Over the last few days, I was trying to think of exactly how one particular column, so long ago, came to be. In 2001, I was writing for Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. Certainly, I remember how the late Van Robinson had talked about the central question in that piece whenever we saw each other, whether at City Hall or elsewhere in downtown Syracuse.
Always, Robinson — a Syracuse Common Councilor — would nod his head to the east before smiling that explosive Van smile, just before he would say:
“It has to come down.”
Somehow, those conversations led to a point where it seemed clear:
It was the right time for a column about a vision for downtown Syracuse, without Interstate 81.
Still, all of it stopped me with a jolt the other day, as I wandered around online and stumbled onto an old link. It has been 25 years this week since I wrote a column for The Post-Standard – after Robinson and I had many long conversations – about an idea that to many Central New Yorkers seemed utterly undoable, if not mad.
Before that piece appeared, Robinson and I met at Almond Street, where he stood between the rusting hulks of the double I-81 bridges and laid out a vision that ran with this headline:
“Councilor’s Direction: Take I-81 Out of Town.”
My column started off this way:
Common Councilor Van Robinson is tired of all the problems with Interstate 81 in Syracuse.
He’s tired of trash and litter that pile up on the elevated sections. He’s tired of exhaust fumes that drift into family apartments and public areas at Pioneer Homes. He’s tired of an interstate that serves as a physical barrier for pedestrians between Syracuse University and downtown Syracuse.
Robinson, up for re-election this year, offers a solution:
Knock it down.
Maybe 800 words later, the last line of the column summed up Robinson’s hope for what would happen to I-81 and that entire raised downtown freeway corridor:
“Get rid of it.”
Once the column was published, I remember the laughter and head-shaking in a whole lot of places — though, thankfully, not from everyone. This was a community whose leadership was hardly known for daring chances: Only a few years earlier, key officials had flinched at the generational chance to build a baseball stadium downtown. The idea of embracing a new and growing national planning sensibility that questioned the wisdom of running interstates through the guts of many cities hardly seemed like a concept that would ever ignite here.
Robinson was a true believer. His hopes had been kindled at a City Hall meeting earlier that year, when a group of city staffers and administrators sat around a table to discuss what to do about rusty car parts and other trash along the interstate and its exit and entry ramps and arterials. Picking up debris, alongside high-speed traffic in that tight space, was always an edgy proposition for state or city workers in yellow vests.
A young planner named Sam Gordon — he was 26 at the time — startled everyone at the meeting when he spoke up about a much more transformative solution. He said the real problem was the practical and brutal challenge of dealing with the bridges in their entirety, so often treacherous in winter and littered in the summer.
Gordon said Syracuse should emulate what was already being done in Milwaukee and a handful of other cities around the world. As I quoted Gordon in the column, he told everyone gathered there: “We ought to knock it down.”
Later, Robinson and Gordon both told me how some people at the table laughed out loud. Robinson, for his part, was fired up. As Linda Brown-Robinson, his widow, remembers so well, he had wondered since the first time he drove into Syracuse about why those massive freeway bridges were dropped atop the heart of the city — a sense of disbelief only magnified when Robinson, as a new resident, heard how the I-81 had leveled the historically Black and Jewish neighborhood within the 15th Ward.
In the early 2000s, for the first time, Robinson saw a practical chance to do what he had dreamed about for years: There was an opening, finally, to bring those bridges down. Mayor Matt Driscoll, who stepped into the job in 2001 when Roy Bernardi left for a federal gig in Washington D.C., made a reference in his first “State of the City” address to the reality that something needed to happen soon with the longterm downtown future of the interstate.
And Vito Sciscioli — the city’s director of operations at the time, and a guy who had served in many key roles under Republican and Democratic mayors — told me this for that piece 25 years ago, on the record, about pulling down the bridges:
“We need to take a bold look at it.”
His voice, like Robinson’s, carried resonance. I talked to Sciscioli this week about that column and that moment in time. He lives now in Ithaca, but he vividly remembers driving with his children in the car and wiping out in his vehicle on an I-81 viaduct many years ago, on an icy winter day. “It was dangerous as hell,” he said.
