Artist Angelo Puccia is refurbishing and repainting a bench he installed 19 years ago on the corner of Erie Boulevard East and McBride Street. The I-81 viaduct, soon to be demolished, is shown at right. The bench will pay tribute to Syracuse Police Officer Michael Jensen and Onondaga County Sheriff's Office Lt. Michael Hoosock, who were shot and killed April 14, 2024 in Salina - as well as honoring city children, lost to violence. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

Angelo Puccia has been doing his restoration work on summer evenings. The afternoons are far too hot, July temperatures sometimes pushing into the 90s. As the sun begins to set behind towering interstate bridges, Puccia — if he’s lucky — gets a little shade and a downtown breeze as he applies each coat of paint.

At Erie Boulevard and McBride Street, in this final summer before the state is forced to move a high-profile piece of public art of great meaning to Puccia, he wants to send a clear message to the community with his big, familiar couch.

The couch — made of steel — dominates that corner on Erie Boulevard, a city thoroughfare built atop what was once the Erie Canal. From the beginning, the point of the couch was as a means of welcome, a reminder of how downtown — even in desolate places — ought to serve as a kind of metropolitan living room.

Over the 19 years since it was installed, Puccia has occasionally repainted the couch with different designs and colors, though he figures this latest theme is as important as it gets.

He searched around to find a paint called “tribute blue.” It provides the foundation for what Puccia envisions as a memorial to Syracuse Police Officer Michael Jensen and Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Michael Hoosock. They were shot to death in 2024 by a heavily armed Salina man who had fled a traffic stop. He opened fire at his home, before he was shot and killed.

“That was devastating,” said Puccia, 79, who wants the couch to serve as homage to all first responders who put themselves at risk on behalf of the community. He also intends to use the couch as a public canvas for painting the name of every child who died by an act of violence in greater Syracuse, in recent years.

That idea was reinforced, he said, after 15-year-old A’Dhon Thomas was shot to death last month near the gate of the Onondaga Park pool. Puccia has worked on arts projects in the past with city children, and he remembers hearing stories from little kids about crawling under their beds when they heard gunfire, just outside their windows.

He often contemplates how too many girls and boys in Syracuse navigate such daily realities, within walking distance of communities considered safe and peaceful.

Artist Angelo Puccia: A final summer, a new message, for his iconic couch. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

“We’ve become desensitized,” Puccia said. He speaks with weariness of the flood of hatred and contempt on the Internet, and he fears it’s all too easy to push away the plight of those children — as well as the boiling rage that claimed the lives of Jensen and Hoosock — as a part of someone else’s world.

This summer, Puccia is restoring his old couch as a cry for love, memory and community.

If you ever drive the boulevard, you can’t miss it. The couch is about 11 feet long, bolted down near an I-690 ramp since 2006. Almost 20 years ago, Puccia said, children involved with an afterschool program at the Salvation Army’s Barnabas Center helped him as he got started on the project.

The couch will need to be moved before too long. It’s in the way of massive state interstate reconstruction that’s reshaping traffic in greater Syracuse. State officials say the couch will be relocated before the downtown I-81 bridges start coming down, bridges that for roughly 60 years have claimed a wide and neglected swath within the city.

“The New York State Department of Transportation is aware of the significance of this commemorative artwork and will ensure that it is safely removed from its current location near McBride Street before construction begins …(and) will work with the City of Syracuse to determine a suitable new location for the piece to be displayed,” wrote TeNesha Murphy, a DOT spokesperson, in an email.

Kate Auwaerter, a city preservation planner who served for years as the Syracuse public art coordinator, said she’s always liked the piece. She noted it’s built “around a bench by the freeway,” which is how Puccia — who at one time intended to add a coffee table and a lamp — offered an unexpected invitation and raised subtle questions about why a grim corridor swallowed the entire eastern edge of downtown.

Puccia said his design was originally sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts and supported by a public arts task force from the old 40 Below, a civic organization known now as Adapt CNY. As Auwaerter notes, Puccia placed the 3-sided steel shell of the couch atop an ancient bench left over from the early days of the interstates, when state planners pitched this dreamy 1960s vision of almost park-like amenities in the shadow of the 81 and 690.

The bridges had an opposite impact. Stone patios and patterned gridwork that were supposed to be attractive were soon overwhelmed by weeds, garbage and tall grass. For decades, the areas beneath or near the bridges turned into a dark, littered and noisy boundary between downtown and the neighborhoods around it.

