Syracuse: 21st Century City

By Drew Roberts About two centuries ago, a writer from New York City visited a banker in a cold, mucky town full of drunks and taverns. He traveled 60 miles by boat up a crude, water-filled ditch. The boat docked at Hanover Square, or as some called it, “Hangover Square.” The writer stepped off the boat, into the mud, and looked around at the tree stumps and shacks that surrounded him.

“You call this a village?” the writer asked the banker. “It would make an owl weep to fly over it.”

“Never mind,” said the banker. “You will live to see it a city yet.”

Twenty years later the writer returned to that village, now officially named Syracuse, by way of the Erie Canal. He stepped off the boat and onto the paved street, and gawked in every direction at the “splendid hotels, rows of massive buildings, and the lofty spires of churches glittering in the sun,” he later wrote. “A city it now is…thronged with people full of life and activity.

This transformation came from the banker, Joshua Forman, who pushed for the Erie Canal, the lifeblood of central New York. As a result, Hanover Square and the city that encompassed it thrived and expanded for decades.

So what the hell happened to Syracuse? Hanover Square is no longer the point of entry; those behemoths of architectural prowess that once greeted visitors arriving on the canal now shiver in the shade beside two elevated highways. In some places, whole expanses of cracked sidewalk lay neglected—artifacts of an age when people got up and walked. Gray parking garages pepper the city like a toddler’s carelessly dropped rocks. If all the downtown parking spots were laid side by side, they would comprise an area equivalent to 40 percent of downtown itself. When you ask a historian like Dennis Connors of the Onondaga Historical Association where Syracuse is going, you get the story of where it’s been. Which is fine. If history repeats itself, then a history lesson is the next best thing to a crystal ball. In Connors’ office hangs a poster of an early 20th century building, with a tagline that reads, “Syracuse: The 21st Century City”—an illustration of how Syracuse’s past informs it. Connors is optimistic about the future. He believes people are realizing the organic urban atmosphere that occurred in the 19th century before cars and highways—is the most natural and logical way for a city to function. When the automobile became popular, especially in the late 1920s, it was an unsuspected poison that city-dwellers and developers embraced. The largest public works project in American history, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, helped create 46,876 miles of interstate highways. That’s the same distance as almost 14 coast-to-coast journeys. Ostensibly, these highways were built to connect cities to cities—which they did. However, that boon came with a bane. Highways also made the suburbs outside cities more accessible. Suddenly that suburban house with a driveway on an acre square of grass was not so out of reach. With that, people left the city. The Highway Act was a national phenomenon: four-lane highways crawled across America like hundreds of black worms. City populations plummeted, and suburbs at city edges flourished. From a vulture’s perspective, the American city must have resembled a carcass: people flocked to it in the morning, sucked what they needed, and deserted it at sundown.

Today, Syracuse looks and feels like its recovering from a bad breakup—which isn’t far from the truth. Katelyn Wright, the Syracuse land use planner, tells a crowd at a neighborhood meeting that the automobile isn’t going to run this city’s life anymore. It conjures an image of a divorcee at a day spa, pledging to have more “me time.” Connors is glad for the upsurge of young people like Wright in the current city administration. Where Connors, the historian, speaks a chronological language, full of backstory and reason, Wright, the beady-eyed planner, speaks a rambling tongue devoid of punctuation—no time for pauses. But for all her focus on the future, Wright keeps an ear attuned to the past.

Within the past year, Wright and her gang at the Planning & Sustainability Department helped write the Land Use and Development Plan, which lays out the development strategy for coming decades. New zoning regulations urge new development projects to follow historic patterns. Wright says that development patterns from the past were more sustainable, and reinforced the character of neighborhoods. Some of the plan’s bullet points for downtown include protecting historic buildings, encouraging “designs that create visual interest,” and wrapping the ground floor of parking garages in retail or office uses. It’s unclear what is meant by “designs that create visual interest”—but if it means an end to the coldhearted, block-style architecture that dominated the 20th century, it couldn’t have come a moment too soon.

