Asked to choose a personal favorite, Tarod Clarke had plenty of options inside the new Syracuse Regional Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math High School for the most mind-blowing aspect of an $85 million renovation and restoration project, which hits an emotional crescendo Wednesday when students finally return.
Many of us, for instance, might select the legendary Lincoln Auditorium, once the home of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra and still a work in progress — but already a visually stunning space that will seat around 2,500, school district officials say, beneath an unforgettably ornate ceiling.
Or maybe we’d go with the basement walkway that teenagers will use as their way into the cafeteria each day, an entrance beyond some elaborate brick arches that will bring these young women and men directly underneath the beams of a stop-you-in-your-tracks skylight, four stories above their heads.
For my part — and Central Current photographer Michelle Gabel and I had the opportunity to walk through the building Sunday, a few days before it formally opens — I might even choose the statue of Minerva in the main entranceway. She was brought there Friday by a crew of workers, who placed her in a crate in the lobby of the Syracuse Downtown Marriott — Minerva’s temporary respite for nine years — and moved her back to her longtime home in the entranceway of the new Syracuse Regional STEAM school.
Or, as it was known for many years: Central High.
I’m hopelessly mystical, but I swear I felt the shades of thousands upon thousands of teenagers of the past rushing by as I stood Sunday alongside Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. She will soon resume her job of greeting students in that vestibule, a task she did with endless patience for much of the 20th century…
Until that grand landmark was left empty for 50 years, turning it into a daily statement of downtown inertia on South Warren Street.
That long purgatory is over. Sunday, as we walked in the front door of the grand and pillared facade, Michael Noralis — superintendent for Murnane Construction — was standing on front steps that were only built in the last week. He was preparing to put up a sign donated by the class of 1952 that will hang at the main entrance, and for the first time in forever the school again will have a name.
All of it, to Clarke — a city schools graduate himself, and a guy I first met at a Little League game when he was 9 — has extraordinary meaning. Still, he finds the highest inspiration in a simple yet beautifully stunning element of the project.
Through his role with JE Bryant and Associates, he is the project construction manager for C&S Construction Companies, the main contractor for the entire job. Clarke is also a graduate of Corcoran High School on the city’s southwest side, a school building constructed in Syracuse with an intentional almost-total-absence of windows in the mid-1960s.
Clarke went there before a major construction project remedied that misstep and punched in some new windows a few years ago, and he recalls — as a teenager — being hungry for a classroom where he’d have a way to see outside, just to know if it was raining or if maybe the sky happened to be blue.
Sunday, Clarke and Thomas Ferrara, the Syracuse City School District’s director of facilities, joined us in walking through old Central, moving past dozens of intent and busy workers focused on getting the building ready for new students. On the second floor, we stopped in a massive classroom where late summer sunshine poured through the windows, an effect that was uplifting unto itself.
That kind of light was a priority of Archimedes Russell, the renowned architect who handled the design of the school when it opened in 1903. Clarke went to a window, looking across the green trees of city neighborhoods and toward sunlight bouncing off the top of the JMA Wireless Dome. Teachers and teenagers throughout the building, he said, will share equally stunning views.
There was a time, 60 years ago, when some educators believed windows and open air distracted students. To Clarke, the impact of looking out will be exactly the opposite.
“The most magnificent thing is all this sunlight coming through,” he said. “This amount of space and all this light will allow teachers to be free and creative and help students to feel the same way, and it will actually help them to pay more attention.”
Ferrara said the STEAM school renovation is one of those efforts that will have a palpable and moving impact on the community around it, which he sees as similar to the way the new Fowler High athletic field elevated the whole atmosphere on nearby South Geddes Street. “We’re creating a community asset,” he said. “This building will last a lot longer than any of us.”
Whenever Ferrara and Clarke encountered intent workers, most wearing yellow vests, they made a point of thanking those women and men for coming in on Labor Day weekend. On a typical August weekday before school resumed, Clarke said, there were anywhere from 130 to 150 men and women on the STEAM school job, represented many contractors – all focused on getting the place ready for kids.
