Too Close to What was Once Home

[thisnewday]

At 1:35 this afternoon, a 20-year-old man was shot in the stomach and shoulder as he was walking along the street which fronts the cemetery where my wife and her family are laid to rest. That's also just a couple of blocks, on the same street, from where my daughter has one of her rental properties. And 3-4 blocks from where my grandson goes on the weekends to play bball with his friend Hector.

This is why the nice folks in the surrounding suburbs have lately been referring to Syracuse as "Little Detroit." It's a joke which carries the sting of a sad truth, that the city where my wife and I raised our kids, and owned a house for over thirty years, is slowly succumbing to the urban terrorism and blight which is affecting cities all over the country...

LPK
Dreamwidth
6.7.2018

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

My youngest son went to the ESF program at Syracuse University, so I've spent some time there. He refused to live on campus, so he shared a series of apartments in that area around Westcott, a student ghetto consisting of acres and acres of two-story A-frames with steeply pitched roofs and rickety porches. I don't think it was always an ugly area, but it kind of is now, and it functions like a kind the Serengeti Plain for the predators who live in the heart of the city a few miles down the hill. Robin's various apartments were broken into five times while he lived there. I sometimes try to figure out what population these structures were originally designed to house - quasi-craftsmen houses, not quite working class - and I can’t. But then, I’ve never been able to figure out why Syracuse exists – I mean in the economic geographic sense. It's not like Rochester, the city I pair it with in my mind. Rochester was a two-company town: Kodak and Xerox. But what economy fueled Syracuse?