The Fifteenth Ward
Near Syracuse, New York
By nineteen fifty, eight of every nine Black residents of Syracuse lived in the Fifteenth Ward, a neighborhood that occupied the central city east of downtown. It was not a wealthy neighborhood. It was a working neighborhood, and it was alive, with churches, barbershops, jazz clubs, funeral homes, pharmacies, groceries, the institutional fabric that any functioning community builds for itself over generations.
The exact number of families displaced is contested in the historical record, and the full accounting has never been definitively settled. What the record does document is this: in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, city and state planners extended Interstate Eighty-One through Syracuse by building an elevated viaduct that cut directly through the Fifteenth Ward. More than thirteen hundred families were relocated, by figures cited in planning documents from the period. A vibrant Black neighborhood was dismantled, block by block, to smooth the flow of commuter traffic from the suburbs.
The Central New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union was born in the spring of nineteen sixty-three as a direct result of police harassment of Fifteenth Ward residents who were protesting the demolition. Their protests were documented and, in due course, dismissed.
The elevated viaduct carried Interstate Eighty-One over the neighborhood for more than half a century. Air quality beneath the viaduct was poor. Property values on its shadow were suppressed. The community that had once organized its life in the Fifteenth Ward scattered.
In the twenty-tens, the state began debating what to do with the aging viaduct. The debate took years. One option was a community grid, tearing the elevated highway down and routing traffic through surface streets, reconnecting the neighborhoods that had been severed. After extensive public process and legal review, that option moved forward. As of the mid-twenty-twenties, demolition of the viaduct is underway.
What gets rebuilt, and who gets to live in it, is a question this city has not yet answered.
