I-81 is Crumbling and Hated in Syracuse, But Removal Is Complicated

These days, hardly anyone in Syracuse sees the hulking Interstate 81 viaduct as anything but a menace, an ugly 1.4-mile overpass that spews noise and pollution and has steadily worsened race relations in the city.

So when the New York State Department of Transportation finally decided in 2019 that the crumbling roadway should be torn down and replaced with a pedestrian-friendly boulevard, the kind of project that’s helped rejuvenate other American cities, a lot of people were excited.

“It sounds crazy, but this project will hopefully be one of the most transformative things to happen in this region in a hundred years,” said Joe Driscoll, who left his position on the Syracuse Common Council in 2022 when the city offered him a job as project director for the viaduct’s removal.

But actually demolishing a highway that nearly everyone seems to hate has proved more complicated than expected.

Part of this stems from the fact that the area primarily affected is Syracuse’s 15th Ward, a historically Black neighborhood that abuts the highway and has long borne the brunt of its impact. Residents in the 15th Ward, despite the promise of the new development, are wary of gentrification and further disruption. But city planners have also faced a string of legal challenges from suburban communities that say the viaduct’s removal will harm businesses outside the city.

Even those who oppose the project, often for different reasons, appear to acknowledge that the viaduct is something of a disaster that must be dealt with. But last year, a group called Renew 81 For All — a coalition of suburban towns, local businesses and politicians — filed suit to block the city’s plans. (It offered a speculative proposal for a “sky bridge” that would soar over the 15th Ward, nearly 50 feet taller than the existing structure and named the Harriet Tubman Memorial Freedom Bridge.)

Justice Gerard J. Neri of the State Supreme Court was unmoved and allowed initial phases of the project to get underway, such as widening the suburban highway where traffic will be redirected. But in a victory for the Renew 81 camp, he also ordered the state to conduct further environmental and traffic studies. The state appealed Justice Neri’s ruling, and the project’s fate is now in the hands of the New York State Court of Appeals.

Today, fewer and fewer people are alive who can remember the neighborhood in its heyday, when its streets were home to flourishing restaurants, barber shops and clothing stores, some of them Black-owned.

After World War II, large numbers of African Americans came to Syracuse to work in factories such as Carrier, the air-conditioning manufacturer. Virtually all of them moved to the 15th Ward, a sliver of a neighborhood between downtown and University Hill, home to many of the city’s colleges and hospitals. They did so largely because restrictive covenants barred Black people from buying or renting elsewhere in the city, according to Kishi Animashaun Ducre, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at Syracuse University, who has studied housing patterns in the city.

But within the 15th Ward, life could still be sweet, recalled Clarence Dunham, who grew up there and has seen the changes first hand. “In Syracuse, the Black neighborhood was very small,” Mr. Dunham recalled. “Most of the families knew everybody. If they didn’t know you, their grandparents did. Or they knew your mother, your father, your uncles. It was very tight-knit, and it was lovely.”

Mr. Dunham got his first inkling of the neighborhood’s fate when he returned home from an army stint in South Korea in 1959 and took a taxi to his family’s 15th Ward home. “It looked like a desert,” Mr. Dunham said.

At the time, Syracuse, like many cities, was swept up in urban renewal fever. Over the next decade, houses and businesses would be demolished and residents dispersed under the guise of clearing out blight.

As in many places, it was the city’s Black neighborhood that felt the greatest disruption. Whole streets disappeared in the 15th Ward. People would learn their homes were marked for destruction by coming home to find X’s painted on their front doors.

Among the houses that were demolished was the Harrison Street home where Mr. Dunham’s family lived, as well as his grandparents’ place on Madison Street.

“You’d look up and say, ‘Damn, so-and-so used to be there,’” Mr. Dunham recalled. “All those landmarks that were there when you left, now they’re gone.”

Nothing would damage the neighborhood as much as the I-81 viaduct, a bleak overpass that casts a deep shadow over the neighborhood even on sunny days. By the time it was finished in 1966, it created a physical barrier between the 15th Ward and the hospitals and colleges that are the economic engines of the region.

Years later, it’s hard to find anyone with anything good to say about it. The viaduct’s design predates current safety standards, and the traffic lanes and shoulders are far too narrow. Crashes occur on this stretch of highway at a rate more than three times the state average, and years of heavy traffic and road salt have weakened the structure. Whole chunks of concrete have been known to fall to the ground.

As a struggling community college student, Lanessa Owens-Chaplin lived for a time in the Pioneer Homes, a public-housing project built in 1941. Because the viaduct was built right next door, residents could literally watch the cars go by steps away from upper-floor windows. The noise was constant.

“I would fall asleep with my TV on loud because that was better than what I was hearing outside,” Ms. Owens-Chaplin recalled. The passing vehicles also emitted pollution. At 19, Ms. Owens-Chaplin said, she developed adult-onset asthma, which she attributes to living next to a highway used by an average of 74,000 vehicles a day.

Today, Ms. Owens-Chaplin is a lawyer and director of the Environmental Justice Project for the New York Civil Liberties Union. She helped persuade the organization to get behind the viaduct’s removal, and she wrote the amicus brief that it filed in support of the project. For her, getting rid of the highway is an environmental justice issue.

Once I-81 cut a swath through the neighborhood, property values plummeted, which led the city to use the 15th Ward as a dumping ground for its less desirable infrastructure projects, such as a sewage treatment facility and a steam plant for Syracuse University. It made the neighborhood only less desirable.

