Not long ago, Mike Walsh was assigned the potentially delicate duty of taking the Tipperary Hill Neighborhood Association’s counter-proposal back to the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. That organization had just agreed to finance Walsh’s longtime dream:
A new interpretative marker that’ll explain the emotional significance of the famed green-over-red traffic signal at Tompkins Street and Milton Avenue.
There was one problem, to which association board members reacted with disbelief.
The marker would be part of Pomeroy’s nationwide “legends and lore” roadside program, and those markers always come in, well, there’s no other way to say it.
Red.
The very mention of that particular color at that particular corner drew “hisses” and incredulous groans when the possibility was presented to a roomful of neighbors, said Janice McKenna, president of the Tipp Hill association. Walsh, a retiree who served as both a Syracuse police captain and chief of the Geddes police, totally understood the pushback, even though he was the original champion of the idea of a marker.
Walsh tried to put it as diplomatically as he could to Pomeroy leadership:
Certainly, the folks on Tipp Hill were grateful for the support. “But let me tell you this,” he offered to the Pomeroy administrators, as a means of counsel. “Put a red sign up at that spot, and it just might turn green.”
No need to say more.
Steve Bodnar, Pomeroy’s associate director of strategic marketing, said that conversation was an opportunity, not a problem. Pomeroy officials understood the contradictory nature of giving a red marker priority at a spot where the whole point is that red is eternally relegated to the bottom, and they listened to an alternative suggested by Tipp Hill loyalists — a notion described by Bodnar as “a wonderful, wonderful idea.”
Pomeroy has put up roughly 200 legends and lore markers around the nation, always in red, celebrating such tales as the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow or the fabled and relentless steel-driving railroad worker, John Henry.
This new one in Syracuse just needed a special touch.
“Every Pomeroy marker is reviewed by the Pomeroy historical marker team,” Bodnar said. The concept and wording go through an historical review process that eventually reaches the Pomeroy board of trustees, final arbiters before a grant for each marker — typically around $2,000 — is awarded.
In this case, the board had the perfect answer for Tipperary Hill.
At 11 a.m. on St. Patrick’s Day, during the annual flag-raising ceremony at Milton and Tompkins, a new marker will go up near the traffic signal …
In what Bodnar called distinctive, one-of-its-kind green.
“That marker,” Walsh said Sunday, “will be as unique as the light itself.”
Sunday, joined by photographer Mike Greenlar, I went over to Tipperary Hill to interview the principals. Mike Walsh and McKenna were joined at “the light” — Tipp Hill shorthand for the traffic signal — by Walsh’s sister-in-law, Mary Shortt Walsh. Her husband was the late police Capt. Richie Walsh, another Tipp Hill legend, and she emphasized that she showed up for our interview because she wanted the chance to say how proud she is of Mike’s persistence and hard work in lining up the marker.
Mary also has another powerful connection to the light: Her dad, Francis “Stubbs” Shortt, was one of the “stone throwers” — the group of Tipp Hill young men and boys who allegedly … and allegedly is a well-loved Tipp Hill word in this tale … became infuriated in the late 1920s when civic leaders decided the traffic signal must have the standard red on top.
That is a color a neighborhood of Irish immigrants associated with the despised British. The story goes they responded with a persistent hail of stones, shattering the red light again and again, until the city grudgingly gave in and the Irish green again was awarded the top spot.
That was just about a century ago. Since the traffic signal is believed to be the only one of its kind in the nation, the “stone thrower” tale has grown into a piece of beloved Irish-American lore, known far beyond Syracuse. In 2005, then-Irish Prime Minister Bernie Ahern even made a pilgrimage to see it, with U.S. Rep. James T. Walsh — a Tipp Hill native but no relation to Mike — as his guide.
Mike Walsh, a Tipp Hill native, has childhood memories of the Milton-Tompkins corner as a commercial hub, where Hewitt’s fish fry was a hot spot, every Lent. He originally hoped Pomeroy would erect a formal historical marker at that crossroads, detailing the exact chronology, but Mike ran into the same problem many of us have encountered while trying to research the history of the light.
Under Pomeroy guidelines, a straight-up historical marker demands exact documentation of events. Yet outside of one wink-wink article written in 1928 by columnist Jim Colligan for the old Syracuse Herald, there is no written evidence — not even a single Common Council resolution — that verifies civic officials made some legislative decision, based on stone-throwing, to put the green on top.
