Getting people to Syracuse

Syracuse's population is falling off again, and people are wondering – how do we draw more people to town?

I'm thinking, though, that maybe this is starting a step ahead of where we need to start. Before we start drawing new people in, we have to figure out how to retain what we have. While new blood is great, we need people with history, background, etc., to be here as well.

For those who are already here, we know we need to start getting new blood in public office – the current crop of leaders is nearing retirement (from U.S. representatives to mayors to school boards), and who better than those of us in our 20s and 30s to kick some life into CNY? The good folks at 40 Below Civic Engagement are doing a Running For Office 101 on July 16 at OHM in Armory Square, starting at 5:30.

It seems like now is the right time to start some revitalization. If you're like me and going out of your way to try to find gas at $4.19 a gallon or less, you're one of the people who are out on the streets more – you're walking to the convenience store, you're biking to the bank. Plus, as Ellen notes, you're bumping into other people, and maybe you're even talking, having conversations. Novel concept.

Centro says they've seen an increase in public transit ridership, but they still haven't increased routes and schedules to the point where I can reasonably take the bus to work (how does an hour and 10 minutes for six miles of travel, plus showing up to work 15 minutes late, sound?).

The newspaper has appointed reporter Greg Munno to the post of Civic Engagement Editor, and with it, they're launching a new blog called CNY Speaks, which solicits opinions and blog posts from the public, as well as having Greg facilitate conversations.

One cool thing my employer is doing is user-generated video. Unlike YouTube, which is giant and requires a lot of searching, this is kind of a localized deal. The Flash transcoding is a little rough, but I think that's OK – it means that whether you take with an HD camera or with your cell phone, you'll get about the same quality. And we're finding out it's more about the content of the video than the quality of it.

Another cool thing they're doing is getting into Facebook; there's now an app with which you can subscribe to RSS feeds from within your Facebook profile.

Anyway, I hope to be back doing this more often. I had a real hard time with Andrea's passing, but Zach's return after a years-long absence is spurring me on.

The Lost: Photographs, memories, and conveyance

I don't take very good photos of people when they're posing. The spontaneous photos I take of people, however, tend to be really good.

I have one of my brother I love. It's at his graduation from the University of Hartford. The lighting was bad, and I decided to take without a flash – or a tripod. What resulted what his smiling face in the center of the frame, surrounded on all four sides by the golden blurs of the theater lights bouncing off the mortarboards of those students standing around him.

I have another one I really like of my friend A—. She is photographing a section of the Declaration of Sentiments in Seneca Falls, NY (see a slideshow I put together of the town). It's a black and white photo, taken from behind her and to her left. She didn't know I was taking it, and it's a positively beautiful picture.

The Lost author Daniel Mendelsohn has traveled to Australia to meet a man who dated one of his long-lost cousins, and meets, as well, others from Bolechow, the town his family came from. Among them is a woman who was a friend of another of his cousins.

Mendelsohn has been carrying around photos of the family he wants so desperately to learn about. And he discovers that what he is carrying around are photographs from someone else's memory.

Unconsciously, I think this is the reason posed photos never look right to me. It's because we're faking the memory. We're not recording something that's happening, we're recording something we've caused.

I suppose this is also why when I set about to sell photos, it surprises me which photos people want. I realize now that it's because the photos I connect to most hold some sort of meaning for me outside the photo, and even if the general mood is conveyed in the photo, the extraneous factors – whom I was with, how I felt, how they felt, what drove me to that particular location – they are all things that never make it through.

Every year Syracuse manages to track down a 60-foot Christmas tree. It sits at the edge of Clinton Square, next to the ice rink. The tree is photographed often, but I have a photo from an unusual angle at an unusual time. It's night, it's snowing, and I'm facing the tree from the middle of Erie Blvd., a full block away from the tree. It's a black and white image, and I could probably make 100 copies and be good on holiday and birthday gifts for a long time.

People love the photo; I do, too.

What the photo can't possibly convey, though, is the calm that lets one stand in the middle of a usually busy street on a weekend night. It doesn't convey the feeling that I just sat through a concert, watching my old friend S— perform while sharing a table with my new friend A—, whom S— had introduced me to. It doesn't convey the frustrated feelings of A&mdash's crushed crush that night. It doesn't convey the crush I had at the time on my new friend. There was a lot of release in that photo. A lot of release.

But not all of that needs to be conveyed in the photo, because I know there are thousands of other people who have their memories of the tree, of snow, of downtown. And the photo might mean something entirely different to them.

And that's OK.

For more posts on The Lost, click here.

Worth Saving

Sometimes I wonder if downtown's worth saving. Usually this happens on a rainy Sunday morning, like today...

Getting off the bus, I walked Fayette St. from Salina to Clinton. Looking across the street:

• Boarded up windows
• Boarded up doors
• For Sale or Lease
• Coming Soon
• Availability

And then there's the Clinton Street Pub on the corner with its fading residency hotel above it, and next to that, as you turn the corner, there's Ron Paul's local headquarters, which will be vacant once he runs out of money for his presidential run, and then another available spot just on the other side of the Hot Shoppe.

And when it's gray and there's no one else on the street, it's really damn depressing.

But by the time I got to Freedom of Espresso, and had a couple of sips, man, did I feel better. Sean Kirst writes today about a couple of guys getting off the train after the SU basketball game and sticking downtown for a bite and a beer.

And then Andy Breuer walked in to pick up some coffee. You might not know Andy, but if you're local, you've seen his name – on the Heuber-Breuer equipment everywhere there's an important local construction project going on. That dude knows what it takes, and he's working for it.

Tear down Interstate 81

Back when we were doing Alive in CNY, one of my favorite topics was the removal of Interstate 81.

Not the whole thing – about a 3-mile chunk that runs from I-690 to I-481, dissecting the city and keeping the university area separate from downtown.

Anyone who wanted to stay on the highway through the city could do five miles on 690 and 481 instead of those three miles on I-81. I don't think an extra two-to-three minutes is two much to ask of people, to help reunite the city.

Also, I don't really think Syracuse should be in the business of making sure people can leave the city as fast as they can. Services like that should be reserved for Las Vegas.

This debate is getting renewed, now that Upstate Medical Center (a teaching hospital affiliated with the SUNY system) has said they can't expand with the highway there.

Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor has also said she'd like to see it taken down.

This latest is causing a lot of stir over at Sean Kirst's blog. Ellen over at NYCO also weighs in.