The original contract rests in a file in the special collections research center of the Syracuse University Libraries. Finalized 80 years ago this month by the William Morris Agency, the document bears a couple of distinctive signatures that closed this particular deal.
One belongs to Dave Salmon, a Syracuse promoter of that era who often brought big-time performers to the city.
The other major signature: Duke Ellington, legendary musician and band leader, who agreed to play a November concert in Syracuse that year — a show that included the first North American performance alongside Ellington by the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.
A venue fitting for such talent?
Lincoln Auditorium, the magnificent hall at the old Central High.
The power of that Ellington visit only amplifies what they are saying at the new Syracuse STEAM High School about an upcoming May 14 performance at what is now called the Micron Lincoln Auditorium, a name added because of Micron’s financial support of the STEAM enterprise. On that evening, the school is hosting “The Spotlight Returns,” a musical event to which the entire community is invited.
It marks the first time students have used that stage for a public event in more than 50 years. Tickets can be obtained for $10 through this Zeffy link, and being there is a way to become a living part of an against-the-odds civic story:
One of the most legendary music halls in greater Syracuse — a place of such 20th century acoustical majesty that it hosted some of the greatest classical and popular performers in the world — has come back from a descent into what seemed like irreversible neglect and decline.
“That’s tough,” said a passionate Mahayla Jamison, a 14-year-old STEAM school student from Baldwinsville, who explained that the word “tough” — for teenagers today — essentially means, at least in this case:
This is someplace you want to be.
She joined a group of students recently — all young musicians, dancers or actors — who met with me in that impossibly-beautiful-again auditorium. Its restoration was completed in late winter, one of the last pieces of the $85 million project that reawakened the old Central High building as a STEAM school, serving high school students from throughout the region.
The first freshman class started school there last September. Jamison and some friends — Zach Coe, Audrey Block, London Perryman, Landon Northrup and Kiley Schermerhorn — told me how their goal at the May performance will be “trying to represent the past and present and future of the school.”
They were among the many students who collaborated in putting together a script. They did extensive historical research and met with many Central alumni, who remain in joyous disbelief about the reopening. That includes Emanuel Atkins, part of the Central graduating class of 1975 and a guitar-playing member of the fabled Black Lites, a rhythm and blues mainstay in Syracuse for more than 50 years.
“What they did is transformational, just mind-boggling,” said Atkins, a retired firefighter who still works as a school sentry for the Syracuse schools. He is among the alumni who will join the students on stage, during the show — along with guest performers representing the Syracuse Orchestra, the Syracuse City Ballet and the Syracuse Contemporary Dance Co.
For the adults, it provides a chance, as Atkins put it, “to watch these flowers grow.”
There will also be an emotional alumni element that I cannot tell you about, because everyone involved wants to leave it as a surprise. Admission proceeds will go toward a fund to help bring in professional artists to work with STEAM school students, organizers say.
The intention is to look ahead, while honoring a staggering musical legacy. For decades, Lincoln was the premier music hall in Syracuse, the longtime home of the old Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. During Salmon’s promoting days alone, Lincoln hosted Ellington and jazz legend Woody Herman and the brilliant pianist Hazel Scott and such band leaders as Guy Lombardo, Spike Jones and Fred Waring… all while serving as a regular stop for major symphonies and world-class operas.
Jim Burns, a writer and filmmaker who is an expert on the life of monumental songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen, said Van Heusen always recalled how he was expelled from Central as a teen for performing “My canary has circles under his eyes,” which delighted the students – but not the faculty.
And in the 1930s, according to OHA records, performers at Lincoln included the touch-the-sky talents of Marion Anderson, a celestial contralto, and the great composer George Gershwin.
At the STEAM school, the goal for May 14 is to somehow wrap it all together as a musical homecoming gift – one that will hopefully come close to filling up a house that seats more than 1,000.
“Oh my goodness,” said instrumental music teacher Melissa Gardiner. “Honoring that history? And bringing it into the present with the students? I was conducting the kids the other day, and I got goosebumps.”
The teens and their teachers do not reveal too much about the theme. What they do talk about is how the STEAM school has given them a sense of sweeping community as dancers and singers and musicians. They were inspired to learn how Gershwin appeared at Lincoln 95 years ago, and they hint that it seems fitting to wrap together this celebration as…
Well, “a rhapsody in blue.”
