The future of I-81

I-81 construction

Years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System spread across American cities and eventually through Syracuse, the city’s 15th Ward was a vibrant, diverse community. Within it were high- and low-income residents, white and black neighbors and the city’s first black dentist.

But in the 1950s and ’60s, the largely African-American community was razed to make way for an elevated interstate highway that would displace nearly 1,300 residents to the South Side. Whites took to the suburbs, leaving abandoned buildings in their wake.

“No one asked the community what it wanted when I-81 was built 50 years ago,” said James D’Agostino, director of the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council, the organization responsible for Onondaga County’s transportation planning.

Walking underneath the I-81 viaduct

Today, portions of Interstate-81, the expressway that cuts through Syracuse, are nearing the end of their lifespan. The visibly decaying viaduct, the 1.4-mile elevated strip, prompted the transportation council and the New York State Department of Transportation to launch The I-81 Challenge, a public outreach campaign to address the future of I-81 in the next decade.

Images via The I-81 Challenge blog.

Foot soldiers

Photos by Andrew Renneisen (via The Daily Orange)

Part 3 of 3: Every year, the Syracuse community gathers in the Carrier Dome to celebrate cancer survivors, honor loved ones lost to the disease and fight back to end cancer. Part Three of this series acknowledges those who fight for the cure.

The abnormal cells grow uncontrollably. They first arrive innocently enough, manifesting themselves as an unusual lump barely worth mentioning. Or a cough that lasts a little too long. Or a bruise that, for some reason, just hasn’t gone away.

The cells spread, invading other parts of the body, destroying tissues in their way. They might travel through a lymph or hide in a white blood cell. Eventually, they announce themselves by ravaging the body they’ve invaded. Too often, they end a life.

Not everyone is willing to sit back and watch.

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In memoriam

Part 2 of 3: Every year, the Syracuse community gathers in the Carrier Dome to celebrate cancer survivors, honor loved ones lost to the disease and fight back to end cancer. Part Two of this series explores the ways in which SU honors, mourns and remembers the fallen.

Typically, one mourns alone. Behind closed doors and under covers, you can hide the raw grief that demands release. The tears that escape honor your grandmother, your great aunt, your father, your loveable Rottweiler, your best friend.

One night of the year in the Carrier Dome, members of the Syracuse community grieve together. They openly share their vulnerability in a ceremony of remembrance for their lost loved ones. No closed doors or covers are needed.

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Day by day

Photo courtesy of Haley Buchan

Part 1 of 3: Every year, the Syracuse community gathers in the Carrier Dome to celebrate cancer survivors, honor loved ones lost to the disease and fight to end cancer. Part One of this series serves to celebrate one of SU’s own survivors.

There’s a feeling that grows as you near the light at the end of the tunnel. The sigh of relief you know will escape your overwhelmed body when you reach your journey’s promising end. “Everything’s going to be OK,” it whispers.

Heather Buchan saw the light in December. And by the end of the month, the Syracuse University freshman would see it disappear the moment her doctor delivered the news: Her cancer had returned.

Nothing could prepare anyone for that. But Buchan learned the day she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at 16 that there was never any certainty to living with cancer, and there was no certainty to living without it.

Saving the haven

Dunbar's impact on the community is shown in the news. © Bethany Bump

Preston Fagan knew African-Americans who would walk down to the Onondaga County Office Building in Syracuse to sign up for social services. Many would get there, and turn around at the last minute without going in for the food stamps, day care or medical assistance they needed. The problem, he said, was they felt stigmatized.

“Whenever they went down there, they felt people thought they were only there to get welfare or to do some begging,” he said.

That’s why the Dunbar Center on South State Street is so vital to the community, said Fagan, who served as president of the 92-year-old nonprofit’s board of directors on and off from the 1980s until 2003. No one feared being unfairly judged at Dunbar, he said, because the center provided so many varied services.

With Dunbar currently facing a major funding cut and administrative reshuffling, alumni have rallied to support the center and its historical roots in the community.

Preserving Dunbar

Adalsa Latty points out the window of his ground-floor office at the Dunbar Center. A snow-speckled South State Street outside is cracked and rundown, cutting through a struggling neighborhood. He drops his hands in despair. He sighs with the force of someone exhausted after a long battle.

“Sometimes when you come here, you see cars lined up from here down to the next block,” Latty says, looking out the window. “They come for service. They get service. I don’t think anybody has ever come here for help and they don’t get it.”

The Dunbar Center is located at 1453 S. State St. in Syracuse, NY. © Bethany Bump

Read the rest of this story I wrote for The Stand, a monthly newspaper covering Syracuse’s South Side. I’ll update soon with another story about how Dunbar’s alumni feel about keeping the center running.

