Conference Agenda

During New York City’s 1970s financial crisis, some residents reclaimed vacant, abandoned lots near their homes by turning them into community gardens. And these spaces became more than just sites of ecological cultivation - they became sites where neighbors commune, hold public concerts, and organize political demonstrations. Between harvest festivals, giant puppet theatre, and activist brass band concerts, gardeners structure these spaces as communal goods - sites where neighbors gather to cultivate and express themselves through their communities. In recent decades, after the city recovered financially through a shift towards a tourism-focused economy, the gardens have become central figures in legal disputes with the city over the ownership and functions of these lands - where the rights of the gardeners to use the lands as community goods are pitted against interests from government officials, commercial developers, and NYC’s larger publics. To navigate these battles, gardeners are slated with the task of proving that communities exist around these gardens and that these communities are worth protecting.

This project explores the role of music and sound produced within community gardens in navigating land disputes with the city’s government and redevelopment initiatives. Through fieldwork in NYC’s community gardens and archival work on the histories of their musical programming and land disputes, this paper demonstrates not only how gardeners structure these spaces as community goods through their artistic programming, but also how these community gardens have reshaped city-wide redevelopment conversations and initiatives. Musical performances within these gardens have sparked conversations surrounding rezoning efforts within the city, new scales of governance over public and private spaces, and opened pathways for decommodifying land within a city-wide economic system of speculation. Throughout this paper, theories of relational space (Simpson 2013, Abe 2018, Martin 2024) and land value (Gregory 1997, Harvey 2004, Angotti 2007) illustrate how music and sound in the gardens are crucial actors in translating these valuations across the city’s varied publics - questioning who has the right to dictate the value of land in urban spaces and who is included in the publics imagined through these performances.

Often referred to as the “second skyline” of Buffalo, New York, the grain silos clustered along the inner and outer harbors of the Buffalo River and Lake Erie stand as monumental remnants of the city’s industrial past. Following the decline of Buffalo’s grain storage industry in 1959, silos and factories were abandoned, and the city entered a prolonged period of deindustrialization that continued throughout the twentieth century. At present, fifteen of the sixteen original silos remain along the Buffalo River. Some have been designated historic landmarks, and developers have converted others into luxury apartments or other market-driven uses.

In recent years, the organization “Silo City” has emerged as a unique attempt to incorporate grain elevators into the city’s economic and cultural revitalization. The three elevators that make up Silo City largely remain in their weathered, unrestored condition. Rather than undergoing full redevelopment, Silo City is opened for provisional creative uses—experimental theater, music, and poetry—while retaining the material and spatial logics of the grain elevators themselves.

This paper examines the relationship between the grain elevators at Silo City and Buffalo’s avant-garde art scene, with particular attention to the “Silo City Reading Series,” a poetry and music series hosted by the Just Buffalo Literary Center within the silos. Focusing on a 2024 performance by poet Fred Moten and bassist Brandon López, the paper situates the series within the broader historical negotiation between Just Buffalo and the Silo City campus, tracing how cultural programming emerged and is sustained within a site shaped by economic failure and institutional ambiguity. Drawing on theories of assemblage urbanism (Farías and Blok, 2016) and cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2003), this paper highlights how the arts and the built environment negotiate their coexistence within an urban ecology.

I argue that the reading series participates in the ongoing process of deindustrialization through expanded programming and sonic interactions with the silos, sustaining their material and social presence without redevelopment. At the same time, the silos themselves shape the conditions under which experimental performance unfolds, contributing to the assemblage that is Buffalo’s contemporary experimental arts scene.

Saint Louis was an unlikely epicenter of musical celebration during the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial year. The city organized the nation’s largest anniversary-focused arts festival, dubbed the Bicentennial Horizons of American Music and Performing Arts Festival (BHAM). The centerpiece of this massive, 400 performance spectacle was an event titled Midnight Carnival, a middle-of-the-night street fair dreamed up to ring in “the most important Fourth of July in American history.” The artist chosen to compose the event's soundtrack was none other than the eclectic modernist composer Lejaren Hiller. Hiller composed Midnight Carnival, a work for 16 tapes and 42-speaker array intended to be transmitted across 16 blocks of downtown Saint Louis. Broadcast live on NBC from 10pm until 2am, Midnight Carnival promised to “literally play the city like an instrument.” Within Hiller’s sonic fog would unfold a “true 20th century man’s carnival,” featuring Tai-Chi and raku demonstrations, dance and additional musical performances, poetry readings, laser light shows, and more.

In this paper I argue that Midnight Carnival did more than play the city in celebration of America, it entered into longstanding debates concerning rust belt economic revitalization and urban renewal. Co-sponsored by the downtown Chamber of Commerce, BHAM organizers envisioned the event as a symbol of a “new Saint Louis:” modern, culturally relevant, good for business, and safe for visitors, even late at night. In this respect Midnight Carnival shared much with another potent symbol of Saint Louis modernism: the televised demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, a spectacularized declaration of the city’s supposedly forward-looking urban renewal vision.

Hiller’s tapes and the environment they constituted argued in favor of tape music as infrastructural composition; a complex sonic system within which other systems (performances, demonstrations, additional music) would operate. (Larkin 2013) Despite major technical difficulties, Midnight Carnival’s infrastructural aesthetic nevertheless established an environment in which numerous independent events occurred, mirroring the democratic management of municipal policymaking. Running ahead of the material sounds of the piece, this infrastructural aspect of the work allowed Midnight Carnival to perform itself without itself, carrying out its political and economic work despite the (near) silence of Hiller's tapes.