To Mayor Ben Walsh, a city decision to move the Syracuse police and fire department headquarters from the downtown Public Safety Building into a repurposed industrial structure on West Fayette Street was driven by pragmatics. The old PSB, the mayor said, is “a tired building” that fails to provide “a good, healthy working environment.”
The city’s emergency response administrators will move in 2026 into 1153 West Fayette on the near West Side, at the doorstep of Tipperary Hill. While the mayor acknowledges there were benefits to having those services downtown, he maintains the new location works in many ways.
He likes the idea of the fire and police nerve center being in a place where everyday residents “can see it and touch and feel it” in an easier manner, and he said there’s natural symmetry for aspiring high school police officers or firefighters at the nearby Public Leadership Academy at Fowler in having easy access to the offices of public safety leaders.
Yet from the day the Common Council approved the decision in 2023, one element has loomed to me as particularly intriguing: In 1964, when the downtown Public Safety Building opened, it was seen as an early step in a vision laid out a year later in a “Central Syracuse Illustrative Plan,” in which the Syracuse mayor of that era and the Syracuse Urban Renewal Agency joined together as main contributors.
That mayor, in his foreword, wrote of how “major public improvements” would be necessary to accommodate dramatically different traffic patterns — a time to “replace the old and worn-out with the new and productive.” Among the visions was a State Street-area “government and institutional district” that would include the new PSB and a modernist Paul Rudolph-designed City Hall, replacing the classic Erie Canal-era landmark that instead remains the heart of city government on East Washington Street.
In other words, in its appearance and footprint, the existing PSB – when it was new, all those years ago – was symbolic of how city leaders of the 1960s saw the future. The mayor whose words appeared in that report:
William Walsh, Ben’s grandfather.
For me, a guy who’s seen the hard results of Urban Renewal in a whole lot of Upstate cities, shifting the PSB becomes a giant symbol. Bill Walsh was mayor from 1961 to 1969, a time when millions in federal dollars poured into Syracuse behind a nationwide notion that the best way of rejuvenating downtowns was to demolish and then to build big, new and fast — a process intertwined in Syracuse with the perceived benefits of the new Interstate 81, which dreamy metropolitan planners of the time saw as a fountain of new commerce through the heart of Syracuse.
It didn’t work out that way. More often, 81 became an easy route to suburban malls and commercial plazas that effectively shuttered downtown businesses, even as thousands of residents left the city and used the interstates for a fast in-and-out drive for work. Almost 60 years later, the grandson of Bill Walsh brought what he describes as an “evolved” philosophy to City Hall — a 133-year-old landmark that he loves — when he took office after being elected in 2017.
“Looking back, when you look at what’s driving a lot of the revitalization happening in the city, it’s repurposing our historic building stock, which is what makes our city authentic and unique and different from other places, and we lost a lot of it back then,” the mayor said.
In many ways, that embraces a dramatic reversal of the City Hall philosophy when his grandfather was mayor. None of that, Ben Walsh said, figured into his direct thinking with the PSB move – but he acknowledges how that shift underlines the point, which he describes less as a rejection and more as what time has shown to be as best practice.
If you want a tiny example of how Ben Walsh sees wise development, take a look at a Dunkin coffee shop on North Salina Street, built when he served as a business development administrator under former Mayor Stephanie Miner.
The storefront, similar to nearby landmark commercial buildings, is flush to the sidewalk, honoring the longtime streetscape. Parking and a drive-through are set behind it, to maintain a “walkable” main entrance on North Salina. The builders rejected the intrusive and impersonal “big box” design for so many chain businesses — suburban thinking, ill-suited to the city, that for decades disrupted and fragmented so many Syracuse neighborhoods.
The mayor said he embraced the idea of sensitive design as a graduate student years ago at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, studying under associate professor Emanuel Carter — for whom Ben Walsh declared an “Emanuel Carter Day” to honor those sensibilities, in 2025.
