Rivers, Roads and Racism

Story by Nate Harrington

Graphics by Alex Levy

Syracuse went from being a few buildings in the swamp beyond Salina in 1820 to the 28th largest city in America by 1850. In one burst, the area’s population soared 14-fold from 1825 — the year the Erie Canal opened — to 1830.

The Canal gave birth to Syracuse. As it grew, the city grew. 

Yet a hundred years after opening, the city paved the Canal over.

Then came the railroads, vital engines of the burgeoning economy and westward expansion, carrying hundreds of millions of tons by the late 19th century. After a hundred years, the city would move the tracks, then the railroads would be made irrelevant by the construction of I-81: the highway that put Syracuse at the crossroads of the nation’s massive interstate system for more than 70 years.

And now the tearing down of the elevated section of I-81 that runs through the city has begun.

It’s cyclical. Every 50 to 100 years, a massive infrastructure project comes to Syracuse, shaping the city, creating a boom for some and a burden for others. Fast forward another 50-100 years, add some rust, ruin and regret, and the cycle begins anew.

But underlying this pattern is one constant: Historians and other experts say each project has come at the expense of communities that suffer under the burden of environmental and structural racism.

The question now — will this cycle repeat once again? 

Historians have called Syracuse’s genesis “accidental,” as the lifeline of the Erie Canal that passed through the heart of the city could have easily been built through Salina. The already established town offered the same benefits of salt production, and Salina would have prospered similarly had the Canal been built through it.

“The Erie Canal literally put Syracuse on the map,” said Robert Searing, curator of history at the Onondaga Historical Association.

Before 1811, Syracuse was nameless and not much more than land near a lake. There would soon be a tavern, but not much more before the Erie Canal. And when the Canal was completed in 1825, Syracuse was officially incorporated as a village.

In spite of the label of accident, Syracuse had one trump card: Onondaga Lake. At the time, “the brine at Onondaga was the strongest known in America,” wrote Joseph Murray, making the lake ripe for development and exploitation.

Onondaga Lake had belonged to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who “were incredibly powerful and well ordered,” Searing said. America was weary of the power the Haudenosaunee had, and sought to break apart their nation as part of the Sullivan-Cliton campaign in 1779.

The “expedition’s” main objective was to cripple the Haudenosaunee to protect Americans from the possibility of war. This meant destroying key villages and food supplies for the nations they came across. 

After the conflicts, “the State of New York moves to secure several treaties with the Onondaga Nation and the rest of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,” Searing said. Fearing further conflicts, the Haudenousaunee signed those treaties, which “forced (them) onto reservations where they remain to this very day.”

Underlying the construction of the Erie Canal was mass displacement of Haudenosaunee Confederacy tribes. Native American tribes were sent either to isolated portions of New York or to completely different areas of America after the multiple violent conquests. 

This removal of the Haudenosaunee and other Native American tribes to build the Canal was the first example of how Syracuse, along with the rest of America, would use infrastructure to disparage, displace and disrupt communities in the pursuit of economic prosperity with undertones of racism. 

As the Onondaga and other Haudenosaunee tribes were displaced, white settlers and a thirst for commerce and growth rushed in. The Canal gave America “the ability to establish a market economy,” said Andrew Cohen, a history professor at Syracuse University.

“It used to be that the average household produced something like nine yards of cloth a year,” Cohen said. The Erie Canal allowed the establishment of factories, which led to the specialization of jobs and mass production of cloth, leather and steel; the first American steel mills were established, which helped start the second industrial revolution.

This shift was possible because of the cheaper, easier and faster movement of goods across the nation. “All of a sudden it becomes possible to manufacture things in New York City and get them to people in Ohio,” Cohen said. “And it becomes possible to grow potatoes and corn and wheat out in Ohio and use it to feed people in the cities.” 

The “transportation revolution,” as Cohen puts it, in conjunction with new means of manufacturing, is what pushed America from an agricultural, sea-trading nation to a capitalistic superpower. 

