Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, July 18, 2010
Citiwire.net

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — “Rightsizing the city” has a different meaning here than in cities where the demolition of vacant homes is the primary but historically fruitless solution. In this upstate post-industrial city, an extraordinary coalition has come together around a multi-faceted policy of regeneration by adding the positive rather than straining to remove the negative.

No one seems left out of the loose partnership among the mayor, university chancellor, assorted neighborhood groups and business associations. The positive spirit is palpable just talking to local residents and activists and viewing reviving rundown areas spread around town.

“There is a ‘can do’ sense throughout the city,” says designer and preservation activist Beth Crawford, “a sense that neighborhoods can fight for what they need and want, oppose demolitions, achieve good planning and needed enforcement.”

Recently, Crawford notes, neighborhood activists with official city support successfully pressured a new Walgreens to forego its desired sea of parking and comply with existing pedestrian-friendly guidelines.

Slowly but surely, the small signs are adding up to a real momentum. Abandoned homes are reclaimed, renovated and sold to new residents. Absentee landlords are feeling the heat of enforcement. Neighborhood groups are organizing clean-ups and creating appealing gathering spaces where people congregate and even share barbecues. Gardens are replacing small, empty lots. New businesses are emerging. And big, longtime empty industrial buildings are being revived.

No one thing explains it all but, clearly, the parallel visions and cooperative efforts of a far-sighted Mayor Stephanie Miner, an equally far-sighted Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney form the lion share of this regeneration strategy.

“We live with decades of bad decisions to tear down too much of our city,” says Mayor Miner. “I drive by some of those mistakes every day. The easy route might be to tear down more but, then you have to ask, where is our soul, who are we?”

The biggest challenge, she says, is overcoming the state and federal regulations that make this revitalization direction so difficult. “We lobbied hard for the state tax credit for historic building restorations and we have to work equally hard to overcome all sorts of regulations to make things more flexible,” she adds.

As difficult as things may be, something is clearly working in this centrally located city that sits between the Finger Lakes and the Adirondack Mountains. Historically, Syracuse has served as a major crossroads, first for the Eric Canal and its offshoots, than as a railroad network and now as a convergence of Interstates 90 and 81.

Downtown vibrancy is real and spreading, even though the scars of excessive demolition of the 1950s and ’60s remain. Armory Square, a six-block area of railroad era warehouses and small hotels that have been gradually renovated since the 1980s, is overflowing with restaurants, cafes, local stores, offices and assorted businesses. More recently the spectacular Thomas Lamb 1920s Landmark Theater was restored. A former Day Brothers Department store has been converted to apartments, adding to the growing downtown population. And the redevelopment of the Pike Block, a multi-building mix of housing and retail, creates a link to Armory Square and expands the revived downtown district. A new seven-story infill building is rising on a former surface parking lot to which a suburban engineering firm is relocating.

Most recently, County Executive Mahoney announced her support for the restoration of the historic 1924 Hotel Syracuse, conveniently close to the convention center. The three-tower brick and sandstone landmark has been bankrupt and shuttered since the 1990s. Mahoney chose to support this investment of county, state and city funding over a proposed new Westin Hotel. The combination of grants and low cost financing is partially subsidized with federal Recovery Zone Bonds.

As positive and promising as all this downtown re-growth is, much of it parallels the kinds of regeneration occurring in urban downtowns where official policies encourage reuse of historic assets combined with compatible new development. But what makes the Syracuse story even more intriguing, and possibly unique, is the additional contribution of Syracuse University, a 20,000 student research institution, combined with a number of energetic neighborhood-based rebuilding efforts.

When Cantor took over as chancellor six years ago, she spent her first year meeting with community groups, churches, business associations and local government officials “listening to what the community thought, needed and wanted.” From the outset, she aimed for a collaboration to “pursue a long-term course that would benefit residents, faculty and students alike and not be a one-shot prescription.” The point, she emphasizes, was to “merge our strengths.”

She hired Marilyn Higgins, a former utility company economic development officer, and turned her loose to be innovative. The resultant myriad programs are head-spinning. Students are engaged with community people in real problem solving, designing and building homes, working with a business incubator in the poorest community, assisting a community newspaper, developing a local African American oral history project, sponsoring cultural activities including art exhibits and musical events, advancing a downtown connective cultural and transit corridor, developing a rain garden and a deconstruction program for unsalvageable vacant homes. The visual and performing arts programs occupy a renovated warehouse and includes small artisanal productions that will likely grow into new neighborhood businesses. The Architecture Program sponsored a design competition for building three new homes on vacant lots to be sold below market.

A major redevelopment target, Higgins notes, is a strip of abandoned warehouses that divides the poorest neighborhood from downtown. Neighborhood residents were convinced, Higgins says, that it “was left abandoned to serve as a Berlin Wall. They wouldn’t believe our initiative was real until they saw something happening there.”

The university bought three vacant industrial buildings, an empty lot and two small additional commercial buildings, all for redevelopment in that targeted area. King and King Architects, the oldest architectural firm in the state, designed the upgrade of another warehouse and then relocated into it from the suburbs. The local PBS office will be moving into a warehouse now under renovation. Another warehouse was converted to commercial and artist lofts. A new cabinet-maker is growing his business in another formerly empty warehouse. Plans are in process for a local ceramicist to move into the other small building to both grow his business and give free instruction to local high school students.

One of the school’s small commercial buildings has an art gallery and a Latino artist-in-residence who will give free art classes to neighborhood students.

And to add to all of this mix are the scattered new residents working on their reclaimed homes purchased for one dollar, some of whom are opening new businesses. A citywide school improvement program includes college financial support for city students.

Has any city/university/community partnership done more? Maybe. Somewhere. But here is a real model of innovative possibilities any combination of which can only go a long way to jumpstarting the regeneration of broken and shrinking cities.

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Roberta Brandes Gratz is an urban critic and author of the newly published The Battle For Gotham: New York In the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, 2010, Nation Books. Her e-mail address is Roberta.Gratz@gmail.com.

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