Today, the viaduct is in such bad shape that the state says it has no choice but to tear it down.

City officials hope to replace the highway with a tree-lined avenue, walking paths and bike lanes, a $2.25 billion project known as the Community Grid. Similar tear-downs have been carried out successfully in cities such as Denver, Boston and Rochester.

Under this plan, much of the traffic that now uses the viaduct would be rerouted to I-481, which traverses the eastern suburbs and reconnects with I-81 farther north. And that’s where much of the opposition comes in.

State officials say rerouting traffic would have a minimal impact on suburban towns, a claim that opponents scoff at. With the viaduct gone, fewer motorists would be able to reach the many restaurants, hotels and other businesses that have sprouted along the highway to the north, they say. That includes Destiny USA, the largest shopping mall in New York state.

“A lot of our commercial corridor was built around the exits that Interstate 81 poured into our town,” said Nick Paro, supervisor of the town of Salina. “The backbone of the town is those traffic corridors, and unfortunately, we think that the project that’s proposed is going to have a significant impact on the businesses.”

Carmen Emmi Jr. owns and operates four hotels near the intersection of I-81 and the New York State Thruway in Salina — a Super 8, a Hampton Inn and Suites, a Homewood Suites and a Tru by Hilton. He estimates that as much as 15 percent of his business each day comes from walk-ins off the highways, and with vehicles rerouted to the east, customer traffic is certain to drop off, he contends.

Mr. Emmi, like many opponents of the Community Grid, is aware that the viaduct damaged the 15th Ward and probably should never have been built there. “But now that it was,” he said, “and it’s been in place for 50 years, there’s been a lot of businesses that have been built up around the highway that rely on the highway.”

Support for the Community Grid is strongest in the city, but even there, doubts linger. Mr. Driscoll, who oversees community outreach for the Community Grid, has met with skepticism even among the neighborhoods that would benefit most.

Growing up in Syracuse and attending public schools, Mr. Driscoll, who is white, thought of his city as a place where races mixed comfortably. As a young man, he spent years as a musician living in Europe, and touring in the Middle East and Africa, he would brag to people he met that his high school looked “like a Benetton ad.”

Reality has proved a lot more complex.

Mr. Driscoll returned to the city in 2014 and became involved with the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign before serving on the city’s Common Council. He has moved into a tiny windowless office in City Hall since becoming the Community Grid’s project director last year. He hasn’t had time to decorate yet or even remove the thumbtacks left on the wall by the previous occupant. “When I do Zoom calls, people ask me, ‘Are you being held hostage?’”

As a rapper and beatboxer who worked with musicians of different races and nationalities, Mr. Driscoll figured he was well positioned to navigate the various factions with a stake in the Community Grid. But the viaduct, coupled with years of other urban renewal projects, had made many residents suspicious of city planners, he learned.

“A lot of people in those corridors, a lot of the African American community in that corridor, are deeply distrustful of government in all its forms, particularly white folks,” he said. It’s not hard to see why, he added.

The biggest worry many had was about gentrification, Mr. Driscoll said. Many of the neighborhood’s residents suspect that the potential improvements will drive up property costs, forcing out lower-income residents. In fact, he said, false rumors are rife that the land has already been sold to Syracuse University for student housing.

Last summer, Mr. Driscoll and the Community Grid’s design team camped out at an elementary school near the viaduct and invited neighborhood residents to come in and ask questions about the government’s plans. They printed out a giant map and laid it on the cafeteria floor to show people the parameters of the project. They also spent time canvassing the neighborhood to talk to residents. It didn’t always go well.

“We had people who didn’t want to talk to us,” Mr. Driscoll recalled. One man in his 60s told him, “You’ve just come here to chase us out of our homes and knock them down.”

Mr. Driscoll tried to explain what was being contemplated for the neighborhood. “Yeah, we’ll see,” the man replied. “I’d appreciate it if you’d get off my porch.”

As critics see it, removing the highway will free up a considerable amount of land next to Syracuse University and several big hospitals, making it an attractive target for developers looking to build high-end residences.

“It’s all about taking down the viaduct so University Hill can be extended into downtown and they can appropriate the surrounding properties,” said Charles Garland, an Onondaga County legislator who represents a majority Black district. He is also a major critic of the Community Grid.

Mr. Garland, who is also a founding member of Renew 81 For All, has some direct experience with urban renewal. His family’s funeral home on Fayette Street was torn down in the late 1960s and relocated to the Southside to make way for the Kennedy Square public housing project.

Four decades later, that same housing project was demolished, and the land became part of SUNY’s Upstate Medical University and College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Concerns like Mr. Garland’s are not without some foundation.

While the city says it would like to preserve land for low-income housing, the property is actually owned by the state, and a definitive plan for the Community Grid is still years away, Mr. Driscoll admitted. The highway will have to come down first.

One thing they can’t do is bring back the 15th Ward the way Clarence Dunham remembers it.

In the years after the highway’s construction, Mr. Dunham worked for telecommunications companies and served as an Onondaga County legislator. Like many former 15th Ward residents, he now lives on the city’s Southside, a short distance away.

At 88, he has slowed down a bit, but his voice still tightens in anger when he thinks about how the 15th Ward was decimated.

“They went to the neighborhood of least resistance,” he said. A lot of people complained, he recalled. “But they built it anyway. And really, what happened to my neighborhood was they tore it down.”