That’s led some Tipp Hill historians — including the great photographer and folklorist John Francis McCarthy — to wonder if the story of “The Stonethrowers” might be more of an epic and lovingly embroidered legend than the factual truth.
The solution, for the Pomeroy Foundation, was suggesting that Walsh shift his focus away from markers based on documented history and toward the markers that recall “legends and lore.” Bodnar said that category meshes rich elements of historical truth with undying and inspired storytelling, which — when you get right down to it — is a pretty good definition of the fundamental nature of Tipp Hill.
So Mike Walsh carefully chose his wording for the new marker: “Green on top,” it begins. “Stone throwers demanded Irish green on top of street light over British red. Threw stones until city officials gave in and did so in 1924.”
All of that appears beneath these three bedrock words: “Legends and lore.”
No one from the 1920s collection of boys identified as the original “stone throwers” is still alive. But the group served collectively as St. Patrick’s Parade grand marshals in 1987, and the oft-told account goes they only appeared publicly because then-Mayor Tom Young, of deep Tipp Hill lineage, gave those white-haired legends legal clemency for any teenage stone throwing misdemeanors — meaning they were finally safe to tell the tale.
Young, when asked the other day about that account, answered in the way of a guy who sees no reason to pour rain on a good story:
“If I had been asked to do so,” he said of providing that mayoral mercy, “I would have.”
What he knows for certain is that his late father, John “Bocko” Young — who served as Onondaga County Democratic chairman — told him the city did indeed make a switch at the corner from green to red on top, and that “Bocko” and Young’s uncle, Bob Young, both remembered one thing about the community response to a red light receiving primacy:
“There was no way that would be tolerated on Tipperary Hill.”
The uppermost light, Tom Young said, soon switched back to green. It’s important to remember, he said, that green was seen as a statement of hope and faith and this-is-us identity by a people fresh from living beneath the harsh boot of oppression. Whether that change was made because of relentless teen rock-hurling or hardnosed neighborhood politics — or both — well, I can only tell you this for sure:
McKenna and Mike Walsh said descendants of every known alleged stone-thrower will be at the unveiling on St. Patrick’s Day, including Mary Walsh. She said her dad, “Stubbs” Short, was christened with his lifetime nickname, Tipp Hill-style, after he accidentally blew off a few fingers as a child with a blasting cap he discovered at a construction site.
Years later, as a husband and a dad, he drove an ice truck for a living on Tipperary Hill. Once, when the rattling engine of that truck burst into flames, he hurried to drive the flaming vehicle home so his family had the chance to watch it burn. It’s hardly a leap, she said, to imagine a guy of that world view – as a teen — joining his buddies in hurling a few street corner stones. She grew up hearing his tales of breaking the red light, stories she remembered her dad sharing with particular gusto around St. Patrick’s Day, and he was buried wearing a Wells & Coverly necktie emblazoned with the green-over-red light.
His daughter has absolute belief the stone throwing tale is not myth, but history.
Her reflections caused me to remember an interview I did years ago with the late Gene Thompson, an alleged stone thrower who was well into his 80s. He told me a lengthy and extremely detailed tale for The Post-Standard in 1996 about how a group of other boys he happened to know were the ones who did the actual stone throwing, with Gene describing himself as only an astounded witness.
His bemused wife Loretta interrupted our conversation to note that Gene and his brother Ed routinely got together and shared vivid accounts of how they’d strategize, as they threw those stones, about making sure they didn’t get caught.
Gene, aghast at such an implication, responded to his wife: “No! That can’t be!”
What certainly is true is this: While no one is sure of the precise chronology, it’s basically 100 years since the red atop a Tipp Hill crossroads made way for the green. You’re welcome to see the tale of stone throwers igniting that transformation as being fact or legend or in any way you want — I admit that I will always be a true believer — but no matter what you think, the time is right for one grand centennial remembrance.
On our impending St. Patrick’s Day, the one-of-a-kind green-over-red traffic signal will also have its own one-of-a-kind green marker, because – and here is one thing I can guarantee as absolute fact – it would have turned that shade no matter what, sooner than later, on Tipperary Hill.
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