He still wonders why 1950s and 1960s state and federal planners thought it wise to “run an elevated highway through the snowiest major city in the United States.” Those bridges, he remembers, “were a pain in the ass to maintain,” and while he says the largest question about removing them remains unanswered — can this community truly maximize this project as an ignition point for energy and growth? — the simple fact that Sciscioli took it seriously 25 years ago added even more weight to what Robinson and Gordon were saying.
As for me, I thought at the time there was a flicker of a chance. But I had also been a big downtown ballpark guy, and I understood just how quickly this kind of idea could meet a swift and dispiriting end in this town.
In the beginning, Robinson knew he faced monumental opposition. The Carousel Center was becoming Destiny USA, and the mall’s owners joined some other businesses along the northern portions of I-81 in saying they hardly wanted any change to traffic patterns.
But the economic landscape — and planning logic — began to shift, and bit by bit the argument stopped seeming far-fetched. Robinson’s call for a new look was reinforced by a visit to Syracuse in the early 2000s by the Citistates Group, urban planning experts who saw the division represented by the bridges. When Jon Edinger retired in 2004 as state Department of Transportation director, he offered this parting message in one of my columns:
The I-81 situation was no joke. The entire structure was deteriorating. The downtown bridges had to be rebuilt or removed. And it soon became clear that any rebuild would mandate wider bridges… and thus cause the shades-of-Urban-Renewal demolition of some nearby city landmarks.
The larger question became a central focus for the Onondaga Citizens League, which released a 2009 study entitled “Rethinking I-81” that embraced this vision:
In downtown Syracuse, transform the viaducts into a boulevard.
The report also paid an important tribute: “(Van Robinson) was … an
early voice in the call to bring down the elevated highway, a proposal that many dismissed as impossible.”
It took a long time to get there, and I do not have room to mention every key moment or contributor here. But I remember the importance when many public leaders — including then-SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner — lined up alongside Robinson. Or how Bob Doucette, the downtown developer who saw the ballpark decision as a heartbreaking step in the wrong direction, became an outspoken leader in the quest to pull out I-81.
I was at a public meeting in Salina in 2014 in which Doucette — facing a roomful of people opposed to a boulevard — passionately maintained the switch would not cause major disruptions for downtown commuters from the north, and that the central imperative was clear:
“Not only does it devalue property,” Doucette said of the I-81 bridges, as quoted in my Post-Standard column, “it devalues life, it devalues how people live and how they interact with their environment.”
By the late 2010s, the debate exploded into three possibilities: A boulevard, bigger bridges or a tunnel. By that time I was working as a columnist in Buffalo, but it always seemed to me the obvious human downside of the tunnel notion was that it would have meant massive construction just to create a way in and a way out, causing fragile city neighborhoods to again take the worst hits.
By 2016, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo – during a conference at the Syracuse Downtown Marriott — was calling the existing viaducts “a classic planning blunder,” a public statement that made it clear: The state was ready to see them go. Six years later, in spring 2022, the state DOT formally announced it would spend more than $2 billion to rebuild much of the Interstate 81 and 481 corridors in Syracuse, replacing the bridges with a street-level grid.
Put simply: The early faith of Van Robinson was bedrock for that decision. State DOT public information officer TeNesha Murphy said this week the demolition of the downtown bridges will begin in 2027, meaning a notion once laughed off as fantasy is about to come to be.
It is now 25 years since Robinson — sensing a once-in-a-lifetime moment — publicly challenged the community about I-81, at a time when many people thought his longtime hope had no chance at all. Linda Brown-Robinson never forgets. She turns 80 next month, and she says her entire focus is making sure that she stays strong and healthy through next year.
Her husband always dreamed of being the guy who could use a sledgehammer to take the first symbolic shot at those bridges, once the state is ready to begin taking them down. He died last year at 87, just before he had the chance to see that happen, but Brown-Robinson said top state officials have already offered quiet assurances his great wish will pass into her hands:
On her husband’s behalf — on the day that astounding demolition gets underway — Brown-Robinson will lift Van’s hammer and take “first slug,” an emphatic statement on civic belief in the impossible.
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