In truth, Balaton was the exception. Most of the city’s scrap-related jobs went to young men who could handle hard labor. I saw this for myself when I visited a company called Buffalo Engine Components, which salvages and recycles auto parts from scrapyards across the country. One of the owners, Joe Pellitieri Jr., showed me around. The scale of the operation was staggering: Workers recycled roughly 1,000 tons of engines and transmissions each week. Teams of men worked furiously — lugging, breaking down, cleaning and restoring auto parts. Pellitieri is devoted to his 150 employees and even offers profit-sharing bonuses, but he was quick to point out that the actual work was backbreaking and paid only about $15 an hour. Almost no one over 40, he said, had the stamina to do it. These jobs — and those of the scrap peddlers — were a far cry from the old union gigs that were lost when steel mills closed. So much so, Pellitieri told me, that he often couldn’t find people willing to do the work. “Everybody wants to be a doctor or a lawyer or a computer engineer or something like that,” he told me. “We’re not all going to be that. You know what I mean?”

As it turns out, the copper from Paisley’s air-conditioner — and all the copper that he has brought in over the years — never stays at Niagara Metals’ yard in North Buffalo for very long. Eventually all the scrap here is sent to Niagara Metals’ main facility in a nearby suburb, Cheektowaga, which looks less like a stereotypical scrapyard and more like an Amazon warehouse: a vast, orderly complex where a staff of attendants tracks inventory with hand-held scanners.

Here I met up with Todd Levin, the owner of Niagara Metals and the scion of one of Buffalo’s oldest and most venerated scrapping families. Levin seemed to know every inch of his yard. He struck me as both serious and meticulous. As a kid, he built a miniature scrapyard in his basement, complete with Tonka trucks and tiny pieces of scrap. It was in his blood. His great-grandfather, Abraham Levin, emigrated from Belarus in the 1890s and started scrapping with a horse and wagon when he was a teenager. He was just one member of an army of peddlers who, as the United States industrialized, began combing the streets for whatever metals they could find. In the ensuing decades, as Buffalo became an industrial powerhouse, the Levin family’s business grew rapidly. Much of their trade operated entirely within the city’s industrial sector. The family would buy scrap from various factories and then sort it, process it and resell it to the city’s many foundries.

By the early 1980s, however, Buffalo’s industry was imploding. Levin still remembers being a teenager, watching the 6 o’clock news in his family’s living room, when the announcement was made that General Motors would be closing its local foundry and laying off more than 2,000 workers. The foundry was one of the Levins’ main buyers. “My father and grandfather had a lot of eggs in that basket,” Levin recalled.

This should have been the death knell for the Levins’ business and for the scrap industry in Buffalo as a whole. Instead, the Levins forged new relationships and expanded their reach. Using rail, which was relatively cheap, they began sending scrap to Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Syracuse. They also teamed up with a steel mill in Hamilton, Ontario, which bought much of their ferrous scrap. And there was one final windfall, the biggest of the big scrap: the city’s ruins. Starting in the late 1990s, as China’s demand for metals increased, there was suddenly an incentive to demolish and scrap Buffalo’s derelict houses, factories and industrial machinery. Levin did some enormous jobs — like taking the scrap from Buffalo Memorial Auditorium and from the same G.M. foundry to which his family had once catered.