Ed Riley says there was nothing to think about. The answer was yes. It was a question, in a way, he had waited years to hear.
Once Jody Manning asked, Riley knew it was time for the 9-foot statue of Minerva to return to where it stood for much of the 20th century: The entrance lobby of what will be called the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics High School — or more simply, the new regional STEAM school in Syracuse.
Even so, to a graying generation of Central New Yorkers, that building will always be the high school known as Central — just as the nearby Marriott Syracuse Downtown, Minerva’s home for almost a decade, will always be to some of us the Hotel Syracuse, its longtime name before it was shuttered, teetered close to being lost…
And then was gloriously restored, with Riley as a founding partner in a hotel project that captured the civic imagination – a kind of joyful emotional resonance that feels similar to what the Syracuse City School District is doing at the old, long-empty Central, right now.
For nine years, the hotel lobby has provided a temporary home for the statue of Minerva, Roman Goddess of wisdom. Within the next few weeks, a work crew will visit that lobby and carefully transport her back to her original home in Central’s old entranceway, a city block or two away — where students over the years would sometimes leave notes for one another on her pedestal, according to Nicholas Nett, who wrote a history of Central for the Onondaga Historical Association.
The school is “where she belongs,” Riley said of his decision at the hotel to say farewell to the statue, whose tale of abandonment — and a new community embrace — is emblematic of the roughly $100 million, primarily state-funded transformation of the long-dormant school where Minerva stood vigil for so long.
Its rebirth as the new STEAM school will be “the old and new coming together,” said Manning, executive director of that effort and a former superintendent of OCM BOCES.
Minerva’s journey reminds Manning of how, years before that vision came to be, he was trying to convince a lawmaker he declines to name to embrace the idea of a STEAM school in a rejuvenated Central — known as Central High until 1960, and then called Central-Tech.
“We’ve already had one miracle over here,” the skeptical lawmaker replied, referring to the beautiful and still-hard-to-believe restoration of the old Hotel Syracuse, in the southern portion of downtown.
“Get ready for another one,” said Manning, whose prophecy will come true next month when students return to a Syracuse landmark, essentially empty for a half-century, that was designed more than 120 years ago by legendary architect Archimedes Russell. Coupled with recent or ongoing projects at the nearby Chimes Building, the Salt City Market, the INSPYRE Innovation Hub and Symphony Place — as well as the emotional turnaround at the hotel — and the school is, well, central to a dramatic rise in fortunes for that piece of downtown.
Manning is among the key administrators on the project, a group Syracuse schools superintendent Anthony Davis describes as the “STEAM team.” Last week, I met with Manning and three of his colleagues in the library at the Institute of Technology at Syracuse Central — an existing city high school that will be a neighbor to the city landmark.
That new initiative will be “the first regional STEAM school” in state history, said Erin Noto, executive director of career and technical education for the city schools. She was at the library, as was Manning — a Henninger High School graduate who was with BOCES when now-retired city schools superintendent Jaime Alicea called about nine years ago with what Alicea described as “this crazy idea.”
Why not stop duplicating many costs and services among area districts and create one pioneering school with a shared STEAM emphasis?
Alicea knew where he wanted it to put it. He and Manning took a drive to boarded-up Central, essentially unused since it closed in 1975. Alicea showed Manning the crumbling and haunting Lincoln Auditorium — once the lush home of the old Syracuse Symphony Orchestra.
Manning stood there in awe, and said: “I get it now.”
Also joining us last week were Dan Straub, who’ll be regional principal of the STEAM school, and Jasmine Harrell, who’ll serve as vice-principal — putting them in charge of day-to-day operations.
The four administrators answered a lot of my fundamental questions. They told me how the school has a buy-in from 23 participating school districts within Onondaga, Madison and Cortland counties. They said 250 freshmen will be there on Sept. 4, representing 28 Central New York middle schools, students selected from 400 applicants – with about 60 percent from the city, and 40 percent from suburban districts.
