The historic marker erected by the Onondaga Historical Association and the Pomeroy Foundation before the "stone barn" - tied to a family with deep connections to the Erie Canal — was demolished.

The landmark, built as a barn and carriage house, is long gone. It was made of stone and linked to the early days of Fairmount, constructed for a vanished farm whose first owner, James Geddes, was closely tied to the vision and origins of the Erie Canal. The structure was knocked down 11 years ago in a decision that still makes no sense, and I think of its absence whenever we go by …

Especially right now, amid the remembrance and reflection surrounding this month’s bicentennial of the completion of the canal. Geddes was one of the main engineers on that project, which led to the swift growth of Syracuse and helped shape the evolution of a young nation.

Not long before that Fairmount carriage house was demolished, just to underline the how-could-this-place-possibly-get-leveled nature of the process, the Onondaga Historical Association and the Pomeroy Foundation put up a nearby commemorative marker to note its deep significance. For me, whenever I see this marker honoring the building as if it were still standing, I recall an aching message I received more than a decade ago from a college student who had lived there for a long time — and how in this case, demolition had a kind of lifetime spiritual effect on the young man who reached out to me.

You could even say that a mom set free last week to return to her family in Massachusetts is a direct result of everything that caused Matt Gonnella to send that note.

He’s now an immigration lawyer in Boston, representing frightened clients with few places to turn. He says you can draw a direct line from the work he does today to the decision to level the old barn and carriage house, in 2014.

What he learned, he said, “is that there are always people who are going to be hurt, and you need to do what you can to help them.”

In that sense, his ethic becomes a monument to the place where he was raised.

As a child, Gonnella lived in the carriage house with his mother, Laurie, and his three siblings. He looks back on those days with particular appreciation for his mom, a single parent who raised her kids alone.

Matt Gonnella: The loss of his childhood home in Fairmount ties directly to his work in immigration law. Credit: Courtesy Matt Gonnella

“She was a house cleaner when I was growing up,” said Gonnella, 33. Finding a safe and reasonable place for her family — on a solitary income based on long hours — wasn’t easy.

When Gonnella was a little kid in grade school, his mother made a joyful, life-changing discovery:

With her children, she moved into the old stone carriage house in Fairmount.

It was owned at the time — as it had been for years — by the Fairmount Animal Hospital. It was also a direct physical link to the old farm and estate established by James Geddes, a guy whose family name is still prominent throughout greater Syracuse.

He called it “Fair Mount.” In the 19th century, the farm passed from Geddes to his son George. When I wrote about the demolition 11 years ago, Dennis Connors — now retired as Onondaga Historical Association curator of history — told me that George’s 19th century farming strategies were so visionary that a young Frederick Law Olmsted came to stay with him for many months.

That’s Olmsted, as in the brilliant designer of such enduring masterworks as Central Park in New York City and Buffalo’s parks system. In one of my 2014 columns, Ellen Edgerton — a writer and community historian with a passion for Fairmount — told me how George Geddes was a champion of both women’s rights and the abolitionist movement that rose up to protest slavery in the United States.

No one is exactly sure when the carriage house was built, though general estimates from historians and former owners put it at somewhere between 1850 and 1870. The late Dr. Richard Grambow, a legendary Fairmount veterinarian, told me years ago that he lived in the building for a long time, though the space was eventually converted into a rental property — even as a suburban shopping district grew up all around a landmark central to the core history of Fairmount.

Gonnella figures his family moved there around 2001. It was, he said, an unforgettable place to grow up. His family could walk to Mass at nearby Holy Family, where his mother cleaned the rectory. The fabled Fairmount Glen miniature golf course was a block or two away. Gonnella attended West Genesee High School, also close to the carriage house, where he was part of some fine scholastic cross-country teams.

He vividly remembers the 18-inch stone walls and magnificent fireplace of his childhood home — and the sense that his little family had hit a kind of emotional lottery with this life inside a beautiful, one-of-a-kind Upstate historic landmark.

Matt went on to St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, where he ran cross country and majored in Spanish and international relations. He was maybe 21, away at school in the early days of 2014, when his mother called.

Their family was being evicted. The new owner of the Geddes carriage house, Rocklyn Development, was giving them 90 days to move out. The company intended to demolish the structure. Gonnella said he quickly learned his mother had no legal recourse. She was forced to scramble to find a much smaller place, which is what they could afford.

The old carriage house from the Geddes farm, as it appeared when Matt Gonnella lived there. Credit: Courtesy Onondaga Historical Association

Gonnella’s family discarded much of their furniture and other possessions, and then moved out.

By early May of 2014, the longtime home they loved was rubble.

