Red Hat / Fedora :: Can't See Files In FTP Nor Access Them From Web

I set up nginx on a VM somewhere and everything is working fine. Then I tried to build some directory structure under the nginx root HTML folder. I received 403 forbidden for a file so normally I assumed permissions. Using root I gave entire dir structure chmod -R a+r /usr/share/ngnix/html/myfolder. Still 403.
Then I SFTP'd into this box using a didcated web FTP account. I am not that experienced to be able to tell how is this user set nor which permissions it has, but by default it can view all directories in the system. When navigating to the HTML root I could see myfolder but when going inside I was seeing nothing. No subfolder, no files. needless to say ls -al from bash on any of these is giving me rwxr--r-- for all files and directories.

if I copy some arbitrary file from within the myfolder dir to html root and give it a+r it IS accessible from web and SFTP. If this were only a 403 I would assume something I am not configuring properly on nginx, but since SFTP is showing same behavior I am led to believe it is something in the directories themselves!? What else is there besides file permissions?