These first-year students, Straub said, will be critical in joining together to establish a totally new culture. By the time they’re seniors, they’ll be the vanguard of a high school with 1,000 students. It’ll be up to them, Straub said, to “really create an identity for the school.”
They’ll be the students, for instance, who come up with a school nickname, a mascot and school colors. And if all comes together as planned, Manning said, they’ll eventually be able to do performances and gatherings at a new outdoor stage at Billings Park.
As for the physical appearance of the STEAM school, Noto described it simply as “beautiful.” She and Manning said more than 90 “collaborators” — meaning regional businesses that include such giants as Amazon and Micron — have assisted in developing a campus that will include a robotics lab, an “emulated clean room,” a semiconducting lab and an animation lab, not to mention curriculums involving voice, dance, instrumental music and on.
The idea is creating an academic engine that might allow a college-bound student with a focus on math, arts or the sciences to rack up anywhere from 24 to 30 college credits, thus saving a year’s worth of tuition. In an equally high imperative, the school will provide the “stackable skills” that Straub said would provide training allowing many teens, focused on a solid job right out of high school, “to walk into the work force.”
The basic mission, Noto said, is “opening doors” to meet these students wherever they are. Ignite that interest — particularly among students who might have drifted toward the exit, in more traditional settings — and she said you finally make real inroads toward dispelling the shadow of “generational poverty that now hangs over Syracuse.”
Harrell, the vice-principal, grew up in the city. As an educator, she said the particularly exciting factor about the new school, in a grand historic setting, is “opening doors that might never have been opened” for these teens.
It’s a dream 25 years in the making. Manning noted the original idea came together a quarter-century ago, when Stephen Jones was superintendent of schools, but the barrier was persuading reluctant suburban districts to get on board.
This time, Manning said, he and his team held individual meetings with all those districts, to reassure officials about the mission and services. His own role as an ally began with the call from Alicea, when Manning was superintendent of OCM BOCES. After retiring from that job, Manning served as a consultant with the STEAM school — until he said it made sense to come back full-time.
Last autumn, he was confident enough everything would soon be in place that he went to the hotel to speak with Riley, about Minerva. That statue, so associated with Central, had a harrowing journey. That’s detailed in the files of the Onondaga Historical Association — and I note with reverence that much of the Minerva research and reporting was done by the late Dick Case, my longtime colleague and a columnist for decades at The Post-Standard | Syracuse.com.
Years ago, a curious Case sought to nail down what happened to the statue. He learned that Minerva’s head came off somehow in the late 1960s, in the final years of the school, and she went into storage at Central. After the school closed, the statue was eventually obtained by restaurateur Paul Christou, who renamed her “Athena,” put her up in a delicatessen he operated on East Fayette Street and later moved her to a family eatery at the state fair.
The statue was a prominent feature at the restaurant. But in 1998, Case later wrote in a column, three visitors at the fairgrounds for the old Super DIRT Week “tried to swipe the statue. They didn’t, but they did drop her.”
Shattered, the pieces of Minerva went into boxes. In 2000, amid the early dreams of reopening Central, Case wrote of how Christou gave the fragments to Kathleen Niles, a 1961 Central graduate, a city schools administrator — and, by chance, the person who hired Straub 27 years ago to his first teaching job in the Syracuse schools.
Niles knew what to do. On behalf of her Central classmates and other alumni, she put what was left of Minerva into the hands of Bob Shenfeld, a skilled ceramist and a longtime Corcoran High art teacher. Speaking of Minerva’s condition at the time, Shenfeld offered three words when we spoke recently:
“Oh my God.”
Over about 15 years, he said, “we worked and worked and worked” — an effort involving Corcoran students as well as staff at his own studio — until Minerva was finally pieced back together. In 2016, Niles and some fellow graduates of Central asked Riley if he’d display the restored statue in the hotel lobby, with only one wistful proviso.
If the school ever reopened, a hope that at the time still seemed a longshot dream, the goddess of wisdom would go back to where she belongs.
On Sept. 4 — in what qualifies to Manning as a Central miracle — Minerva will be where she ought to be when the first kids hustle in after a 50-year recess, and head to class.
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