In the following years, Gonnella’s mother and his siblings relocated to the Carolinas or other points south. Gonnella said they never regained the sense of home in greater Syracuse they had felt for years in the Fairmount carriage house.

He sometimes wonders: If the building had never been demolished, would his mom still be there?

In the middle of it all, in 2014, Gonnella contacted me. In a way, it was simply to make this statement: While many historians and residents were shocked by the demolition of an important landmark, Gonnella saw the building itself as secondary to another lesson — the idea of how decent, hardworking people can have their lives turned upside-down…

… “and no one gave a s—,” he said.

He remembers hurrying back from New Hampshire to his mother’s sadness, and to the uncertainty of a youngest sister, still in grade school, who was about to lose the one place she had always seen as home. It was during that time that I wrote a column about the family’s situation.

Looking back on it, Gonnella never forgets that feeling of being utterly powerless.

It has everything to do with his work, right now.

He went on from St. Anselm to Suffolk University Law School. After earning his degree, Gonnella — whose dad was born into the Onondaga Nation — spent four years working for the American Indian Law Alliance, before he accepted a position as a tax lawyer in private law.

Fluent in Spanish and French, he was making good money. From the outside, he seemed to be a major success. But he would lie awake at night thinking: There must be ways to make a direct difference in the world.

“I just always wanted to work for someone who could really use the help,” he said.

Typically, with his duties, he rarely went to court. But he happened to be there one day when he saw a judge grant a restraining order to protect a weary, frightened woman who was in physical danger from her former partner.

People like that, Gonnella thought: They are the ones who need help and support, which he saw as the highest purpose of the law.

Contemplating that mission, he began to look around. He moved to a firm whose specialty was immigration law, including clients seeking temporary or permanent legal status.

Earlier this year, he opened his own practice — 11 years to the month since the demolition of his childhood home.

One of his cases was recently featured in The Boston Globe: A 58-year-old woman from El Salvador showed up for a scheduled and seemingly routine federal immigration meeting in August to update her visa application, part of an ongoing attempt for legal residency after settling in Massachusetts decades ago.

Instead, she was arrested at that meeting and immediately sent to a Vermont detention facility. She has no criminal record, Gonnella said, but the government said she faces a deportation order because she missed a hearing 19 years ago.

Through Gonnella, she is fighting for a special residency status allowed for victims of human trafficking. His client — who has three children in greater Boston — was targeted and essentially held captive years ago by human smugglers, he said. That kind of trauma elevates her chance of obtaining a temporary visa, a result she’s been pursuing legally for years.

If deported, he said, her life would be at risk in El Salvador — which she initially fled after neighborhood gang members demanded what little money she had, he said, then threatened her with violence if she did not come up with more.

Last Friday, Gonnella said, a federal judge ordered her release. His client was reunited with her grown kids.

While she still is at risk of eventual deportation, he said her odds of obtaining longterm legal status have dramatically improved.

“It’s a great feeling to be able to help these families,” he said. He knows his client’s children — who are American citizens — were so worried during her detention “they could barely sleep at night.”

Gonnella said he reads high-profile and fast-moving media stories involving arrests and deportation that involve detainees with hard-core criminal records. But he said that doesn’t represent the people who typically walk through his door. Most, he said, have little hope of avoiding eventual deportation, but “almost all of them” share similar stories:

He said they are often from nations where law enforcement holds little sway. “Entire neighborhoods are controlled by gangs and (criminal) syndicates,” Gonnella said, “and they charge people who have little with an extortion fee, and they threaten to kill you or your family if you don’t pay — to make you into an example.”

Matt Gonnella (front right, next to this mother Laurie) and his family, before their Fairmount home was demolished: That sense of loss and isolation is a powerful link to his clients. Credit: Family photo

Such desperate circumstance, he said, is what causes many young parents to make the high-risk decision to leave behind their lives in their own nations, and flee toward the U.S. Most of the people who come to him, he said, have no criminal records, and care for their families by working long hours in jobs that offer low pay and no benefits.

He said he feels he’s reflecting American ideals in the simple idea that for people who have done their best to follow every step of the legal process, meaning they still have a fighting chance in court, that he can at least provide counsel — even against difficult odds.

Gonnella’s mom, like so many women who walk through the door of his firm, was a cleaning woman. What he remembers, vividly, is the feeling when his own family was evicted — and the way that even a single empathetic voice at a time of isolation could offer reassurance, a sense of your own meaning.

In his free time, Gonnella is a marathon runner — an extension of the passion he first embraced at West Genesee. He’s gone for a daily run on what’s closing in on 420 days in a row, and what he’s realized increasingly as he grows older is that running is one of the few times in life when he feels everything is under his own control.

It’s the exact opposite of what happened with the destruction of his childhood home — though he understands now, in that rubble, he found his calling.

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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...