Chuck Mazzuca, a maintenance guy, has been a customer for years at City Hardware on South Geddes Street. Sure, he comes in because he likes the people who run it and because he finds everything he needs, but the staff members he loves most of all were both standing behind the counter Tuesday.
On their hind legs.
“I’m going to miss you,” Mazzuca said with emphasis, reaching over to rub the heads of Yukon and Dobbie, a couple of rescue dogs who always “walk me around and show me the place,” Mazzuca said.
City Hardware closes today. Everything is 80 percent off, so the shelves are pretty much — but not yet entirely — picked clean. This is one last chance to see owner John Calley — whose family has operated their appliance-store-morphed-into-hardware-place on the Near West Side since 1946 — or his partner, Dawn Rutledge, a familiar knows-where-everything-is presence behind the cash register.
Even so, Calley and Rutledge totally understand: Like Mazzuca, a whole lot of old friends are stopping by to say goodbye to their dogs.
“Talk about bittersweet,” said Elizabeth Ross, a third-generation customer who walked the aisles of the hardware store for the last time, as some lonesome Marshall Tucker tunes played over the speakers. The operation, inside a 164-year-old landmark of astounding history, has the almost indescribable look and feel and scent of a distinct and vanishing American variety of neighborhood hardware store.
Ross stood for a moment near the swinging exit doors — where Calley always had jumbled boxes of discount work boots, and where the hardware dogs would sprawl out on their beds — and offered a hard-to-dispute observation:
This is the kind of operation, Ross said, “you might never see again.”
Although …
At 62, Calley isn’t totally retiring — and there’s a dog connection in why he changed his mind. Not long ago, Carmen Cesta popped in, looking for Calley. Cesta operates three Central New York “Carm’s Dog House” pet centers for “grooming, boarding, retails, fish, mammals, reptiles” and more, and he’s about to open another one — with “an inground pool for dogs,” no less — in the historic Byrne Square flatiron building, near the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in downtown Syracuse.
It turns out that Cesta, who’s opening a True Value Hardware store in Central Square, also owns the old Red Cross building at West Genesee and Wallace streets in downtown Syracuse. It occurred to him — when he learned City Hardware was closing — that a downtown hardware store might prosper, especially with so many contractors working in that district and the sheer growth in the number of downtown residents.
So he hopes to open another hardware store, with a Wallace Street entrance, by late winter or early spring. He dropped by City Hardware not long ago to talk with Calley about the whole idea and the best ways of getting started, and it turned out Calley and Rutledge happened to use Cesta’s mobile pet grooming service for their dogs — Yukon is a Huskie-Akita mix, while Dobbie is what Rutledge calls “a supermutt.”
Calley was already feeling some pangs about closing, especially with so many regulars telling him — as customers Patrick Coyne and Paul Finch said with emphasis — they didn’t know anywhere else where they could ever find “such inventory and such knowledge.”
Cesta’s idea offered a third rail. By the time the two men were done talking, Calley agreed to come downtown on a parttime basis to help train the staff and lend a hand as the new place gets rolling, which Cesta said is kind of like, well, hiring a Syracuse hardware Hall-of-Famer.
“I think,” Cesta said of a downtown hardware store, “it’s going to do very well.”
Rutledge is happy for Calley, because she knows how much the work is in his blood. For her part, after decades behind the counter, she’s ready to do something besides retail.
Best of all, she’ll have even more time to focus on the dogs.
As for the old City Hardware building, it’s been purchased by Rick Destito, a developer and make-it-happen dreamer whose grit and vision transformed a neighboring Albert Kahn-designed factory on South Geddes Street into the mesh of residential and artist’s studio space known as the Gear Factory. Calley said he’s known for at least a year — “things have gotten a lot harder,” he said — he was ready to sell the hardware store.
The pandemic was tough on business. A staff that was once as large as 10 is now down to Calley and Rutledge.
When Destito made an offer for the building, Calley was ready.
“Most of my customers,” Calley said, “still don’t believe it.”
The place is a landmark, home more than a century ago to an all-star team of Syracuse industrial inventors, and the second floor — which Destito envisions as one-of-a-kind apartments — still has wooden support beams that look like they came straight from the forest. Destito said he’s had some conversations about putting another hardware store in the downstairs space, because the old one certainly was popular enough with all his resident artists…
Again, in no small part due to the dogs.