No city benefited more from the Canal than Syracuse.

Beginning with a population of 500 in 1825, after five years of the Canal being in operation, Syracuse’s population grew to roughly 7,000. 

Graphic by Alex Levy

Graph depicting population gain from 1820 to 1830.

Other cities saw population booms: Buffalo grew from 2,000 to 8,700 from 1820 to 1830, and Rochester grew from 1,500 to over 9,200 in that same time frame. But even those population jumps couldn’t match Syracuse’s pace.

This boom did not subside. The Erie Canal pushed Syracuse into the top 30 cities in the nation by 1850 (two years after it was designated a city). The Canal allowed the salt industry to export “3 and one half millions bushels” in 1841, according to Joseph Murphy, a professor at Syracuse University at the time of this publication in 1949, equating to roughly 175 million pounds of salt.

Syracuse’s growth would only continue when the railroad industry started. The Auburn and Syracuse Railroad began operation in Syracuse in 1838, servicing various towns between the two. The Vanderbilt Square rail station was opened soon after to accommodate the increasing train traffic.

And as trains began to carry more cargo in the 1860-70s, the two massive pieces of infrastructure did more than just compete and bring economic benefits to the city. They also helped divide communities. 

Scarlett Rebmann, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the civil rights protests in Syracuse, retold a story from one of her interviewees. 

The interviewee’s father lived in Syracuse before the Canal was paved over in 1924, when “the Black community was on the Eastside, just south of the Canal, and then the Northside was Italian American,” Rebmann recalled. “The Erie Canal was the dividing point of the neighborhoods, and you would not cross.”

This was not by mistake. Even before the practice of redlining, Syracuse had designated areas for “Negros,” which separated them not only from white communities but also from each other. This segregation, displayed in the Map of 1919, shows how the Erie Canal and railroads were used to separate communities in Syracuse, not dissimilar to the future effect I-81 would have on dividing the city. 

Courtesy of U.S. National Archives

This 1919 map of Syracuse blocks outlines each neighborhood’s residents and served as a precursor to the redlining policies that took over the city later.

“Restrictive racial covenants barred properties from being sold or rented to people that were not Caucasian,” said Searing on the segregation shown in the Map of 1919. “The Italian people lived with other Italian people, they had a choice, they wanted to. The Irish people and the Polish people, all that is true (too). African Americans did not have a choice of where they wanted to live.”

The practice of forcing Black Americans into certain areas wouldn’t stop even after some of the infrastructure separating races was removed.

In 1918, the construction of the Barge Canal was completed, making stretches of the Erie Canal irrelevant. Train transit and cargo would also surpass the Canal system in capacity and use in the early 20th century. Syracuse would pave over the Erie Canal in 1924, killing the very thing that gave the city life a year before it turned 100.

Despite paving over the Canal and removing railroads from the city in 1936, Syracuse could not erase the inequality the infrastructure had perpetuated. Racism and segregation were ingrained in the city and the nation, as the Federal Housing Administration employed policies that “federally sponsored redlining.” 

Seen in the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of 1937, Syracuse was very successful in continuing the segregation it enforced in 1919.

The red areas were designated for populations that were not economically sound to give loans to,  which almost exclusively referred to Black people. The Federal Housing Administration explicitly recommended prohibiting “the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended,” according to the Federal Reserve History website.

And as the Black population in Syracuse grew, that “widespread discrimination led to their almost exclusive concentration in the 15th Ward,” writes OHA, the county historical association. A major part of this ward is labeled as a “D” — meaning the area was labeled as hazardous, denying the residents access to loans that could be used to improve the dilapidation in the area —  in the 1937 HOLC map.

City Survey Files

The 1937 HOLC map depicting the redlining zones in Syracuse. The areas in red, largely populated by Black Syracusians, were areas deemed to be high risk, meaning less loan money was given out in those areas.

