The Globe and Mail has conducted a sweet profile on the Silo City honeybees, which can be viewed here. Writer Lisa Rochon recently explored some of Buffalo's architecturally significant structures, including the Frank Lloyd Wright's Gardener's Cottage, and the grain silos and elevators of Silo City, but was surprisingly taken with an entirely different effort - the relocation of a colony of bees from an abandoned office building to a state-of-the-art metallic hive (shown here on BRO). A passage from the article reads:
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Walking through the magnificent city of silos, keen to discuss ways that artists might be enticed to come work here, [Rick] Smith expresses his commitment to regenerating the site through small, meaningful gestures. "What better way to start than with beehives? You don't need 400 master plans. This is small, but it works."
That's one of the greatest things about places like Silo City and Larkinville (as Rick so righteously points out). Whether it's the small incremental steps are an all-out growth spurt, we are seeing progress on many levels. Silo City will experience organic growth, and will not need all of the legendarily (and often times useless) Master Plans, many of which never see the light of day. Small grassroots partnership projects like 'Elevator B' create a national buzz and inspire additional initiatives to unfold purely through passion - in this case the passionate parties are University at Buffalo and a rogue developer who is determined to buck the trend of appealing to the 'powers that be'.
Toronto people really like to pat themselves on the back.
Because they're very progressive. I'd be doing the same.
Progressive or not, they are some smug ass folks.