My original intent at the big St. Patrick’s Day flag raising and marker-revealing ceremony at the green-over-red was to just be there to be there and not to write anything. That went out the window when I stepped from my car Tuesday on Tompkins Street and saw two women, who both turned out to be in their 70s, physically supporting each other as they walked slowly up an ice-covered sidewalk, toward the light.
That pretty much explained how much the day meant to them.
One was Kathleen Shortt Grajko, 73, the daughter of a stone thrower.
The other was Irene Nedoshytko, 79, a member of a Ukrainian chorus, who told me she arrived in the neighborhood in 1963. She knows the whole area is usually called Tipperary Hill, but her presence at the gathering Tuesday was one small example of the love she feels for the place, which she summed up in three words:
“It’s everybody’s hill.”
Yeah, I thought, I better bring my notebook. That plan was reinforced when I realized even the curbside slush surrounding the event — slush being the grinding, says-it-all local byproduct of such an oh-so-Syracuse phenomenon as a warm March 16 that swiftly flipped into a snowy St. Patrick’s Day — was a slushy and distinctive hunter green.
That was no doubt a residue of the midnight painting of a shamrock beneath the green-over-red traffic signal about 11 hours earlier, a tradition that’s been going on for decades. It occurred to me how this particular intersection was probably one of the few places in the galaxy that makes its own St. Patrick’s Day green slush, even if by accident, and so, yeah:
I had to write this. Not to mention: The famous Tompkins-Milton crossroads was packed for the flag-raising and “marker reveal” with dozens of people I’ve known in a multitude of ways since I joined the then-Syracuse Newspapers in Central New York just about 38 years ago, when the first thing my wife Nora and I did once we unpacked our bags was to connect with some old friends who were already living here.
To introduce us to the community, they took us to dinner at Coleman’s, and then we went up the street to see the green-on-top traffic signal. It was our first stop on our absolute first night out in Syracuse. They told us the story of the light. We fell in love with the tale. Before long I was learning everything I could about it, a research project that’s never really stopped, involving the details of one iconic story:
How a century ago, in the mid-1920s, when the city first started using traffic signals, a group of Tipp Hill teens and boys from Irish immigrant families — never forgetting British oppression and cruelty in Ireland, and furious at the red light being above the green — began throwing stones and shattering the red lens, again and again, until the city broke down and finally agreed to keep the green on top.
That remains one of the great and definitive tales of Syracuse. It has such power that in 2005 Bertie Ahern himself, then the prime minister of Ireland, visited the light in the company of longtime U.S. Rep. James T. Walsh, the nephew of a stone thrower.
As Jim Conroy, grandson of stone thrower Patrick “Packy” Corbett, told me of his late grandfather and the others: “They knew who they were, and the circumstances that brought their families to this country.”
What makes all of it even more astounding is that no documented record exists to establish the details of the stone throwing: The only proof is the one-of-a-kind light, itself. Like many others, I’ve pored through old records looking for a this-is-it document. There was a cryptic reference in a 1928 column by a writer named Jim Colligan, in the old Herald, that seems to refer to the stone throwers… but outside of that, nothing.
The lack of documentation has led some historians to wonder if the stone throwing is more a piece of lore than fact. The late Charlie Marvin, son of longtime mayor Rollie Marvin, once told me his father agreed to the color switch on the traffic signal as part of a quiet backroom deal with political leaders on Tipp Hill.
The earliest public mention I could ever find of the green-over-red light in old newspaper accounts was in 1949, when Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York City stood beneath the light to greet the famous Walkers, two sets of Syracuse triplets who grew up in the same family.
A mystery, then. Yet the story was handed down with such generational authority that Mike Walsh, a retired city police captain and Geddes police chief (and no relation to Jim), worked for years — with the help of the Tipp Hill Neighborhood Association and its president, Janice McKenna — to see a roadside marker go up at the site, memorializing the story.
