Visit Buffalo Niagara

Buffalo Arts Studio, located on the fifth floor of bustling Tri-Main Center on Main Street (the main entrance is on Halbert Street around the corner) near the city’s Parkside neighborhood, is a pillar of the city’s art scene. With dozens of resi...

Keri Thomas-Whiteside is the new owner of Westside Stories secondhand book shop, a name familiar to book lovers in Buffalo since it has been an anchor to a revived Grant Street on the city’s West Side since 2011. The store changed hands – and locations — in the last few years and Thomas-Whiteside is the third owner of the store. It has a new location at 398 Grant Street and new energy as Thomas-Whiteside brings her passion as a former librarian to the challenge of putting her own stamp on the shop, reaffirming the store’s place in the neighborhood and, of course, selling books to Buffalo’s many book lovers. Here’s what she had to say about her own West Side story.   

Keri Thomas-Whiteside, owner of Westside Stories

Visit Buffalo Niagara: What inspired you to purchase Westside Stories? 

Keri Thomas-Whiteside: We are lucky to be neighbors of the store’s original owners, Joe and Jeanenne Petri, so we saw the store come into being. It was a special part of the neighborhood, and we were frequent visitors. When the store closed and sold during Covid, it hit everyone pretty hard. I happened to see the Facebook post that the store was for sale again, I sent a text just to see what it would involve. Everything after that just happened pretty quickly and we had a bookstore! 

VBN: Are you an avid reader or book collector who visits bookstores whenever you travel? 

KTW: My husband, Bob, is the avid reader in the house. He usually has multiple books going at the same time. I’m the person that has the large pile to get through and is still adding to it. I was a librarian until I left to start this journey, so I always made a point to visit libraries when we traveled. If we saw a bookstore, we would pop in though I’m sure that will now be our priority.  

VBN: Do you have a favorite bookstore? Does it serve as inspiration for how you hope to attract customers to Westside Stories? 

KTW: My favorite all-time is the late, lamented The Village Green on Elmwood (showing my age on that one!). It was just the first one I really connected with as a customer since I grew up going to ones in the mall. I’ve had some others I’ve enjoyed through the years Symposium Books and Books on the Square in Providence, RI were visited a lot when we lived there. We also have been customers of Rust Belt Books since the Allen Street days. Talking Leaves is my new book spot.  

Of course, we were big fans of the original Westside Stories, and that store is probably the largest inspiration. I want people to have that same feeling they had when it was down the street. Joe created a great community around the store and I’m hoping to carry that on. 

VBN: There’s a lot of competition from online booksellers today; why should book lovers buy their books from stores like Westside Stories? 

KTW: I think people should buy from myself or another local bookstore because we’re a part of the community. Our customers aren’t just numbers and dollars, they are our neighbors, and we try to do right by them. We’re also usually trying to help other local groups, artists, crafters, and businesses succeed as well. 

VBN: Does Westside Stories have an area that it specializes in or non-book items it sells? 

KTW: We don’t have a specialty. The motto I came up with for the store is “Interesting books for curious readers of all ages”. The librarian in me wants everyone to find a little something though that doesn’t mean I will carry just anything. I try to carry a diverse collection of authors in all genres and subjects. It’s important to me that lesser-known voices are heard. 

VBN: How do you feel about being a part of the Grant Street neighborhood? 

KTW: I’ve lived in the neighborhood for almost 15 years. We were really seeing a lot of momentum in the neighborhood with new businesses, especially immigrant and refugee owned businesses, and then Covid hit. The losses were hard to overcome, and we had many closures. I think losing Sweet_ness 7 and the community built around it is still hard. Then West Side Bazaar had the fire and that was devastating. I’m hoping that things can start to bounce back, and I hope to be a part of that future for the neighborhood. There is a strong sense of community here and people looking out for each other. 

VBN: Do you feel like you are a part of a larger literary community in Buffalo given that there are a number of bookstores and events like Babel? 

KTW: I don’t feel a part of that yet, but that’s just because we are so new and might just be getting on the radar for people. The bookseller community in Buffalo is very supportive and have been incredibly helpful as I’ve started on this journey, especially Meg from Alice, Ever After who is probably our biggest cheerleader and champion. I think as we grow and get more well-known, those connections will probably start to fall into place. 

VBN: Favorite book? 

KTW: Ugh, I don’t have one! But I loved Encyclopedia Brown growing up. Some that I’ve loved are: “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion, “Confessions of a Mask” by Yukio Mishima, and “Hyperbole and a Half” by Allie Brosh are the ones coming to mind right now. I read all over the place! 