The canine who started it all was Cooper, revered by Rutledge and Calley, a Siberian huskie and Australian cattle dog mix dog whose death about 16 months ago still brings a sigh from longtime customers like Saad Amer, a regular who goes back far enough to remember when John Calley was a little boy exploring the aisles of the old family store, on Oswego Street.
Calley and Rutledge never imagined their hardware business as a place that would become synonymous with dogs. But one day then-SPCA Investigator John Duby stopped by, as he often did. He told Rutledge about some newly arrived puppies at the animal shelter in Mattydale. He showed Rutledge some photos of the pups.
“Oh my God,” Rutledge said. “You’ve got to tell John.”
The timing was perfect. Rutledge knew Calley had been daydreaming about bringing home a dog. “It takes me a long time to make a decision,” he said, describing himself as a person who endlessly weighs the ups and downs, but the photos were the jolt that broke everything loose.
When Calley hesitated about going to Mattydale to take a look, Duby knew just what to do. He walked into City Hardware in 2013, on the day before Thanksgiving, carrying a tiny puppy. That was all it took. The couple even gave the dog a hardware name:
Cooper, after the tires on John’s truck.
Before long, the dog pretty much ran the place. He wore a distinctive vest and shadowed Calley as he walked the aisles, soon becoming a draw unto himself.
The hardware store is a hangout for roofers and painters and carpenters and other fix-it folk, people with calloused hands who work outdoors in all kinds of Syracuse weather, a gritty crew in coveralls who can seem about as sentimental as steel wool.
In 2024, when Cooper suddenly grew ill and Calley and Rutledge had to make the hardest choice, many of those customers shed tears. The couple had always kept a little donation jar for the SPCA on the counter. Grieving regulars filled it up in Cooper’s honor, with one guy leaving a $100 bill, raising so much that Calley said the SPCA dedicated one of its kennels, for a year’s time, in the dog’s honor.
Rutledge and Calley felt the devastation known by anyone who’s loved a dog: They thought there’d be no replacing Cooper, ever. For Calley, the absence — almost immediately — was simply too much. After a couple of weeks, the couple went out and found Yukon — as in Yukon Cornelius — at the Wanderer’s Rest Humane Association in Canastota.
The dog, a Siberian Huskie and Akita mix, is a strong-willed character with a wanderlust. A month after arriving, he escaped from the couple in Clay and took off into the woods. Tom Mott, a letter carrier who delivers mail to the hardware store, was so distraught about the dog’s disappearance he drove out several times to join in the search.
“His wilderness run,” Calley said, of Yukon’s great escape. The quest went on for five days. No luck, though they’d sometimes catch a glimpse from a distance of the frightened and confused dog. Finally, Calley and Rutledge contacted an organization called Gatekeeper K9 Rescue, which specializes in locating lost dogs. That outfit, recalls an impressed Calley, needed only a few hours to bring Yukon home.
Calley and Rutledge contemplated Yukon’s restless spirit, and thought:
Maybe another dog?
Enter Dobbie, a little rescue of magnificent soul, adopted from Forever Friends in Pennellville.
The two-dog idea worked, beautifully. Dobbie and Yukon are close friends. They love to spend time behind the counter with Rutledge, though Yukon also enjoys wandering the store with Calley. As the clock ticked down to today, closing time at the hardware store, many customers made a point of stopping in and making sure they said so long to the dogs.
Mott, the letter carrier, has been in every day to drop off the mail and then to sit against the wall and rumble a little with “the puppers,” as he calls them. “Good dogs, good owners,” Mott said. Rutledge’s stepdad, Charles Moore, stops by all the time with a pocketful of treats, while Coyne — a Syracuse landlord — said the dogs are really symbolic of the homegrown strength of the couple that run the place:
What you feel when you walk in is unlike anywhere else.
Thinking of the dogs, Calley and Rutledge both worry a little about how Yukon and Dobbie will do once away from their daily shifts at the store. Even so, Calley isn’t sure he wants to bring either of them into the unknowns of a new downtown operation. In a way he completely understands, they are creatures shaped by long routine, and he’s concerned the animals might have trouble adjusting to different doors, different people and different surprises in the busy heart of the city.
Cesta is simply glad Calley is willing to help out. But if by chance Calley someday changes his mind, and asks Cesta if it would be OK to transfer this unique City Hardware canines-in-the-aisles tradition into the new hardware place downtown?
“Absolutely,” said Cesta, a true believer in the benefits of going to the dogs.
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