People people throw your love around

I worked on a story this week that involved speaking to many passionate people (my favorite kind, personally). If you go through life perpetually bored, perpetually cynical, or just plain miserable to those around you for no good reason at all, well, I really want nothing to do with you. I see people like this every day. And it used to be disappointing — going through your day with practically no friendly encounters, no “Good mornings!” or “Have a nice days”. Worse than that are people whose bottom line in everything they do is for their own hubris. Get a grip. For me, what makes the every day special is interacting with people who don’t just want to serve themselves. I’m not saying everyone needs to paste on a happy face just for the hell of it either. I don’t know. I just have come to be bored by how contagious negativity seems to be.

Anyhow, that said, check out some of the passionate people trying to keep the arts alive in Syracuse.

Until next time, stay bright, stay shiny, stay happy people.

xo†

We have known who the Falling Man is all along.

The ability of the written word to move me to my core is one of the reasons I cherish it so much. In one of my classes this week, my professor asked me to recall a story I had read in the last year that left an impression and stood out amongst the rest. I had to pause only for a moment before knowing the answer. Tom Junod. Esquire. The Falling Man. September 2003. I strongly suggest giving it a read. It is long. But it is a wonderful way to spend 30 minutes of your time. I promise.

An excerpt:

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did — who jumped — appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else — something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

Continue reading.

What stories have moved you to your core? I’d love to know.

The return

I recently finished a 2005 memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion. I’ve admired Didion for some time, reading and hearing only snippets of her accomplishments in writing. But after finishing this book my admiration for her skyrocketed.

The memoir is about the year that followed her husband’s sudden death by cardiac arrest and her daughter’s troubles in and out of the hospital in the year to follow. Didion describes her immobilization and inability to move from grief to mourning over her husband’s death. I doubt if the writer has ever been a woman who dwells in self-pity or feels comfortable being in a state of inertia (“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.”). So this glimpse into a year of her life was moving, if not permeated with melancholia that asks nothing of the reader. It simply is. And I think that kind of writing has always been present in Didion’s work. It’s also the kind of writing that I’ve always admired.

I am sometimes torn in the world of literature, writing and journalism. I’ve seen egos tear writers down, or undeservingly win writers praise. It often creates a kind of fight-or-flight reaction in me. I want to run away from the conceit of it all. Or I want to curl up in an armchair and read all I can get my hands on, write down every damned thought that passes through my head and just live in the beauty of words.

I’ve chosen the former before. I’ve run. My own disgust and experiences caused me to abandon it all and tell myself I would never look back. And then my younger self who could sit down for 10 hours straight reading anything I could get my hands on will sometimes re-emerge. She’ll return. And she’ll find flashes of beauty in literature. She’ll momentarily forget whatever disgust she was feeling. She’ll relish the painstaking and exquisite beauty of the written word when done well. Most importantly, she is able to discern the difference between ego and genuine talent.

It ropes me back in.

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.” -Joan Didion

This is your life, are you who you wanna be?

OK, I’m going to try and be a little bit better at updating, but it’s been a busy couple of weeks. Things will be winding down soon and all shall be good in the world.

 

I’m currently sexiled from my room, so I’m in the lounge doing nothing. And ya know what? It feels damn good.

 

I had a meeting with my reporting professor today. A sort of exit interview for the class if you will. I think it went well. The professor has always been a bit intimidating but I think I’ve gotten over that throughout the duration of the class. He told me he liked my articles recently, especially the one I did on Orange Alert. I took this to be the kind of reassurance I needed to bolster my courage to ask him for a letter of recommendation. Which I did and I got a yesssss. So, phew, that is one out of the way. I’ll be asking my newswriting professor for one tomorrow. We went over my resume, which he pretty much tore apart, but it was very helpful. I really appreciate the Newhouse professors, they have been very helpful and it’s been really great getting to interview and meet with a lot of them. I am very sure this is the business I want to be getting in, and that feels good.

 

My brain really hurts today. I don’t know whether it’s from cramming so much information into it or a lack of sleep the past week. What am I talking about. The past month. I think it might be a combination of both.

 

The story I’ve been trying to work on the past couple days is not going very well. Basically, we got some unconfirmed information on security cuts in residence halls from a Residence Security Advisor and NO official at the school would confirm this. They gave me the run-around so many times it’s ridiculous. I was inclined to actually believe them because I can’t see why someone would go through so much trouble to stop people from knowing about it. But, the RSA said that other security guards actually signed documents for this security cutback. We are currently trying to find these documents because that would be super excellent!!! Naturally. Basically, I’m talking about this to say: I LOVE journalism. It’s what I want to do and I couldn’t be happier with the way things are going. I hope things continue on a good path.

 

Alright, all is well. I really hope I can return to my room soon so I can get some much-needed SLEEP.