Visualizing 81 | Chapter 1

A puzzle piece that surrounds the first letter of the story.

s 200 protesters marched from the People’s AME Zion Church on East Fayette Street to Syracuse’s City Hall, they crossed the city ground where the new interstate highway would soon loom overhead. Protesters’ chants of “freedom, freedom!” carried on the call from only weeks before when, on Aug. 28, 1963, Syracuse protesters boarded a bus at the same church to attend the historic March on Washington. Meanwhile at City Hall, a few onlookers jeered “beat ‘em, beat ‘em,” in return.

A young man wearing suit pants and a button up shirt carries a sign that says “No Uncle Toms Wanted.”

The march had gathered in response to the city’s planned construction of Interstate 81 and a slate of urban renewal programs in Syracuse’s 15th Ward. In September 1963, Syracuse’s Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) appealed to then-Mayor William Walsh to halt the demolition of the Ward and the segregated relocation of families that would follow. If not, CORE spokesperson George Wiley announced the “direct intervention of our physical selves into the urban renewal area to halt the urban renewal program.”

Walsh bluntly denied the request.

“I cannot believe that you have fully weighed the consequences of your action,” Walsh said, as reported by The Post-Standard at the time. “As mayor of Syracuse, I hereby request that in the best interest of our community, you withdraw your ultimatum, which is a threat to bring the orderly process of city government to a halt.”

The city and state governments’ “orderly process” would come to be known as one of the biggest urban development blunders in the city’s history — or, as the now-defunct Syracuse Herald-Journal called it, a “Russian roulette multimillion dollar boondoggle of concrete and steel.”

The construction annihilated Syracuse’s historic 15th Ward, which before the late 1960s formed the center of African American, Jewish, and immigrant life in the city. In 1950, eight of every nine Black residents in Syracuse lived in the Ward, which housed a residential neighborhood similar to the rows of early-20th-century, single-family homes still found around Syracuse University and Westcott Street today.

A historic aerial image of Syracuse shows the historic 15th Ward between the city’s downtown and Syracuse University.

The same view in the present day shows I-81 cutting through the center of the 15th Ward.

During the construction of the I-81 viaduct from 1964 to 1969 and simultaneous “urban renewal” projects in the area, the city tore down 90% of the Ward’s structures and displaced an estimated 1,300-2,200 families.

State highway engineers of the 1950s and 1960s plunged a dagger through the heart of Syracuse, following a similar trend as other urban freeways built through city centers and redlined districts across the United States. Today, the New York State Department of Transportation is approaching the final phase of a decision 15 years in the making: replace the 1.4 mile center-city viaduct with a street-level “community grid.”

After more than a decade of study on the aging viaduct, the state transportation department agreed in 2019 to move ahead with the grid rather than more expensive options of rebuilding the viaduct or digging an underground tunnel. The grid had gained favor among locals and transportation planners for its promise to promote economic growth, reduce air and noise pollution, and reunite the city.

But as the dagger is removed now decades later, local community members and activists are wary the city will fail to remedy its past and present inequities. In its 2019 Draft Environmental Impact Statement, the department determined that the community grid construction would not result in adverse effects on nearby communities, and would make the corridor more attractive for development. But redeveloping the 15th Ward now won’t revitalize the communities created by the segregated relocation of the Ward’s former population.

“What does that even mean to bring new life [to the Ward], when you displaced so many lives, and you created desolate cityscapes?” asked Joan Bryant, chair of Syracuse University’s African American Studies department. Local activists echo her concern that as Syracuse moves forward with its community grid redevelopment project, the communities still feeling the consequences of the 1960s urban renewal programs will be forgotten.

Pioneer Homes, located in Syracuse’s Southwest neighborhood just across the interstate from Upstate University Hospital, is one of these communities. When it was built in 1937, Pioneer Homes was the first public housing project in New York state. The housing was segregated, and 53 Black families were placed in the low-cost housing project in buildings separate from the 678 white families who lived there.

When thousands of Black, Jewish, and immigrant residents of the 15th Ward were displaced in the 1960s, many moved to the city’s South and East sides. In turn, white residents living in those neighborhoods sold their homes, following the same pattern of white flight to the suburbs seen in many metropolitan areas across the United States.

Juanita Sales, a former resident of the 15th Ward and one of two Black women hired by Carrier Corporation in Syracuse in 1964, remembered her white coworkers in the 1970s mentioning they used to live near Sales’ new residence on the South Side, but they would never explain why they had moved. “You would see ‘For Sale’ signs on a lot of properties,” Sales recalled. “They didn’t want to admit that they moved because Blacks were moving in, and they didn’t want to live near them.” Listen

Before long, Pioneer Homes became a predominantly Black neighborhood whose local grocery markets were bulldozed during urban renewal. Today, the city blocks from Pioneer Homes north to I-690 are designated a food desert and a pocket of concentrated poverty in Syracuse, and are among locations subjected to the consequences of food apartheid in the city.

Developers have announced Blueprint 15, a plan to replace the 1930s housing project and surrounding East Adams Street neighborhood with new, mixed-income apartments with access to a grocery, better schools, transportation, and other amenities. Blueprint 15’s goal is to engage the community in decisions being made today that will affect resources and opportunities for generations to come.

Lanessa Chaplin, the I-81 project counsel for the central New York chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, warned that the project needs to avoid pitfalls that have played out in similar “purpose-built communities” across the country, such as building on implicit biases that more affluent white residents need to be integrated into the neighborhood for it to be considered valuable.

To help deliver equity to residents living in the shadow of the I-81 viaduct, Chaplin and the NYCLU are calling on the state to put eight of the 17 acres anticipated to be freed after the viaduct comes down into a land trust for development controlled by the community. The land trust would be a measure to enable the community to build localized amenities — such as a grocery, a barbershop, a bookstore, and a community center — and to prevent private developers and universities from building in the area against the community’s interests.

“We want the viaduct to come down, but it has to happen equitably,” Chaplin said. “If it's not community-led, if it's not community-driven, then we need to rethink the investment and time we're putting into the project.” Listen

Chaplin gave voice to concerns from the community that, if the land trust and other equitable development measures aren’t taken, that forces of gentrification and raised property taxes could lead to a “slow leak of displacement” just as devious as the “overnight” displacement of the 15th Ward’s residents 60 years ago.

Revisiting and Revisualizing Syracuse’s 15th Ward

Government highway and urban renewal projects of the 1960s changed the community residing in the heart of Syracuse beyond recognition. Now, city and community leaders are reevaluating its past with hopes of reenvisioning its future.

Chapter 1

Syracuse's Coming "Revitalization" of The 15th Ward