Well, I graduated from my dream school Sunday. For the first time, school is not the center of my life. I have been in the education system for 17 out of my 22 years. Get me started, and I will spout off every reason I truly believe education is the future of our country.
My 3-year-old nephew will attend pre-school this fall. He would have you believe he earned that cap though!
Ask me if I’m happy it’s behind me and I will tell you: my future is undecided and wide open and it’s wonderful.
It seems like I woke up just the other day, looked out my curtains and saw a white blanket of snow on the haphazard quadrangle outside. Mmmmm, Central New York. There was no respite from the snow. The cozy feelings of hot chocolate, scarves and fireplaces that coincide with the onset of winter quickly subside after about a month, maybe two.
With only sunshine ahead for the next five months, I want to say goodbye and so long winter. When I stumbled on the photos below though, I marveled at how pretty Austria makes winter look. And how maybe, just maybe I could live with it a little longer. This little town in Salzburg is so enchanting!
A bridge crosses the Salzach River to the Salzburg old town.
St Wolfgang Pilgrimage Church by the Wolfgangsee.
The Salzach River winds its way through the Salzburg old town.
Then again, I really love moccasin season.
Check out more Austria photos by these talented folks.
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.
Gloomy weather + gloomy week + gloomy spring so far + chronic lack of sunshine =
And yet somehow he manages to make gloomy look good.
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.
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.