Ferrara said the school district also brought in about 30 custodians to help, volunteers who weren’t needed at their assigned buildings on the weekend. Still, there are some elements that Clarke concedes will require extra time to finish. The lower seats in the auditorium, for instance, have yet to be installed, and Clarke said it will probably be sometime in the New Year before that beloved space is ready for a concert or performance.
The goal is to have two floors ready to go this autumn. There’ll be a formal ribbon-cutting, late this afternoon, to celebrate Wednesday’s arrival of students. Yet this first week will provide a little extra time for the work crews, Ferrara said, since the 250 new students — ninth graders representing 28 middle schools throughout Central New York — will spend a few days on field trips as a way of building community.
The new robotics room, sponsored by Amazon, should be ready. So will the simulated and silver-toned “clean room,” which Ferrara said is often called the “Micron room” because it’s sponsored by the semiconductor giant. He said full power to the building was just turned on last week, and workers have also been busy with such priorities as finishing up the built-from-scratch front steps — as well as a ramp for wheelchair access being worked on as you read this.
Decades ago, Ferrara said, a contractor who briefly attempted to turn the school into business offices ripped out much of the beautiful and original ornamental detail. Some of it — such as the chandeliers that grace the elaborately decorative patterns on the auditorium ceiling — is being replicated, with painstaking attention. Workers were intrigued to find a few old Central High posters – some maybe a century old – behind a wall.
And certain striking features have survived, such as beautiful cast iron stairs that carry the name of their maker, the Thelen Architectural Iron Works.
As for transportation, suburban and rural school districts whose students attend the STEAM school will take care of busing them to the new campus, Ferrara said, while city school students will ride city buses to the neighboring Centro Transit Hub.
For me, there was particular symmetry involved with touring the building while working alongside Gabel, a Central Current photographer. In 2011, when we were both at Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, we teamed up to cover a public tour of the landmark that was guided by the late Sehl Burns, a long ago Central student whose greatest dream was seeing the place brought back — but who died in 2023, about two years before it happened.
Even in 2011, the potential of the old high school seemed staggering — though its condition was heartbreaking. Neglect and the stalled business renovation had damaged and disfigured the interior. It was easy to believe — without dramatic intervention — the building might never be put to use again.
Sunday, more than 14 years after we saw the place in forlorn disrepair, it was joyous to contemplate the full extent of the restoration — and what it will mean, educationally and spiritually, to the city.
Clarke, for his part, sees a corollary between the potential of the new high school and the factors that made a difference in his life. He went to Corcoran and grew up on nearby Glenwood Avenue. He said he saw too many close friends in the African-American community lost to violence or struggle, and there was a time in his life when it would have been all too easy for a teenager to take a similar kind of turn.
He will always be grateful for both a vigilant and tireless mother and a strong and caring neighborhood community that embraced Clarke and his siblings: At the homes of friends, he saw the possibility for the kind of professional life he had not really contemplated for himself.
“Those are the things,” said Clarke, now a husband and father raising two children in Syracuse, “that make you into you.”
He went on to study sports management at SUNY Cortland, and he found a mentor after graduation in the late Dick Anderson, who helped run Vector Construction, founded by Anderson’s father. Clarke became emotional in recalling Anderson’s impact on his life. For 22 years, Clarke worked on construction jobs, before he shifted into management.
Now, with JE Bryant, he is overseeing the birth of a new school — in a beloved landmark — that will attempt to do for its students what a network of caring mentors did for Clarke: By exposing teenagers to new skills and experiences, by introducing them to artists and business leaders and women and men skilled at the trades, the goal is opening gateways these young people might never have imagined.
“Amazing,” Clarke said softly, in summary, as we ended the tour. We stopped to admire the front entrance, where Noralis had just finished putting up the sign — donated by the class of 1952 — that boils down to one essential message for every visitor:
This is Central.
The only difference, as of Wednesday, is that it’s turning on the STEAM.
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