Those early benches often became a place of rest and refuge for people living on the streets, women and men who found what shelter they could beneath the bridges.

Puccia’s couch, then, quickly took on practical use for those who needed it most. This week, a man walking past saw Puccia working on the sculpture and stopped to introduce himself. He said his name is Tryail. He explained that he’s struggling and living without shelter. On many occasions, he told Puccia, he slept on the hard bench inside the couch.

Puccia told him the story of how the couch came to be. “It made me want to work on it,” Tryail said, and Puccia hired him on the spot to do an hour or two of sanding. Tryail was grateful, and he saw it all with a touch of humor and disbelief.

As Tryail put it, who would have thought he’d suddenly meet “the inventor of the couch?”

Mayor Ben Walsh has his own close connection to that piece of art. As a young member of 40 Below in 2006, he had a hands-on role when that sculpture was installed. Then and now, Walsh saw Puccia’s work as a reminder: In that desolate zone near the interstates, the couch was a signal of life, of warmth, of humanity…

Or “Whimsy,” which is what Puccia used as a title for the piece in a 2012 interview with the late Dick Case, longtime columnist for The Syracuse Herald-Journal and later syracuse.com | The Post-Standard.

Born in Watertown, Puccia worked for a time as a teenager for an outfit that made stone graveyard memorials. He earned an art degree from Alfred University, settled in Syracuse and became a sculptor and muralist who married Benita Rogers, a poet and fellow artist.

In the mid-2000s, the couch provided an early example of a new and accessible kind of public art in Syracuse. Puccia was living at the time on Glenwood Avenue, and the sculpture ended up in his driveway as he did the final touches. Once finished, there was still a major challenge:

How do you get this giant piece of steel from Puccia’s home, in the Elmwood neighborhood, to downtown?

Some members of the 40 Below task force showed up to help, including Walsh and Rick Destito, who played what is always a key role:

He was the guy who had a truck.

To him, the couch was complementary to the kind of thinking that led Destito to kickstart a number of projects on the near West Side, notably the Gear Factory — an old factory designed by pioneering industrial architect Albert Kahn. Destito’s big dream was restoring that landmark, much of it now used as residential, gallery and studio space for artists.

Walsh and Destito both say the couch, this simple piece of art, has lasting resonance. While the idea of bringing down the interstate bridges still seemed like an all-but-impossible longshot in 2006, Walsh said Puccia’s work raised early questions about so much that was missing in that harsh, overgrown terrain.

“I’m excited that it’s getting new life,” Walsh of both the couch and the district around it.

As for Destito, he recalls how the volunteers used two-by-fours to raise the steel couch onto the back of his truck. Destito took a high-spirited drive through the city on the way to Erie Boulevard, and he remembers he had the radio blaring when the song  “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” by McFadden and Whitehead came on, and the lyrics seemed to fit what they all believed:

There’s been so many things that’s held us down
But now it looks like things are finally comin’ around…   

A giant couch was simply fun, the kind of glad-to-be-alive artwork a city with energy ought to embrace. Once downtown, behind Puccia’s direction, the little crew dropped the couch over the old bench and bolted it in. Looking back on that day and the sheer joy of the volunteers, Destito says: “It was the beginning of a lot of different things.”

All of that still matters to Puccia, who’s happy that anyone remembers the point and progress of his sculpture. At the beginning, he daydreamed about putting similar pieces of civic furniture in other neighborhoods, but it never came to be.

Artist Angelo Puccia, right, speaks with Tryail -, a Syracuse man who said he is houseless and has slept on Puccia’s artistic steel vision of a couch. Puccia hired Tryail to help for a night with restoring the project. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

“What I wanted to do,” he said of the couch, “was create a focal point.”

He hopes his sculpture will still serve that purpose, wherever it ends up. His immediate priority is that it makes us think of Hoosock and Jensen and the magnitude of their sacrifice, and of every child lost to violence who should have lived a long life – thus challenging all of us to consider what it will take to build a truly great community, in Syracuse.

In this last summer at Erie and McBride, from a longtime artist closing in on 80, a work of art that began as “Whimsy” rises into a larger and far more urgent statement. Once the restoration is complete, Puccia — a thoughtful guy who’s also quick to laugh — invites all of us to stop by this street corner living room.

The ways he sees it, an entire city — if we want it — can find room on his old couch.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...