Editor’s note: You can sign up to atttend Central Current’s Democratic mayoral forum here.
It’s been a month since I joined The Central Current and began writing columns again in Syracuse, for the first time in a decade. One of the immediate delights of coming back was learning The Current will host a debate at 6 p.m. tonight for the three Democratic candidates for mayor, as part of the buildup to next month’s primary.
What I found specifically exciting and appropriate was the spot for that event: The auditorium of the Everson Museum of Art, a globally acclaimed work of architecture. My hope in joining other listeners in that beautiful space — and this simply reflects the unprecedented nature of this moment, for our city — is that the scope of the mayoral conversation rises toward the imagination involved with the place where it will happen.
I’ve known the three candidates — Councilor Pat Hogan, Councilor Chol Majok, and Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens, names I carefully list in alphabetical order — for many years, often from events around my neighborhood. In my life as an everyday citizen of Syracuse, I’ve seen each of them do warm and quietly meaningful things. My interest tonight, then, is not about typical campaign rivalries.
It lies in hearing how they respond to this baseline truth:
No mayoral race in memory in Syracuse — or really, in any of the many Upstate cities where I’ve lived — has occurred on the brink of such a pivot in civic destiny.
“We stand at the center of the next great phase, the great leap forward,” said Bob Searing, curator of history for the Onondaga Historical Association. “I think the question you’re asking — the question we’re all wondering — is who is ready to step up to that moment.”
This is what Searing means: He sees the economic history of Syracuse — the junctures of potentially landscape-changing forward motion — as involving three distinct periods.
There was the transformational impact of the Erie Canal, exactly 200 years ago right now. There were the up-and-down-but-primarily-up industrial bursts of the late 19th and first-half-of-the-20th centuries, which lifted Syracuse, for decades, into a place of prominence and growth — before a long sequence of economic struggles wounded and staggered the community as it entered the 21st century.
Today? To Searing, it becomes another fateful pivot. Suddenly, he said, Central New York is anticipating a potential Micron investment of at least $20 billion — and possibly far more — for building new semiconductor fabrication plants in Clay. That project, still in fledgling form, arrives at the same moment the state is embarked on a massive $2.25 billion transformation of Interstate 81 and its major connectors, in Syracuse.
Put collectively, you’re looking at roughly $23 billion — at least — pouring into Onondaga County in the coming years. “That’s astonishing,” Searing said. No Upstate community has experienced anything that’s even roughly comparable, at least not since before the great regional economic downturn began a little more than 60 years ago.
Channeled wisely and effectively, this kind of raw capital could finally address seemingly unchangeable patterns of suffocating poverty in Syracuse. It could rejuvenate dormant city neighborhoods and bring a whole new energy to education. As Searing notes, that scope of growth and investment offers life-changing opportunities — and challenges — that no civic leader has encountered in this community for a long, long time.
Those prospects change everything about this race for City Hall, offering one dominating question for our next mayor: How do you rise up to such a challenge? How do you make sure this vast influx of new money is dynamic-changing, when the danger is that it simply calcifies and reinforces, on a massive scale, the worst patterns of post-World War II greater Syracuse: Relative suburban affluence, surrounding a city center burdened by generational cycles of poverty and pain?
This is an extraordinary, one-chance-is-all-you-get opportunity — meaning this mayoral race has stakes like nothing else we’ve seen in our lifetimes. What we’ll need in City Hall is the tireless will and focus and passion to leverage and maneuver the complex sweep of everything that’s coming into civic revelation and restoration. That’s the kind of vision I’ll be looking for tonight — and there really couldn’t be a better setting for such thoughts.
In any community, it’s easy to grow accustomed to civic wonder when it’s right in front of us. Certainly that’s true about the Everson, a work of globally important design that was an early triumph for the late I.M. Pei, a master architect.
“Placed in the desolate limbo of center-city urban renewal,” as celebrated architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in The New York Times of the Everson in 1968, shortly after it opened, she described how the museum embodied “the architecture of today as art history will eventually record it.”
In other words: A world classic, in a spot where few people saw it coming.
The Everson — Pei’s first museum design — was acclaimed as an architectural triumph. The stunning “floating” staircase that greets each visitor is a lasting reminder of the idea of the larger structure as a work of art, unto itself.
The late Henry Cobb — Pei’s partner, and the guy who oversaw the firm’s design of SUNY Fredonia, another Upstate treasure — once told me with awe, when I was writing for The Buffalo News, of how “every inch (of the Everson) was bush hammered by hand,” which epitomized Pei’s fierce attention to the smallest detail.
And Kellogg Wong, Pei’s longtime friend and collaborator, spoke with love and reverence of the Everson for a column I wrote years ago for Syracuse.com — describing it as “an inanimate object that reflects so much of what human endeavor is supposed to contain.”
Think of such heights in association with the debate, inside those walls.
Put simply, the Everson is a Syracuse architectural marvel that transcended tired boundaries and any emotional it-can’t-be-done limitations of its time, a reminder of the constant chance in this community of creating something surprising, uplifting and lasting.
Something great.
Tonight, with the Everson itself as a reminder of what’s possible, in an auditorium Huxtable described as memorably “elegant,” we’ll listen for a similar spark of inspiration — as Searing says, at such a make-or-break, city-changing pivot point — from these three candidates who dream of being mayor.
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