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♬ Sunflower, Vol. 6 – Harry Styles

VBN: Favorite author? 

KTW: A few: Joan Didion, Samantha Irby, Karen Russell, and Roxane Gay are at the top right now. 

VBN: What’s on your nightstand being read or waiting to be read? 

KTW: I have a few cookbooks I’ve been meaning to go through. A good cookbook should have a good narrative, as well as a bunch of good recipes. We have our first book club on April 4th with Progressive Book Club 716, so I need to read that book “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi.  

Westside Stories Used Books
398 Grant St, Buffalo, NY
westsidestoriesbuffalo.com

The post The Next Chapter of Westside Stories Bookstore appeared first on Visit Buffalo Niagara.

For nearly 20 years, Buffalo’s Town Ballroom has earned its rep as one of downtown’s most significant live music spots.   Since 2005, the locale has hosted some of the city’s most legendary sets, with up-and-comers and established perform...

There’s nothing like starting your day with a delicious breakfast sandwich. Thanks to the ever-expanding breakfast sandwich scene in Buffalo, there’s plenty of options to enjoy. Check out the spots below for all your breakfast sandwich needs!  ...

Step into the rehabbed factory where barrels were made a century ago and discover a new space where beer is made, and fun is had, at what may be the first local brewery to launch a public tour.

For a $20 ticket, which can be purchased at resurgencebrewing.com, visitors to Resurgence Brewing Co. at 55 Chicago St. get three samples to taste, a free beer at the end and a 45-minute look into the process and good cheer that is behind the company’s beer making philosophy.

“It’s part of our mantra to experience great beer,” said Drew Zach, director of brewery operations who has developed the tour.  “Smell the hops. Smell the malt. Smell the things that are brewing … You can see how everything is made and be a part of that whole experience.”

Resurgence, one of about 50 local breweries, is among the first to arrange a public tour. Highlights include the building’s cooperage – or barrel-making – history and the process behind Resurgence’s production of 9,000 barrels a year.

With 248 pints of beer in each barrel that makes for 2.23 million pints a year of IPAs, sours, pilsners, lagers, porters and other new creations being made at the brewery. It’s housed inside a refurbished brick building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, where, according to a Preservation Ready Sites web page, E & B Holmes Machinery Co. once made the machines that made wooden barrels used by distilleries.

In 2019, the place became the expansive new headquarters for Resurgence, which moved to these digs from its first Niagara Street location. Now the brewery has plans to extend its reach to nine more cities, including Fort Meyers, Fla.

The Buffalo flagship is about a block away from the waterfront and the source of one of beer’s four main ingredients – Lake Erie water is clean and does not need a lot of extra treatment.  “Buffalo water is some of the best water,” said Dan Robinson, director of sales.  “We think the less you have to add and subtract, the better.”

The tour covers the fundamentals of good beer and its ingredients – from water and yeast to malt and hops.  Visitors can crank a hand grinder that cracks the malted barley that seeps in hot water letting out sugars to create the “wort” sugar water that the yeast eats to create alcohol.  To give everyone a better understanding of the process, people also get to take a pinch of hop buds from a jar and smell the pungency they add to the wort so that beer has its distinctive flavor and bitterness.

At Resurgence, beer education is mixed with jokes, cheers and unique brew-related games.  As visitors stop at the sampling tables set up with tasting cups, they are invited to choose a silly toast: “To the nights we will never remember and the friends we will never forget!” and “Cheers to bread because without bread we would not have toast. “

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♬ Walking On A Dream – Empire Of The Sun

Tour goers also get to try games Zach created like the competition for two to see who is faster at assembling the gaskets and clamps that brewers use to connect the hoses that funnel beer from one vessel to another.

 “It’s not your average brewery tour,” said Zach. “We really want to make this brewery tour one of the best tours in Buffalo.” His favorite part? Sharing the details of the process that is a labor of love. “For me, it’s really that understanding of the ingredients that are making the final product … Seeing, touching, feeling those ingredients is a fun thing for people to understand: all the different things that went into it.”

Resurgence Brewing Co.
55 Chicago Street, Buffalo, NY
resurgencebrewing.com

The post Resurgence Brewery Co. Elevates its Beer Experience with New Tour appeared first on Visit Buffalo Niagara.

Visitors to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) can expect to see much more than a name change when the greatly expanded and renewed campus opens to the public on June 2023. After more than three years and ...