First slug.
“That’s all I want,” said Linda Brown-Robinson. “I’m not letting it go.”
Her husband, the late Van Robinson, died last Saturday, at 87. At some point over the last decade or so, Van — who served for years as Syracuse Common Council president — received an honorary sledgehammer from a civic group.
The gesture had a point. The idea was honoring him for his dogged campaign to rid Syracuse of the north-south Interstate 81 viaduct — best known as the downtown bridges — through the heart of the city. Van accepted the gift and brought it home, and sometimes he brought it with him on the stump, but he told Linda he did not see it as a joke.
The state Department of Transportation eventually embraced the notion of bringing down the bridges. Sweeping preparatory work on that $2.25 billion transformation is underway. TeNesha Murphy, a DOT public information officer, said demolition of the downtown bridges is expected to begin in 2026.
Looking toward the day those bridges finally start to come down, Van had this dream: Maybe local, state and federal officials would allow him to pick up his sledgehammer and take the first swing at the cement foundation.
“It was his life mission, his passion,” Linda said. “If he’s not here to do it, I hope I am. I hope I can do it in his place.”
Though Van was struggling with several illnesses, Linda said he was vital, almost to the end. Only three days before his death, he participated by phone in a meeting involving the future of the New York State Fair’s Van Robinson NAACP Pan-African Village, already named in his honor.
It was another proud achievement in a long civic career. Linda and Van — their wedding anniversary is Tuesday, a day after Van’s memorial services at Bethany Baptist Church — moved here in the late 1960s, from New York City. Van worked for Group Health Insurance. He immediately brought new energy to the local chapter of the NAACP, which Van and Linda would both serve as president.
In the early 1980s, Linda said, a city garbage truck careened into their house, near Onondaga Park. The damage was extensive. Then-Mayor Lee Alexander lived a block or two away. He and Van met because of the accident. Alexander, impressed, later appointed Van to the Zoning Board of Appeals.
In 1999, he was appointed to the Common Council. He stayed there 18 years. In 2023, that extended service led the council to officially name its City Hall chambers after Van.
During the celebration, a line of passionate speakers made it clear they appreciated his great move-the-boulder contribution:
Again and again, they praised his commitment to bringing down I-81.
In 2001, when many skeptics were laughing off the idea as madness, I wrote a column for The Post-Standard about Robinson’s quest. He recalled how he always saw the interstate as a dirty, city-splitting wall that was particularly onerous to communities that had the least.
In that same year, his dream of seeing the highway removed had received a sudden boost during a monthly meeting in the office of Vito Sciscioli, the city’s then-director of operations. The wide-ranging sessions involved planning staff and others from City Hall, including such councilors as Robinson.
At this particular session, someone was lamenting how difficult it was to remove junk and debris from the already-crumbling I-81 bridges when a 26-year-old planner named Sam Gordon spoke up:
“We should tear it down, like they did in Milwaukee.”
A eureka moment. Robinson found a kindred soul. In the 2001 column, Sciscioli spoke of the bridges as an “ominous barrier,” not long after then-Mayor Matt Driscoll mused publicly about bringing them down. At the same time, the DOT was quietly warning Central New York officials that Interstate 81 was aging beyond safety and would need to be addressed, before too long.
“The most important person at that table was Van,” said Gordon, recalling the meeting. Now 50, he is a lead planner with the Environmental Design and Research landscape architecture firm — which has him working directly on the same I-81 transformation he envisioned, a quarter-century ago.
Van started speaking out, when few others were. He had the quiet will to say “the right thing to do is to bring this thing down,” said Bob Doucette, a downtown business leader and a founder of the ReThink 81 coalition. Linda recalls how officials with Destiny USA and other businesses opposed to pulling out the interstate quietly and relentlessly tried to change his mind.
He considered them friends, she said, but he held firm.
Long before the Onondaga Citizens League released a report calling for the removal of the bridges, long before such pivotal heavyweights as then-Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor got on board, long before the then-Metropolitan Development Association brought former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist to Syracuse to reaffirm the wisdom of replacing the bridges with a boulevard, Doucette recalls how Van Robinson was saying:
“Get rid of it.”
Aaron Knight, who wrote an insightful thesis on how the bridges went up in the first place, remembers of Van: “He really stuck his neck out there early – and took a great amount of heat for it, even though he was ultimately vindicated by the grid’s selection many years later on.”
Norquist, retired president and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, said it is hard to overstate the importance of a figure like Van, whom Norquist met during that 2009 visit to Syracuse:
“Here’s a a guy with authority in the community … and instead of wavering all over the place, he took a stand.”
In the early 2000s, Doucette said proponents of replacing the bridges with a grid “were like owls, hooting in the wilderness.” Sandra Barrett, then-executive vice-president of the citizens league, recalls how the OCL study made clear that removing I-81 in favor of a boulevard was both a cheaper and superior option to new bridges.
“Once we got into it,” she said, “it seemed like the obvious thing to do.”
Until then?
The bridges were such a part of the fabric that removing them — to much of the community — seemed inconceivable.
During a time when it would have been easy to simply assume the viaduct must be rebuilt, Barrett remembers Van Robinson as a clear and lonely voice.
Linda said her husband learned early to be resolute. His mother died when he was 15. He and his brother Harry relied on their dad, a tailor in the Bronx. Linda said the father had a profound influence on Van. Her husband dressed impeccably, Linda said. He always believed in order and organization.
A Common Councilor central to one of the most monumental decisions in Central New York history — a voracious reader passionate about education for city children — never went to college, Linda said. After graduating from Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, Van joined the Navy, then returned to build the career that carried him to Syracuse.
She loves to quote the story her husband often told, of how he drove into Syracuse in 1968 and immediately wondered:
Why did they build this highway straight through town?
He soon learned the history that serves as intimate fuel for Sam Gordon, whose great-grandfather was a Jewish immigrant in the old 15th Ward, where Black and Jewish families lived side-by-side because they had trouble being accepted anywhere else. That district was destroyed by I-81 construction, wiping out the cultural centerpiece of the African-American community in Syracuse, and certainly Gordon had that civic pain in mind when he spoke out, as a young planner, at that meeting.
All these years later, Gordon offered one truth about movements toward real change.
“Somebody has to be a champion for a project,” he said.
In Syracuse, with I-81, that was Van Robinson. Linda Irvin, the longtime Onondaga County legislator, remembers standing under an interstate underpass with Van, when the outcome remained uncertain. They dreamed out loud about the bridges coming down, and wondered if they would live to see it happen.
Van knew he won the struggle, though he will not see the result. Thursday – with Van’s old sledgehammer packed away – I brought one along that his wife Linda lifted with surprising ease, and she posed for a photo while again making the point:
To honor Van’s great wish, all she wants is the “first slug.”
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