There is already a beautiful sculpture of a family of Irish immigrants at the Milton-Tompkins crossroads, but its only reference to the stone throwers is a slingshot hanging from the back pocket of a young son, a statement that doesn’t exactly announce itself to visitors. Mike Walsh felt something at that corner ought to tell the tale, so — with neighborhood association backing — he went to officials with the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, which puts up markers across the nation.
Their response: Historical markers need exact documentation. Since little of it exists, they suggested doing it instead as a “legends and lore” marker. The foundation provided a grant for the marker, and Pomeroy administrators understood the problem when Tipp Hill regulars noted those markers usually come in distinctive red, which just wouldn’t do at all.
A logical solution: By mutual agreement the marker’s color was switched to green, the only one in that shade of the hundreds the Pomeroy folks put up, across the nation.
Tuesday, that marker was unveiled in the presence of Mayor Sharon Owens, who read a proclamation honoring the day and the moment. Former mayor Ben Walsh (Jim’s son and the great-nephew of a stone thrower) was also there, along with his dad and many others with deep neighborhood roots.
The marker reads:
“Green on top. 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.”
Bill Brower, strategic adviser to the Pomeroy Foundation, spoke to the crowd on behalf of foundation founder Bill Pomeroy, and made this point about the communal statement of the marker:
“Irish immigrants who came to Syracuse seeking opportunity and a better life for their families helped shape this neighborhood and this city — just as generations of newcomers have shaped Syracuse throughout its history. From the immigrants who helped build the Erie Canal to more recent neighbors from Somalia, Burma, Bhutan, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places — each generation helps author the story of this city.”
The green-over-red, he said, is emblematic of “the stories that build this city.”
That community-of-immigrants theme was also celebrated by many speakers representing more than 50 descendants of the original stone throwers, families brought together again by McKenna. The longtime friends who threw the stones – allegedly, as they loved to insist – are all gone now, though they served collectively as grand marshals of the 1987 St. Patrick’s parade.
Their children understood what it meant to gather, one more time. Kathy Shortt Grajko — the same woman I’d seen supporting her friend, on the ice — certainly spoke for them all when she made a fiery point on behalf of her late dad, a stone thrower named Francis “Stubbs” Shortt:
The stone throwing is no legend, she said with passion. Their father spoke of it specifically from memory, not as mythology. The theory goes that it never made it into the papers in the 1920s because it was a long time before city lawmakers found any humor or whimsy in the act, which to Grajko only underlines the idea that the tale is about fierce and memorable youthful defiance, not some dreamy Irish lore.
“This is for real,” she said, to much applause.
The ceremony also had particular meaning for Thomas Emerson Campbell III, whose father died before that 1987 parade, and thus was never a formal part of any green-over-red ceremony. Yet the late Tom Campbell II was listed with reverence as a stone thrower in a 1987 letter to the editor from his old friends in the parade, and the son was proud to travel from Albany to represent his dad Tuesday, at the light.
Like Grajko, he remembers his father’s stories about a Tipp Hill childhood,and he has no doubt: “They threw stones,” Campbell said. Marveling at the size of the St. Patrick’s Day gathering, he reflected on how the boys who heaved those rocks, worried mainly about dodging the police, could never have imagined that act being celebrated with markers and mayoral proclamations, a century later.
“Not in their wildest dreams,” Campbell said.
He is 78. Even the children of the stone throwers are into the winter of their lives. That means even the last of those who heard the stories first-hand are beginning to leave the stage, which is exactly why Mike Walsh felt for years that it was so important to see a marker go up.
Mike, a Tipp Hill native whose tenacity really brought this whole thing about, did his best to stay out of Tuesday’s spotlight. He stood in the back of the crowd, feet in the green slush. He held his grandson Milo — both of them watching as the U.S., Irish and Ukrainian flags were raised — until McKenna insisted that Mike step forward. Even then, as soon as he could, Mike ducked back into the crowd.
It was only once everything was finished — and people were already posing with the new marker at what instantly becomes a beloved spot for photos, in this Instagram age — that Mike allowed himself to offer the reflection about the green-on-top marker that really wrapped together the whole day.
“All my life,” he said, “I just thought: It should be there.”
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