![]() “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. 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. Stephen is on the music faculty at the University at Buffalo.An unused grain elevator in Buffalo. Some of his published work includes Choro in the Time of Bossa Nova with Duo Guerra/Morrow, Suíte Rio de Janeiro with Guitar Chamber Music Press, 10 Brazilian Choros Arranged for Classical Guitar Solo with Mel Bay, and a popular YouTube channel. Specializing in Brazilian music, guitarist-composer Stephen Guerra performs regularly at music clubs, universities, and guitar societies around the US and Brazil and has proudly shared the stage with some of the greats, including Rogério Souza and Ronaldo do Bandolim from Trio Madeira and Época de Ouro. ![]() ![]() You can now hear it live and let yourself be transported back to the golden era of Chorinho with five talented musicians and their unique instruments:Stephen Guerra - nylon string guitar, Titus Stevens - mandolin, Jeff Reynolds - bandolin, Jeremy Spindler - accordion, Jack Smith - pandeiro. It is considered to have been one of the precursors of samba and other Brazilian modern genres. Brazilian Choro is now in Buffalo! Chorro is an instrumental genre started in the late 19th century in Rio de Janeiro, and continued as a popular form into the 20th century. ![]()
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