That is a far cry from the widespread urban planning vision of his grandfather’s era, when parking and vehicular access were paramount and demolition was seen as a kick start toward a new city. It was a time in which civic leaders envisioned a ring of arterials around downtown, as demonstrated by West Street, that would serve as “footers” for expressways — some that fortunately were never built.
The idea was that metropolitan highways and arterials could harness heavy traffic, still a new postwar phenomenon, into an economic engine for the city.
While that didn’t succeed for Syracuse, Ben Walsh takes pains to say he doesn’t see himself as rejecting his grandfather’s legacy. His point is similar to one made by Dennis Connors, curator emeritus of history for the Onondaga Historical Association and a guy who spent his early years in Syracuse in the 1970s fighting the demolition-happy ripples of Urban Renewal.
“They are reflective of their generations,” Connors said of the two mayors. The entire federal emphasis in the 1960s — in cities across the nation — was that a flood of government money, focused on demolition and new builds, might turn around the larger struggle that people sensed their downtowns were facing as automobile use exploded after World War II:
City centers were declining, and it would take dramatic change to reverse that trend.
“It was an ambitious time for the city, when they thought big and built big and dreamt big,” Ben Walsh said. His grandfather was mayor for the construction of the first of the MONY (now AXA) Towers, which intertwined with a dream of refocusing downtown energy in their footprint, as the “Illustrative Plan” explains.
He was mayor for the opening of the Everson Museum of Art, conceived as part of that same dream of State Street as a modernistic avenue of public government and art — and a museum still considered one of the enduring masterworks of architect I.M. Pei. As the “illustrated plan” mentions, he was mayor for the earliest vision of the Creekwalk, which soon found a 1960s champion when the mayor hired innovative parks commissioner James Heath.
Bill Walsh also inherited plans for Interstate 81, a massive demolition and construction project that for the most part happened while he was mayor. It leveled the 15th Ward and displaced much of the city’s Black community — behind the idea, at the time, that new public housing rising in the interstate’s wake might provide a better option, though the polar opposite proved true.
To Connors, Bill Walsh represented the prevailing wisdom of his era — and his grandson, decades later, came into office with his own generation’s hard-earned knowledge about seeing what really works and what doesn’t in shaping city districts.
“Look,” Ben Walsh said, “you have to learn from history, and for me in my position as mayor you have to learn from history that involves my family, most notably my grandfather as mayor.”
Bill Walsh, a Republican, stepped down after two terms in City Hall, and later served in the House of Representatives. He lived to be 98, and he once told me his great regret was that he did not run one more time in 1969 — because he believes he might have defeated the late Lee Alexander, whose eventual conviction on corruption charges caused years of anguish for the city.
His son, James T. Walsh – the father of today’s mayor – also spent decades in public service: After serving on the council and narrowly losing an Onondaga County Executive Republican primary to Nick Pirro, Jim Walsh spent 20 years in Congress and built a reputation as a guy with a particular passion for the city.
This is Ben Walsh’s last week as mayor, before his deputy of eight years — Sharon Owens — is sworn in, after a resounding victory in November, as the first Black mayor in Syracuse history. Walsh, elected as an independent, is being “term-limited” out, and he said one particularly emotional moment that made him pause in recent weeks was when he packed up a portrait of his grandfather that he could see from his desk.
A similar and permanent image of Bill Walsh hangs in the main City Hall corridor, part of a prominent gallery of all Syracuse mayors since the 1800s. Ben Walsh saw it – and thought about it – every day. He contemplated the meaning of that photo – the reminder it provided each day – as he heard this month from many relatives, wishing him well as his time in office ticked down:
“I joke with them that one of my primary goals was not to screw up the family legacy.”
The bottom line, he said, is that he revered his grandfather. He has two particularly compelling memories related to his “grampa” and City Hall: Maybe 16 years ago, when Ben Walsh was working for Centerstate CEO, he took his grandfather for a ride through the city, listening with pleasure as Bill Walsh reflected on such achievements as construction of the Everson and the AXA Towers.