From 1940 to 1950, the Black population doubled from 2,082 to 4,586, and “in 1950, almost 4,000 African-Americans, eight of every nine in Syracuse” lived in Ward 15, according to OHA. By 1960, the city’s Black population nearly tripled, jumping to 11,210. 

During the period of Black population growth, the state wanted to build a highway through the city to continue expanding the networks of highways quickly being built. The pitch for the new infrastructure only strengthened after President Eishenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway Act. But the act held stipulations, writes David Rubin, requiring that “new roads had to be either elevated or depressed if they went through the city.” 

And one part of the city made the most sense to demolish for constructing the highway.

“Highways are built through Black neighborhoods because it’s easier to justify politically going through a high-poverty, segregated space,” Rebmann said.

Because of eminent domain – which requires fair compensation for taking private land for public use – the cheapest area to buy out would be the 15th Ward. The poverty exacerbated by redlining also strengthened the justification to demolish the 15th Ward and build I-81.

Despite the state using the cheap land value to justify the destruction of the 15th Ward, the Black community was flourishing in the one place it had been allowed to live. The ward was the heart of the Black community in Syracuse; it had homes, businesses, churches and a strong Jewish and immigrant presence. 

“Social cohesion was provided by clubs, churches and the Dunbar Center, the most prominent community institution,” said Otey Scruggs, a former professor of history at Syracuse University, according to OHA. “But most of all, the ties that bound rested on the camaraderie that blossomed from knowing virtually everyone in the community.”

The 15th Ward was much more than land to be razed to construct a highway, but the I-81 project would displace 1,300 families who called it home. Ignoring the concerns of the community about to be dissolved, supporters of the highway claimed it would benefit the city, in turn benefiting all of its constituents. But the benefit for those primarily Black families was unclear.

The community tried to protest the demolition of buildings, but the decision had already been made and construction continued. 

I-81 razed the 15th Ward, having 75% of the Black community relocated, and subjecting the residents around the highway to not only continued racism and segregation but “disproportionately high rates of asthma and lead poisoning,” writes the New York Focus. All of these factors exacerbated poverty.

In 1959, as I-81 was beginning to be built, nearly 58% of black families in Syracuse made less than $3,000. The federal poverty line for a family of four in 1959 “was $3,100”, and “a modest but adequate budget cost approximately $7,000,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

Despite wide-ranging social-safety nets coming into effect in the 1960s, Black Syracusans’ poverty rates stayed consistent with the national poverty rates. In 1970, nearly 30% of Black residents were below the poverty line. 

On top of the segregation, discrimination and razing of the Black community, this poverty would be further exacerbated by deindustrialization, white flight and the inability to move because of their poverty. 

In 2020, more than 35% of Black Syracuse residents lived in poverty, which is more than double the national average for Black families and triple the percentage of white Syracusans in poverty.

“Poverty is concentrated in smaller pockets, and what you see in the city of Syracuse in particular is what you start to refer to as white flight,” Searing said. “The interstate, which was supposed to breathe new life into the urban core, had the exact opposite effect.

“The metropolis of the city lost about 55,000 people between 1965 and 2000,” Searing continued, explaining the effects that building I-81 brought upon Syracuse. “That is an enormous loss of population, and that does exacerbate poverty, because what you’re left with in the city are poor folks with less of a tax base, which leads to cutting Social Services, which means a cut in public services.”

And those injustices have remained unrectified for nearly seven decades.

I-81’s decades of bisecting the city of Syracuse are beginning to come to an end.

“Years of use and exposure to the extreme weather conditions in Syracuse have taken a toll on portions of the highway. That is why NYSDOT and FHWA initiated this project,” writes the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT). 

The NYSDOT’s beginning reason for the tearing down of I-81 is not as noble as some might hope — i.e., combating the segregation and poverty the highway has compounded for decades — but the I-81 Viaduct Project has begun, and so has work to make sure this infrastructure project does not harm the communities historically affected by such projects.