The auditorium “is really the heart of the building,” said Jody Manning, executive director of the STEAM school initiative. He said he recently learned his position will be eliminated for the coming school year, now that the school is in operation — school district representatives declined comment — though Manning hopes to remain involved in some advisory role.
He told me he first began believing in the restoration years ago, when former schools superintendent Jaime Alicea showed him the crumbling but still majestic auditorium. For Manning — as he prepares to step away — this concert takes on aching resonance.
The school, opened in 1903 and designed by Archimedes Russell, was once the lauded centerpiece of public education in Syracuse, but then sat empty for a half-century at downtown’s southern gateway. Manning, the then-superintendent of Onondaga-Cortland-Madison BOCES, became involved a decade ago when Alicea decided to revive a longtime civic goal: The old Central reborn as an inclusive regional hub of science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.
The building was dark and dormant when Manning first walked inside. Last week, he was around to see new multicolored LED lights play off the pillared entrance as the STEAM school held a dance in the gymnasium for the first time in more than 50 years.
As for the auditorium, Manning said it is is really a 21st century educational lab, intertwined with the entire school. Students in the dance studio or practice areas or classrooms can watch on a screen as their classmates perform. The lighting, rigging and audiovisual technology are so state-of-the-art, Manning said, that students who master those skills will be able to step directly into the job market, if they choose.
Tarod Clarke, construction manager for the school restoration for JE Bryant and Associates, recalled how the auditorium was “horrific” — dank and crumbling — the first time he saw it. Tom Ferrara, facilities director for the city schools, said a half-hearted attempt decades ago to convert the building into office space extensively damaged the stage.
Bringing it back, they agreed, became a painstaking task. Clarke said artisans from J & A Plastering and Stucco used dentistry tools during the auditorium restoration, sometimes spending hours on a foot or two of detail on the ornate ceiling.
The result, Clarke said, is “a wow factor.”
That work happened exactly a century after an earlier renovation turned the place into a musical showcase. Clippings and documents at the Onondaga Historical Association describe how a scholastic facility seen as drab and inadequate in the early 1920s was renovated into magnificence by architect Albert Brockway, who received help from pioneering acoustical engineer Vern Knudsen, of Los Angeles.
“The way it was set up, you had one of the finest-sounding rooms in the country,” said Bob Searing, curator of history for the OHA, who offered this summary of what is happening right now:
“To have young people back in that building? To once again see it serving as a vanguard of public education? As a musician, as a fan of music … to have music performed again in the place where Duke Ellington and Django Reinhardt and George Gershwin all performed?”
On May 14, Searing said: “You will feel the ghosts.”
Students and faculty are working on that show at a deadline pace. In the middle of all that practice, Manning and Central principal Dan Straub introduced me to Gardiner, dance teacher Haley Stuart and vocal music teacher Becca Pena, who provided an overview of the upcoming show. They have overseen many students working collectively from the script, an effort they describe “as a schoolwide collaboration.”
The hall was used publicly once before, for Onondaga County Ryan McMahon’s “state of the county” address in March, but the first-year students have yet to perform there for an audience. With construction underway earlier this year, a school musicial — “Matilda” — was held at the nearby Everson Museum of Art.
The teachers said they have never taught in a situation quite as inspiring as what they are experiencing at the STEAM school. “All of us being artists, we knew what it could be,” Pena said, but the way it came together exceeded even her best hopes.
Gardiner, who plays jazz trombone, said the students have a beyond-their-years appreciation of performing on a stage that has welcomed such globally significant performers. She joined her friends in expressing delight at the idea of student musicians playing alongside, say, members of the Syracuse Orchestra – some of whom remember when Lincoln was home to the symphony.
As for Stuart, the dance teacher, her grandmother — Barbara Marshall Stuart — is 93 and struggling with memory loss. Yet Barbara is a 1951 Central High graduate who can still look at old yearbooks and have flashes of recollection about serving as a student usher 75 years ago, during shows by some of the greatest musical names in the world.
That enduring love is explained perfectly by a joyous Mahayla Jamison:
For teenage students, then and now, that auditorium is tough.
Read more of Central Current’s coverage
Sean Kirst: To celebrate rebirth of Lincoln Aud, STEAM school teens embrace the ghosts
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