Why do the prospects for downtown Syracuse seem so much bleaker than those for Rochester? Syracuse has a current population of about 150,000 (from a peak of 220,000 in 1950), while Rochester’s population is 210,000 (peak of 330,000 in 1950). Those seem like about the same orders of magnitude, and in fact, the depopulation of Rochester over the decades has been more severe. Syracuse has a very important anchor institution in the Upstate Medical University, with over 10,000 employees and a budget of almost $2 billion. It also has Syracuse University, with 4,500 employees and 21,000 students. The University, unlike any of those in Rochester, has a noted sports program, with a high-profile basketball team. The Syracuse metro has a population of about 670,000.
But something about downtown Syracuse gives it a feeling of desolation and lack of activity. Its public spaces are empty and poorly maintained. It has acres of surface parking lots (presumably where abandoned buildings were demolished), while Rochester has an extensive network of structured parking. Syracuse’s nods to current trends in urbanism, like shared scooters, fixed public seating, Victor Stanley trash baskets, and expensive newly installed hardscape like distinctive pavers and traffic calming bump-outs (traffic calming, where there is no traffic?) feel like afterthoughts. This is probably because they are so static – with almost no pedestrian activity. Of course, at one point in the 80’s built pedestrian skybridges were built, to get office workers off the “unsafe” streets and out of the winter weather – a move that has proven disastrous for most places. There also appears to be a small amount of residential development downtown, following the trend (including adaptive reuse of commercial structures) – but I would imagine downtown life in Syracuse to be a hard sell.
One observation I drew from the Rochester/Syracuse comparison is that in terms of a perception of safety and activity downtown, parking structures do way less damage than open lots. This isn’t something I had previously noticed. Garages continue the street wall and give at least some sense of activity – although they generally, unless they are well designed, present blank walls to the street and create pedestrian dead zones. But walking around Syracuse leads one to conclude that flat parking conveys a much stronger feeling of a lack of activity and dereliction. Continuous street walls, even ones without ground floor retail activity, are important to a sense of urbanity. Lots full of cars lead to a feeling of abandonment, particularly if the lots are mostly empty.
It is highly worth noting that I walked to dinner through the dark, bleak downtown, past the city’s main public space, Clinton Square, which looks abandoned and ominous, to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. I was told that there was a half hour wait for a table. The place next door, Apizza Regionale, was also hopping. So, people were coming downtown on a Friday night for dining and drinking – even though there appeared to be no one on the street.
My internet search for a distinctive place to stay yielded only chains along highways, with almost no acceptable options downtown (the Trip Advisor reviews of the non-chain places downtown were hair raising) – so we stayed at a bleak Quality Inn, with small (clean) rooms, no closets, outdoor corridors, and a plexiglass window with a slot where customers once slid their credit cards through for payment. The motel was located right next to the elevated IH 81, which slices through the middle of town, and is charged with much of the city’s ills. Planning is underway to tear down the highway as a vehicle for revitalizing the downtown.
Oddly enough, Syracuse has a great, historic hotel. The Hotel Syracuse, built in 1924, is beautifully maintained with spectacular public rooms. It is both a Marriott and a member of Historic Hotels of America. Why I didn’t find in in my internet search is a mystery to me (and no one recommend it to me as I was planning the trip). The property also doesn’t come up on Google Maps until you have magnified the image to the maximum. The hotel is a major civic asset, and I was glad I eventually found it during my walking around. It is likely the grandest hotel in Upstate New York. The dark, cramped Quality Inn, at $285 per night, was the most expensive place we stayed on our bi-state odyssey. I have to think this whole business a detriment as to the way Syracuse presents itself to the world, even if I am an embarrassed, incompetent internet searcher.
Clinton Square is truly awful. It has some important neo-gothic buildings around it, and those two restaurants are adjacent to it. It is organized around an impressive City Beautiful era Civil War monument completed in 1910. The monument was erected adjacent to the Erie Canal, which in time was covered over and became Erie Boulevard. The square also has seen some recent rebuilding of adjoining sidewalks and curbs. There is ice skating on the square in the winter and it appeared that the infrastructure for the ice rink is just left lying around during the off season. The square looks unused and neglected, with a few scattered desultory benches and picnic tables cemented to the ground. The extensive hardscaping is windswept and empty.
South Salina Street was once the main shopping district of Syracuse and today has many empty stores. One bright spot on Salina is the recently opened Parthenon Books, a large bight store, with a carefully curated inventory. There are a half a dozen midcentury modern office towers nearby. The city has quite a few older architecturally interesting commercial and civic buildings, but they are spread out around the downtown and don’t create any sense of urban synergy. It would be hard to say what the 100% corner of Syracuse is. The downtown doesn’t have a center. Given that, I’m not sure what good tearing down the highway is going to do towards revitalizing Syracuse, particularly if it is replaced with a multi-lane boulevard. The theory is that removing that highway will “reknit” the city. Under present circumstances, there isn’t actually enough downtown activity to be connected. A better focus for Syracuse’s boosters would be to pick a corner (near the book store?) and focus on creating a constant stream of activity at that place – through incentivizing food and drink (with outdoor dining and drinking) and other distinctive retail uses; as well as in activating nearby public spaces with activity. The billions of dollars that will be expended on bringing highway traffic to ground level might be better spent on filling in the gaps in pedestrian activity created by the flat parking.
The University is a good long walk from the downtown and seems to be off by itself. This is most likely by design, to separate the campus in its marketing to prospective students from a drab urban setting. The University certainly needs to be encouraged to be more aggressive about attaching itself to the downtown, by moving high visibility, street level uses there. Also, two and half miles from downtown Syracuse is Destiny USA, built in 1990 and formerly know as Carousel Center. It is a 2.4 million square foot project (the country’s 8th largest), featuring over 250 stores. The mall markets itself as a travel destination. That probably explains a lot about the absence of pedestrian life downtown.
It is telling that while the Rochester Philharmonic is a first-class organization, the Syracuse Symphony, conducted at one time by Christopher Keene, was allowed to fold in 1991. It may well be that civic leaders of Syracuse don’t much care about how the downtown works. It certainly looks that way. Likely for the corporate leaders who drive in to Syracuse in the morning and leave for the suburbs in the evening, the situation is good enough. The political structure, no doubt, fears that economic or demographic change will threaten its grip on the reins of power, the otherwise comfortable lives they lead outside the downtown and the contracts they let and control.
There is positive energy to be harnessed in downtown Syracuse as the two busy restaurants and magnificent hotel demonstrate. Again, as with Amsterdam, there is a lot of stranded social infrastructure in downtown Syracuse, at a time when pundits have declared a national housing “crisis” and tens of thousands of people are eager to move their lives to the United States from the many places across the world in turmoil and economic decline or stagnation. It just doesn’t make any sense not to use and leverage Syracuse’s still substantial resources to address those problems. It will take small scale risk taking and large-scale civic leadership, particularly by private sector anchor institutions to make the downtown once again a great place.
