Central New Yorkers get to have their say this week about what Syracuse will look like once the elevated portion of Interstate 81 in downtown Syracuse comes down. The Walsh administration has released the Community Grid Vision Plan, along with a slate of upcoming open houses offering a close-up look at plans.
This 55-page document isn’t any kind of final engineering proposal for a viaduct-less city. Instead, it dreams how the city can use the land in a community grid configuration, to reach certain goals.
"How do we connect the streets? How do we make it walkable? How do we make it so people want to stop at the shops that are there?,” said Joe Driscoll, Syracuse’s I-81 project director. “The typical thing people always say is ‘you want ground-level retail apartments above it. You want a walkable, bikeable street.’ These are the things that these are the goals that we want."
There are a number of proposals for different seven neighborhoods from the north side to the south side. For example, switching a lot of one-way streets to two-way, reconfiguring streets to create usable land, new parks, and density in the form of affordable housing and businesses in this new street realignment.
For Driscoll, one of the biggest changes would be along Harrison and Adams streets, which are currently multilane roads that are mostly exits and entrances to 81.
"There's really a lot of potential for Adams and Harrison to be these kind of east-west connectors and to make them complete streets that are walkable and bikeable because they're super inhospitable," Driscoll said.
One of the areas he hopes to get input is on parcels on the city’s Southside.
“It still remains a challenge to develop. The topography is awkward, it's a 30-foot grade change at the moment, but that includes a lot of old-growth trees,” he said. “Is the area flattened, do we bring it all to grade? We've heard community ambition for a park. We've heard community ambition for new housing.”
There are a few renderings in the document. There are pictures of people walking hand-in-hand along streets lined with two, three, or five-story buildings with bikers traversing the tree-laden streets, even in winter. Driscoll is optimistic these utopian pictures don’t end up on the trash heap, like other development project proposals for Syracuse.
"It is a lot of overly ambitious stuff, but I think I'm very hopeful that it's not just another gondola, or an indoor nature trail or one of the other many renderings that have come to nothing in the city,” he said.
The city spent $500,000 of American Rescue Plan funds to pay Dover, Kohl, & Partners to create the Vision plan. The city will hold open houses on Syracuse’s south and north sides to share the Vision Plan with residents and community stakeholders.
The first session takes place on Tuesday, Feb. 27 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the cafeteria of STEAM at Dr. King Elementary at 416 E. Raynor Avenue. The second open house is on Wednesday, Feb. 28 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the cafeteria of Lincoln Middle School at 1613 James Street.
