Grain elevators are a stubborn target for urban renewal, because it’s so difficult to use them for anything but cleaning and storing grain. Then they went back to the drawing board. They recouped some of their losses by selling one of the original three elevators, which they’d managed to refurbish, for two million dollars, to a Minnesota-based hedge-fund subsidiary that speculates on commodity prices. “That was not a pretty chapter of my life,” he said. Ultimately, though, they concluded that a biofuel plant would be too costly. Figuring that the complex could be adapted to corn storage and processing, Smith and three business partners sank more than three million dollars into the project, forty thousand of which went into buying a nearby fourth elevator. Not surprisingly, the men’s first impulse was to convert the elevators into a factory, specifically to produce ethanol. Watkins, for his part, once worked as a factory-process engineer. His grandfather founded Rigidized Metals in order to texturize lightweight materials for Second World War aircraft-a business that Smith’s father, and then Smith, diversified, to produce patterned metal for commercial goods such as restroom-stall partitions. Smith is a legacy of Buffalo’s manufacturing glory days. Smith unearthed a craft brew for me from among the Budweiser in Watkins’s crusted fridge, and the men began to tell me about their attempts to make use of the silos. “It was frontier.”) Watkins had a grizzled gray beard and wore brown Carhartt coveralls. (“Buffalo was once the Wild, Wild West,” he said of the outfit. He had the air of a Great Lakes cowboy, dressed in a long wool coat that was roughened up by a ten-gallon hat, denim vest, and boots. “Sometimes we get really creative when we’re in the shack drinking some beers.” Smith pulled a stool near the stove for me. “You could call this our office,” he said. When he opened his door, I felt puffs of toasty air from a wood stove, which made the shed feel inviting. Watkins lives in a converted maintenance shed in the midst of the three elevators, and works on the site. Smith often drives over from Rigidized Metals at the end of the workday to hang out with Jim Watkins, a drinking buddy from nearby Swannie House, one of Buffalo’s oldest bars.
(The other turned grain into malt for brewing.) But, when agribusinesses found different routes for their goods, Buffalo’s elevators fell into disuse. All but one had been designed for a very particular purpose: cleaning, drying, and storing as many as eleven million bushels of grain, for shipment on railways or down the Erie Canal. While the factory expansion was under way, he began to consider what he could do with them.
#BOOM DAYS FAMILY FESTIVAL DOWN AT SILO CITY PLUS#
For a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, he got twelve acres, plus the massive silo complexes. He had hoped to get an easement but wound up buying the land instead. Smith had been looking to expand what he calls his “wrinkle tin” company, Rigidized Metals, and was scouting the parcel of land between the elevators and the factory where he texturized metal products. It belonged to Rick Smith, a local industrialist who had purchased the elevators, in 2006, almost by accident. I took them in for a while, until a forest-green 1973 Oldsmobile convertible rumbled up beside me. Looming above them was the reason for my visit: a complex of three disused grain elevators, each containing dozens of silos that towered as many as thirteen stories high. One steel-gray afternoon in the late winter, I pulled into a snow-coated gravel parking lot along the frozen Buffalo River.
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