Andy Mondo paused Thursday on a walkway outside the Chimes Building, looking past the dust, fractured concrete and orange fencing of construction. It was 59 years since he was last inside that landmark, and the door he used in 1966 was long gone.
As a teenager, once he walked through it, his life changed forever — an experience shared in that space by thousands of now-white-haired Central New Yorkers.
“When I left the house with my dad that morning,” said Mondo, 78, “I didn’t come back for a year and a half.”
He is a veteran of the Vietnam war. He was thinking Thursday of Bobby Donovan, his close friend and a kid from the South Side whose memory says everything about the highest meaning of a landmark.
The art deco Chimes Building, which opened 96 years ago this month, is undergoing a $40 million renovation — and, as much as possible, a restoration — by the nonprofit Allyn Family Foundation. Meg O’Connell, the executive director, said she joins Maarten Jacobs, a top Allyn administrator, and project manager Jonathan Link Logan in hoping the initiative has a transformative impact on that piece of downtown.
The urgency, she said, was made clear by the dreary longtime message of an extraordinarily prominent landmark, in disrepair. The building — its name based on its long-gone chimes, once heard across the city — was a depressing across-the-street counterweight to the vibrancy of the foundation’s new Salt City Market, a multicultural food bazaar at South Salina and West Onondaga streets.
Beyond that, O’Connell said — in a region struggling desperately with housing needs — the Chimes Building will offer at least one template for a much larger solution. It will provide 152 units, divided by three tiers of pricing, including room for a group under particular duress — working people who are barely getting by.
Finally, there is the lasting emotional truth of everything Mondo represents. Like him, countless Central New Yorkers — over almost a century — have made some contact of meaning with the building. Maybe they worked there. Maybe they saw a doctor or paid their mortgage at one of the offices inside.
Or maybe — in the same way as Mondo, and so many others — they raised their hand and said an oath in that building before leaving Syracuse, ready to put their lives at risk in such conflicts as the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
The power of those memories is amplified by sheer structural presence: Even now, with long-dark windows illuminated with strings of construction lights, the Chimes Building is reclaiming its one-of-a-kind prominence.
“That building really anchors the southern end of downtown,” said O’Connell, who described the echoing scope of the now-long-vanished chimes — there was no practical means, planners decided, of replacing them today — as symbolic of a building whose reach in many ways touched distant corners of the region.
Thursday, Paul Nojaim of the Allyn Family Foundation led a little group of us, including Mondo, into the now-stripped-down first floor space that for years housed military recruiters. Nojaim had his own family link: His dad chaired the local draft board during the years of Chimes Building inductions.
We followed him onto the elevators, which carried us to a 12th floor rooftop whose stunning view will eventually be the highlight of an outdoor gathering place.
Nojaim spread his arms, wrapping in a panorama that captures Onondaga Lake, the tree-covered hills of Syracuse and an absolutely unique vista of downtown.
“You’re not really on a corner,” Nojaim said of that view. “You’re looking out from the center of Salina Street.”
Behind us was a “setback,” a smaller structure holding the 13th and 14th floors. Covered decades ago with bland sheathing, crews have pulled away that material to reveal striking original deco detail. It provides a vivid reminder that the building’s architect was Shreve, Lamb & Harmon – the same firm that designed the Empire State Building.
While that view is staggering enough, the most dramatic visual impact — once the job is done — might be from the ground. Enter downtown from the north, and the Chimes Building dominates the Salina Street horizon. For years, muddled renovations and general darkness at the Chimes made a statement of dormancy no downtown wants.
Soon, fully illuminated, that structure will provide a vivid change to the nighttime skyline — especially after the nearby STEAM school, located within the dark-for-all-too-long Central High, opens as well.
“Where this building sits,” Nojaim said, “has such a huge role on downtown.”
It was also a pivot in a world-changing story of a new and perilous future. Nojaim stopped to give us a quick glimpse of the fifth floor, which will be home to many apartments above restored terrazzo floors when the Chimes Building reopens in March 2026.
In the early 1940s, as directories at the Onondaga Historical Association verify, that fifth floor space was home to regional offices for the Army Corp of Engineers. On June 17, 1942, as the late Col. James Marshall recalled in an interview, he received a teletype that resulted in Marshall leaving Syracuse for urgent meetings in Washington D.C.
The Chimes Building message was the first step in his key role in setting up the “Manhattan Project” — the American development of the atomic bomb.
That history — combined with the building’s direct and intense connection to generations of young people, entering military service — leaves O’Connell and her team contemplating ways to reflect and memorialize such profound meaning. Mondo’s tale is emblematic: He graduated from the old St. Anthony’s High School in Syracuse, then began classes at Onondaga Community College when it was downtown, near Erie Boulevard.
“I was a waste of skin,” said Mondo, in a hard assessment of his own teenage motivation. At a time when he knew his sinking grades meant his days at OCC were numbered, he went to have some beers with a buddy, Terry Loftus, at a place called the 800 Club.
They talked about joining up for the Army. Mondo, intrigued, went home and told his parents he wanted to look into enlisting.
The next morning, his less-than-enthusiastic dad dropped him off at the West Onondaga Street door of the Chimes Building — a half-block from South Salina Street, where Mondo used to cruise and occasionally drag race his 1957 Chevy in an endless downtown back and forth, on summer nights.
A recruiter told Mondo he could get him into the 101st Airborne, on the spot. Mondo signed up, then put a dime in a Chimes Building payphone and called his family — leading his father to rush there to ask his son why he’d given up on his plans to become a truck driver to instead, almost certainly, go to war.
In the induction line inside the Chimes that day, Mondo encountered Donovan — a fellow teenager and a former youth baseball star Mondo knew from a time when they both did dishes at a Syracuse University dining hall. Donovan had already been drafted, but they ended up entering the Army on the same day. Before long they were close friends, together throughout training.
They remained side-by-side when their unit was thrown into combat, almost immediately, in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. That was Nov. 9, 1966, and Mondo describes his memories of that day as utter chaos, a torrent of gunfire so fierce it was bringing down young trees.
When the violence finally relented, Bobby Donovan — nine days away from turning 20 -—was dead.
In 1967, his tour over, Mondo came home. He met with Donovan’s grieving parents — Fran Donovan, Bobby’s dad, had named his son after Fran’s brother, killed in World War II — and then Mondo tried to lose himself in a General Electric factory job, where the work made him feel locked in and miserable.
“You didn’t know if it was day or night,” Mondo said.
He learned they were hiring at the United Parcel Service. He took a job as a truck driver, and stayed there 30 years. The long drives were exactly what he needed to find peace, and he soon married his wife Jeannette. They’d met at the old Hewitt’s restaurant in Fairmount, where she made a promise to write to him in Vietnam.
All these decades later, Mondo never forgets Bobby Donovan. Even now, on Memorial Day, he stops by the Elmwood Little League field named in Donovan’s honor, and then he pays a quiet visit to his friend’s grave at Assumption Cemetery.
For a long time, because so many halfway restorations had altered the look of the Chimes Building, Mondo stopped associating it with the moment his entire life changed. Going there last week, he said, reignited that connection.
Mondo remembered seeing Donovan inside, and he recalled the general location of the payphone he used to call his dad, and the building became for him what it will always be: A downtown landmark that serves as a 14-floor monument to generations of young people and the highest levels of sacrifice.
“Little did I know,” said Mondo, remembering his mindset as a teenager, just before he walked in the Chimes Building door — and summarizing why it’s so important, almost 60 years after his friend’s death, for all those lights to go back on.
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