rick resumes his role as tour guide, showing us a series of warming huts designed by UB students, a pond-bog full of life, and a place he calls “The Meadows”–an open space dominated by a Tree-of-Life-type tree, from which he has hung a classic wooden swing, named for his first child, Nora.

Silo City’s development as a nature preserve–or at least a laboratory for ecological experiments and a space that encourages healthy biodiversity–has proceeded in a manner similar to the site’s evolution as the city’s most sought-after alternative arts venue: guided by general but unbending principles and open to, as the poet Carl Dennis once wrote to me in an entirely unrelated matter, “the magic of the happenstance.”

You might say the site’s artistic and ecological activities are also equally driven by collaboration: Just Buffalo, Torn Space, ELAB, Hollywood location scouts, architects, and individual artists of every medium on one side; PUSH Buffalo, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper, and local public school students, Girl Scouts, and aspiring bioengineers and conservationists on the other.

The only difference is that the continued artistic activity depends on artists. Collaboration may be driving ecological projects at the silos–but they’ll continue and transform with or without human encouragement. “I love what’s happening ecologically on its own, without anyone interfering, even myself,” Josh says. He points out that one of the elevators on the site and the railroad allowing access to it were in use up to six months ago. Already it’s almost completely vegetated, he says. “You can see it happening.”

But there is a difficult balance to strike in this. “We’re trying to use the site to its highest potential,” Josh says. “Like Rick says, ‘It’s always becoming.’” That’s true for ecology, economics, popular engagement, and aesthetics. And these things are inextricably enmeshed. The site’s attraction as an arts venue will fund and generate support for the conservation projects; the conservation projects will offset and mediate the “heavier” footprint of bigger events and permanent alterations like the tapas-and-cocktail bar, or whatever else Rick pulls from under his cowboy hat. A zipline, for example–or a helipad–would destroy this balance.

The concrete is “sacred,” as Rick says. The steel is sacred. The natural world, the landscape, the plants and animals native to this former floodplain of the Buffalo River, all that too is sacred. But sacrality depends on a human observer, a sanctifier. To be sacred (from the Latin sacer) is to be consecrated, dedicated, or set aside–as opposed to the profane (from the Latin pro for before or without and fanum for temple), that which has no special purpose, that which lies outside the sacralized space, the sanctum … the silos. Sacrality is relative to and depends upon a participant–which is why the silos that for years echoed with commerce and profanities can now be “dedicated” by thousands at City of Night; why the meadows, which belong to indifferent nature, can be “consecrated” in the public rituals of Torn Space; and why Rick Smith can hang a rope and a board from a tall tree and name it for his daughter, the set-aside place within the set-aside place, the adyt of his siloed sanctum sanctorum.

How is Silo City different from Riverworks, the Kellogg plant, the empty Gelmac Annex or Concrete-Central, or any other ruin, venue, or redevelopment project in Buffalo?

I flash back to Swannie telling me about his favorite time of year here: January and early February, he says, the coldest days in our climate. “I wake up in the morning and the air is still, but the sun’s up,” he says. Snow lies on the ground in “little flakes like diamonds,” and “the air is crisp and glittering.”

The difference is worship.

The silos will stand, and remain as open to the public as possible, they will attract new artists, architects, engineers, admirers, because of Rick and Swannie. Because of Rick and Swannie they will be kept free from the destructive influences of capital and her cousin, bad taste. This summer, Marine A will reverberate with poetry and music; a stranger to the city will leave, eyes singing because of Noah Falck and Just Buffalo. On another night a crowd will gather to experience catharsis together, reconsider the nature of theatre, of experience, of connectedness because of Dan Shanahan and Torn Space. All across the city, from the Barrel Factory to the Gypsy Parlor to PAUSA to the North Park scores of other artists from every discipline will remake, create, and invite, inspired in their work by experiences they had at Silo City. Without knowing it, the bugs and birds and burrowers will add to the thriving biodiversity of the site, will join in the fecund entanglement of old concrete and new life, because of Josh Smith. Building and engineering students will rely on the site as a laboratory for their experiments–movie directors and South Buffalo retirees alike will rely on the site for inspiring walks–children will continue to come here to learn about their city’s past, to talk about the value of food and work and art and preservation and the environment.

I recall something Rick said earlier: “We were the best at something. Let’s get back to that.” What “that” is doesn’t really matter–it’s whatever fits in the fingers, whatever falls along the lifelines of a Buffalonian’s hand. The point is not to know “what” you’re doing, any more than Harry R. Wait knew what his slipform silos of 1906 would inspire and engender. The point is saying “yes,” is daring, is being ready to pitch in when the moment comes.

Or, as Rick says, “It’s about these collaborations. It’s about getting these guys to do stuff together.” That’s what makes Silo City–and the people who’ve (re)created it–different, special. “You don’t know what you’re going to get into, but
that’s the fun.” This doesn’t guarantee 10,000 jobs; it doesn’t offer any prizes; it promises only what it asks for in return: an unqualified yes.

“And then you say, ‘OK. Let’s do some stuff.’”

Thanks to Michele Bewley, Chuck LaChiusa, the Buffalo History Museum, and staff of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Central Library’s Grosvenor Room, as well as the authors of all the books, articles, and web pages dedicated to Buffalo’s grain silos, then and now, for their help in telling this story.

in print discover issue nineteen