His grandfather was also “open and honest and self-reflective” about mistakes made during that era, Ben Walsh said. Bill Walsh “acknowledged that they didn’t get it all right,” the mayor said of that car ride, during which they discussed in general an era in which demolition claimed such revered landmarks as, say, the third county courthouse at Clinton Square — a building whose significance was noted by legendary New York Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable.
The honesty and humility of those concessions stay with the grandson:
“The reason it helped me so much … is because all of us who serve as leaders, whether (in an) elected capacity or not, we are not infallible. We are imperfect and we don’t always get it right. What I’ve always said is that I try to do the right things for the right reasons, and I’m sure when people look back on my decisions, some will come to the conclusion I didn’t get them all right.”
In that sense, he sees his connection to his grandfather as a straight line reinforced by widening knowledge. He said many planners in the 1960s, looking at a fast-changing world, took chances they believe were based on best practices — which at the time seemed to be adjusting cities to better serve the car.
The thesis proved wrong. What became clear in the following decades was the enduring importance of streetscapes, of density, of “walkability” — that city neighborhoods and business districts could survive and thrive not by feeling more like their car-oriented suburban counterparts, but through sensitive decisions that emphasize longstanding elements of community.
Within a few days, Owens will be sworn in as mayor. Gov. Kathy Hochul has appointed Ben Walsh as the new director of the state Canal Corp., a job he will assume after stepping down from the only elected role he ever really wanted — and he said he has no plans, at least right now, to ever run for anything again.
But he also offers another Bill Walsh tale that stays with him. Years ago, three generations of Walshes — the grandfather, father and grandson — attended an event at the old University Sheraton. The way Ben Walsh remembers it, once that gathering was over, his dad went to get their car, leaving Bill and Ben Walsh waiting together outside the hotel.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Bill Walsh asked: “Ben, what are you thinking? What’s next for you? Are you going to run for something?”
The grandson responded that his goal was to “continue to find ways to make the community a better place … (and to) do it without running for office because I just don’t think politics is for me.”
Bill Walsh, well into his 90s, replied with what might be called a certain gentle urgency: “Well, Ben, that’s really nice, and I’m glad to hear you want to help the community, but you need to run for office and you need to do it sooner than later because I wish I did it sooner in my own life.”
That “was really a shock to the system,” the mayor said, because his grandfather rarely spoke to him that bluntly. Bill Walsh died in 2011, eulogized as a guy who provided strong, warm and steady leadership during one of the most turbulent decades in Syracuse history — a time of war in Vietnam, a time when the Black community rose up against years of poverty, segregation and suffering, a time when I-81 went up and many landmarks rose and fell downtown.
In 2017, Bill’s grandson was only 38 when he ran for the same job in City Hall, and won — a position he would hold for eight years, amid the pandemic and the national furor over the police killing of George Floyd and the beginning of the $2.25 billion effort to tear down the I-81 bridges, as well as the announcement that Micron wants to spend billions on a new semiconductor complex in Clay.
The mayor will leave it to residents — and to historians like Connors — to rule on how he did in City Hall. As for his own measure, when he thinks about elected office and the careers of his grandfather and his dad, “it was about them but even more so the way in which they went about public service … grounding myself in the fact that I’m here to serve the people of Syracuse.”
Through that filter, then, he contends his support for moving the PSB — or bringing down the I-81 viaduct, or focusing on restoring city streetscapes rather than widespread demolition to make way for new “builds” — aren’t a rejection of his grandfather’s policies, but a logical extension in a different world of the same goals and ideals, built around a truth of both family and politics:
You are supposed to honor and learn from the triumphs and mistakes of your grandparents and parents, because there is no true motion forward unless you do.
He hopes that’s why, outside the Sheraton, Bill Walsh asked him to run.
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