A weird place, yes, but a place nonetheless. Smith remembers, “and we have a pretty unique network of waterways you know, bombing around we’ve got a ship canal, we’ve got a Buffalo River, we’ve got a Great Lake, we’ve got the Niagara River.”Įventually, Buffalonians did pay attention and, now, Silo City has become a place. “There were very few people in the city that really paid attention to the waterfront,” Mr. But, since new housing wasn’t the competitive sport it is in the Greater Toronto Area, he turned to artists and musicians to animate the spaces – inside the tall silos and out in the slowly renaturalizing fields surrounding them – with art installations and concerts. Smith, owner of third-generation steel fabricator Rigidized Metals, began to envision other uses. Shifting gears when the market crashed two years later, Mr.
Silo city buffalo full#
In nearby Buffalo, so many grain elevators line the serpentine Buffalo River it could’ve become a full graveyard were it not for the strange and wonderful stewardship of Cleveland-born Rick Smith III, who purchased a number of silos, mills, warehouses and office buildings on what was then Childs Street – now renamed Silo City Row – from ConAgra back in 2006 with the intention of creating ethanol industry jobs. Ironically, here, in this immense dirt-and-gravel parking lot at the foot of Parliament Street the decaying 1940s structure isn’t fully fenced in: One can walk right up to the concrete bellies and plant a kiss on any one of them or, more likely, a spray-painted tag.Īlthough some writers have dubbed these two ruins Toronto’s “bookends” (when they’ve noticed them at all) if something isn’t done soon, a more appropriate moniker might be tombstones.Ī reclaimed riverbank in Silo City Row, Buffalo.
Three-and-a-half kilometers away, the old Victory Mills silos are simply a brief curiosity as folks park SUVs to bring little ones to the immersive theatre at Pirate Life, or hop onboard a dinner cruise. Likely, they’re here to contemplate Rowan Gillespie’s haunting bronze figures (which mark the arrival of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine in 1847), or to watch planes fly in and out of Billy Bishop airport. The few bundled folks walking towards Ireland Park barely notice the monolithic 1920s Canada Malting silos towering over them, perhaps because they’re fenced in … and that fence is covered with intimidating “Beware of Falling Objects” signs every few feet. The wind whips Lake Ontario – on this cool fall day it’s a dark olive colour – into fat, frothy saw-teeth.
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