![]() ![]() ![]() Born in Cleveland, he relocated with his family to Buffalo as a kid and stayed there until college. In a way, Smith and the elevators were made for each other, each asset-rich but difficult-to-peg, each in need of a boost. Other artists have shot videos and created temporary installations inside the silos themselves poets and chamber musicians revel in their moodiness and their reverberations. Last summer, architecture students at the University of Buffalo created 10 small “reflection spaces” from which to contemplate the silos and their surrounding meadows. Other colorful productions have since followed. In 2012, a local theater company, Torn Space, staged Motion Picture, using the exterior of one grain elevator as a surface to project both video and light, telling the story of a soldier preparing for and engaging in battle. Then came the artists, at Smith’s invitation. “The conference served as a catalyst to open up the elevators and get people in to see if they liked them.” The next Spring, Boom Days-an annual festival to shoo away winter that Smith and others had created a decade before-moved to Silo City, finding a permanent home. In 2011, an enthusiastic group of preservationists and architects toured the complex and “confirmed what we had begun thinking,” Smith says. “Plus,” says Smith, “the neighborhood didn’t really want to become industrial again.” The notion floundered when they discovered that the city’s infrastructure-its rail lines, its natural gas system-might not be up to the task. Smith and his partners first latched onto an idea of using the facility to make ethanol. It’s all part of what the 56-year-old Smith has dubbed Silo City, which operates a thriving performing and visual-arts program and, increasingly, rents itself out for private functions. Today, the chirp of birds hiding in native grasses and the lap-lap-lap of kayakers on the Buffalo River accompany the crunch of gravel underfoot as visitors arrive to enjoy anything from a performance to an art exhibit to a wedding. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is a lot of stuff!’ The sheer scale, the height, the volume.” The elevators typically rise higher than 150 feet, and each one can hold more than a million bushels of storage. It was a great deal, but he didn’t quite know what to do with his new acquisition. He bit, picking up the land and the elevators for $120,000. Smith learned that the company was looking to unload its 12-acre site altogether. “Standing under them, I really got a sense of their castle-like structures and how the river has shaped their geometries.” ![]() “The elevators turned out to be way cooler than I thought,” Smith says. Then one day Conagra Brands, the packaged-food manufacturer that owned three of the elevators, responded to Smith’s request for an easement to accommodate the expansion of his family business by inviting him to check out the elevators. Most of them had been abandoned and were deteriorating and splashed with graffiti. But like many who grew up in the area, he never gave much thought to the hulking relics of an industrial past that had put New York’s second city on the map. Recipe for industrial redevelopment: Take empty grain elevators, add vision.į or years, Rick Smith C’83 worked in the shadow of a cluster of concrete grain elevators in Buffalo. ![]()
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