Lanessa Owens-Chaplin of the New York Civil Liberties Union has been working with state transportation officials and Syracuse community members to “try to prevent” more racially tainted infrastructure “from happening again.”

In this partnership, the state has “been receptive thus far,” Owens-Chaplin said. “They’ve been good collaborators in the work and just in making sure that (they’re) being very receptive.”

One example of this is the moving of a roundabout, which was initially planned to be in front of Dr. King Elementary School. Community outcry and protests organized by Owens-Chaplin forced NYSDOT to move the roundabout away from the school.

“There is a real awareness on the part of policymakers, on the part of government and on the part of community organizations, of all the mistakes that were made in the 1950s and the 1960s,” said Searing, who participated in panels and weighed in on other conversations to help make sure the I-81 project is successful. “That has led to a profoundly different conversation, both at the policymaking level, at Congress and at the discourse level.” 

But major questions persist. The land belongs to the state, and what the state does with it after the interstate is removed will once again remake the city, for better or for worse. 

Tearing down I-81 will make “24 acres of land in the middle of the community available for the first time in many people’s lifetimes, and probably for the last time,” Owens-Chaplin said. 

New York state and its Department of Transportation have several potential plans for the land after the demolition of I-81. They could reconstruct a new viaduct; they could make the area now beneath the highway a community grid, which would have four lanes of traffic, but include new bike lanes and sidewalks; or they could forgo demolition and try to repair the decrepit stretch of I-81.

“‘Hey, we’re going to keep the land’ — which is their current plan — is not acceptable,” she continued. “And I think that then saying an alternate plan of ‘We’ll just give the land to the city of Syracuse with no strings attached’ is also not acceptable.”

“What community residents have been asking for, and what I as a staff person at the NYCLU have been trying to uplift and elevate, is a community land trust,” said Owens-Chaplin on the ideal outcome of the project. “4.5 acres of land will be owned by community residents, and that way they can decide how they want to develop it. They can ensure that it will maintain its affordability, and they will ensure that it’s used for the benefit of the community.”

Community land trusts are nonprofit organizations that are controlled by a board and staff, but also by community members in order to build wealth and stability, while still listening and helping to combat community problems. 

These trusts aren’t a new phenomenon. A fellow Canal city, Buffalo, used the trust to push back against an encroaching medical campus. This solution being installed in Syracuse could begin to allow the Black community to rebuild part of what it lost when the historic and vibrant 15th Ward was decimated.

The I-81 Viaduct Project’s final result carries such weight because of the people whose community was razed in its path to building the initial highway. And this community is still suffering due to the environmental racism that is just now having a chance to be rectified. 

This is the problem that needs to be fixed, Owens-Chaplin said. 

“Let’s recognize that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you disseminated an entire Black community,” she said of the government’s decision to build I-81. “You removed 500 homes and businesses, thousands of families out of that neighborhood with no relocation plan for the first six years of construction. So, in my opinion, they are obligated to ameliorate that harm.”

Syracuse was born from the Erie Canal, the first major infrastructure project in America, and then it welcomed railroad transportation. Both those pieces of infrastructure ran through the city, both were used to segregate Black communities, and both were removed roughly 100 years after their installation. Yet, segregation, discrimination and disproportionate poverty levels remained.

I-81 continued the cycle of change while continuing the legacy of racism. The interstate destroyed the one place Black people were allowed to live in Syracuse during a time of rapid growth among the African American population of the city.

For more than six decades, I-81 has loomed over the graves of hundreds of homes, of churches, of businesses and of the historic and vibrant 15th Ward. 

“The land was sitting there and was taken by eminent domain,” Owens-Chaplin said. “(That land) has to be used in a way that’s responsible and can allow people in that neighborhood to rebuild their community. Not only through providing affordable housing — we’re thinking bigger than that. We’re talking about land ownership so they can start building back equity and building back generational wealth that was lost in those years.”