Nothing killed visual interest like modernism, and the influx of architects like Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who emigrated to America from Europe just before World War II. These architects hailed from Germany's Bauhaus design school, which taught rationalismand functionalism. The results were boring, gaunt, boxy structures thrust on the public as high art. Why such a minimalist, barren style was so eagerly embraced by a capitalist country like the U.S. continues to baffle experts. This anorexic aesthetic duped cities across the nation, including Syracuse. Driving through downtown, you see its influence in the secure Post-Standard building at Clinton Square, or, a slingshot fling west of that, the concrete filingcabinet that is the Federal Building. So, next time you’re driving through Syracuse and you see a flat sided building with hard, unforgiving edges and hardly any windows (there are more than a few of these hanging around)—just think of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, cigar twixt lips, saying the phrase he’s most well-known for: “Less is more.”

One cannot have a conversation about urban design today, especially the kind that values old, 19th century design values, without mentioning newurbanism, a movement advocating pedestrian-friendly, community-driven neighborhoods. For George Curry, the ESF landscape architecture professor, the “new” in new urbanism is misleading. He’s always correcting himself when saying it: “New urb—well, old urbanism…it’s not new. It’s an old prototype on new land, that’s all.” In the 1980s Curry, along with his partner Robert Doucette, revamped Armory Square according to new urbanist principles. Unlike the modernist concrete slabs that often clashed with the more classically designed edifices around them, Center Armory, the long strip of connected buildings between West Jefferson and Walton Streets, blended with the historic buildings around it. The space was originally a parking lot. When the city asked what the two planned to do about parking, the two basically said, “not much.” The message was: if you want a car friendly experience, go to the mall. If you want to sit outside and have a drink, come to Armory Square.

Syracusans, for the most part, are familiar with this story. If you ask an out-of-towner, though, he probably won’t know about the development in Armory Square, or the city’s efforts to improve its infrastructure or beautify storefronts. What the out-oftowner will likely know about, is Destiny USA, the 2.4 million square foot shopping mall that will swallow up an additional 120 acres in the coming years. Destiny’s PR guys blow some hot air about the project’s many wonderful windfalls—like its capacity for increasing tourism, and its innovative green energy (the new flooring is made of crushed walnut shells and cork). But those most familiar with the fine-tuning of Syracuse urban design will tell you that Destiny USA is capitalism’s tumor. It shows how attached the city remains to its cars. Furthermore, Destiny has an exclusivity clause which prevents stores from opening up downtown locations, and thats certainly not doing the city any favors. While downtown moves toward a more pedestrian-oriented schema, Destiny USA is a vestige of the minivan mindset that’s strangled downtown for decades: a giant leap in the wrong direction.

Despite Destiny, there’s hope for the city’s fate. Forward-thinking developers like Doucette, the father of Armory Square, remain a strong influence in Syracuse’s development. Doucette has traveled the world, taking notes on what works and what doesn’t. He loves Istanbul. The name alone causes him to sit forward in his chair. Istanbul works, he says, not because it has developers or grants from the city, but because of its people. Lots of them. “When you get that many people into a small space, they make a city happen,” Doucette says. It’s ironic to hear a developer, whose job depends on strategy, praise a city for its lack of strategy. On the other hand, it’s easy to see how this emphasis on density plays into Doucette’s vision for Syracuse. A significant portion of his projects is mixed-use apartment buildings. If there’s an overarching strategy to Doucette’s work, it seems to be bringing people back to the city and re-densifying Syracuse to the point where it won’t need him—or any developer—anymore.

In 1825, moments after a cannon blast heralded the completion of the Erie Canal, governor DeWitt Clinton congratulated a crowd of thousands on what he considered the greatest work of the age. The canal, he said, was the result of the “voluntary efforts of free men.” Because people, when left to their own devices, will naturally build great things. In this way, a city is like an undeveloped roll of film. It doesn’t benefit from too much poking and prodding, but rather the right ingredients. Add light and certain chemicals to paper, and you’ll have a photograph. Add people to a plot of land, and you’ll have a city. The development happens on its own. The more developers who understand that, the more beautiful Syracuse will be.