McClellan Music Move: Preserving a Dying Art

By Rick Ahrens

McClellan Music House, a Buffalo staple and go-to business for scholastic instrument rentals in the city, has made a move down Elmwood Avenue to the Pierce Arrow building.  

The business, with its retail, repair, and lesson facilities crammed tightly inside a three-story family home near Summer Street, has suffered from a national downward trend in funding for school music programs.  The city of Buffalo is no different, and while smaller, suburban music companies have been bolstered by wealthier school districts, McClellan's has felt blow-back from reduced music spending within the city's public schools. 

Local businessman Joe Koessler hopes that the century-old Pierce Arrow building at the corner of Elmwood and Great Arrow Avenue will be the launching point for a regional hub for musical instrument repair and rental.  Seeing the North Buffalo property as an "undiscovered gem", Koessler said he jumped at the opportunity to lay claim to the substantial warehouse space.

"We were originally not even planning on having a show room--I was more looking for a factory warehouse space, where we could store rental instruments and perform repairs without a retail presence," he said.  "The space had to be repainted and cleaned up a little bit, but physically, it was exactly what we were looking for.  The additional space for a retail front was a big plus, too."

Koessler looked at several locations around the city, from old factories along Niagara Street to the Tri-Main Building, but the Pierce Arrow building's sizeable loading area and potential for expanding McClellan's repair workshop sold him on the property.  Being able to set up shop in a building dating from a similar era as McClellan's, which was founded in 1910, was an added bonus.

"The building was put up in 1907, so it has a couple years on us, but it's still a wonderful opportunity to move this business into a facility that dates to a similar time in the city's history," he said.

The music store's new retail front contains subtle flourishes of the original store, like the turn-of-the-century wooden cabinets that contain a collection of professional-caliber instruments, but the space has evolved into a contemporary layout of hardwoods, with gentle track lighting dancing across the contours of horns and woodwinds mounted on the walls.  The four-month process of planning and executing the warehouse's redesign was carried out by architect Brad Wales, who also worked with Koessler on the turn-around of SPoT Coffee; the aesthetic similarity between the two projects is noticeable.

McClellan's expanded maintenance workshop is a feature that warrants special consideration. The sparse white walls and drawers packed with esoteric repair tools could hold the key to a prosperous future for the company.

Koessler has negotiated a deal with a national school instrument rental company in which McClellan would be responsible for the cleaning and upkeep of a portion of the Maryland-based firm's regional rentals.  Ideally, he said, the company will offer their services to similar companies in the Northeast.

The full-time staff of four repair specialists, hammers away dents, fixes valves and finger pads and replaces cork by hand.  While time-intensive, Lynn Olmstead, with a student's clarinet partially deconstructed on his workbench, remarked that there is a huge amount of job satisfaction to be found in the small details of his business.

"Everything here is done by hand with these instruments.  A machine can't do this correctly," he said.  "It's cool to work on these instruments for two or three hours.  They'll come to you as a piece of junk, but they'll leave fully functional.  It's great."

These types of repair jobs, Koessler said, have mostly operated as a cottage industry, with workshops being in cramped corners of a music shop or in the basements of homes.

"This could become a dying art," he said. "We would like McClellan to be seen as a place for a level of expertise and craftsmanship you don't always see anymore."

The new facility celebrated their grand opening on March 20th with Buffalo Philharmonic Music Director JoAnn Falletta cutting the ribbon.

McClellan Music House is located at 255 Great Arrow Ave, Suite 1A.