Floor Burns
by M.C. Antil

Chapter Seventeen: Two Dirty Words

His name was Nelson Pitts, and he hailed from the 4th Ward on the city's East Side, not far from the New York Central tracks. Pitts was employed in the early 1950s as a city engineer. At the time, Syracuse was, quite literally, choking on its own traffic. Following World War II, downtown had become a beehive of retail activity, and the city itself such a hotbed of industry and global commerce, what with factories, plants and foundries in all four quadrants, that traffic along such major arteries as Salina Street, Genesee Street, Erie Boulevard and James Street, as well as dozens of side streets, often came to a complete standstill.

Given that during the war, it had been determined that 85% of all traffic in the Empire State traveled in and out of New York City, in the post-war years support began building for a network of modern highways to link the state’s key cities with the five boroughs of New York. Pitts, as city engineer, hated the idea for his hometown and went public with his opposition. He did not see highways as a means of making downtown Syracuse more accessible, but rather as an excuse for locals and outsiders alike to bypass it altogether. He was quoted in one local paper as saying, “Too much highway construction will draw people out of downtown.”

Around the same time, Syracuse elected two fiscally conservative mayors in a row, Thomas Kennedy and Frank Costello, both of whom were opposed to deficit spending of any kind and held fast to a pay-as-you-go philosophy, especially when it came to public works projects. Similarly, a body called the Syracuse/Onondaga Post-War Planning Council had been formed, along with a state entity calling itself the New York State Department of Arterial Route Planning.

The two, though ostensibly seeking the same pot of gold – an answer to a growing transportation problem in a state in which car ownership was exploding – nevertheless had entirely different ideas how to get there. The Syracuse group, for one, wanted what was best for the people and merchants of the Salt City. The Albany-based group, on the other hand, comprised mainly of bureaucrats and civil engineers, simply wanted to move traffic from Point A to Point B as efficiently and as quickly as possible.

Eventually, the governor sent out a directive to every city with a population of 5,000 or more to submit a plan for how they envisioned an intrastate highway might interconnect with their municipality. Syracuse, in part because of its new-found fiscal conservatism, had no appetite for additional taxes on city workers and merchants – even though its traffic congestion continued to spiral out of control. Despite the fact New York State promised to foot 50% of the bill for any highway, city officials stuck to their guns.

However, in 1956, Dwight Eisenhower signed into law something called the Federal-Aid Highway Act, the largest infrastructure initiative in U.S. history, more sweeping, in fact, than anything FDR had launched during his New Deal. For many in Syracuse, especially the political elite, the key word in the new law was not so much “Highway,” as it was “Aid.”

Yet, the fiscally conservative voices at the heart of Syracuse’s power base – and, indeed, all local voices – began to matter less and less in the larger scheme of things. The project soon had attached to it unprecedented sums of money, both state and federal. So much so, in fact, that between Albany’s engineers and Washington’s legislators, many of the most critical decisions regarding the new Empire State highway found themselves wrested out of local hands and placed squarely in those of outsiders. And those outside hands belonged to men whose goals were more tied to macro concerns like traffic flow, evacuation routes, interstate commerce and civil defense than they were to more mundane considerations like home property value, neighborhood livability and daily merchant receipts.

Before long, a plan had been devised in Albany that called for an elevated “viaduct” to cut through the center of state and right through the heart of the city, downtown Syracuse.

Nelson Pitts absolutely hated the idea, though his feelings paled compared to those of many downtown merchants. Pitts soon went public with his outrage, claiming the plan would displace the residents of some 1,400 households. He'd done the research. He knew. He claimed an elevated highway would leave in its wake any number of “dead zones” that would be good for nothing; not housing, not commerce, not even greenery. He blasted highways as “speed demons” and said they'd, in time, become a “tortuous nightmare” for Syracuse.

A short time later, Nelson Pitts was fired.  City officials gave as their reason, "insubordination."

Enter William Francis Walsh, a 49-year old retired Army Air Corps captain and graduate of St. Bonaventure University. Walsh was a Tipp Hill guy, a strong family man, a lifelong Syracusan, and the proud son of two Irish immigrants. Growing up in Skunk City in the 1920s he'd earned himself the nickname Pug, and for those who knew him best, he was and would always remain Pug Walsh.  To everyone else, however, especially since he'd moved to Tipperary Hill to start and raise his big Irish family, he'd become simply Bill.

Like so many Irishmen, Bill Walsh had politics it in his blood. He was serious, ambitious and loved nothing more than keeping the wheels of government well-lubricated and humming.

He'd first cut his teeth in the public sector as a social worker. Later he became the regional head of the New York State Commission Against Discrimination and, in time, Onondaga County Welfare Commissioner, a job he held for two years before deciding to run for mayor. Little did Walsh know at the time, but the seat he was seeking was about to become – at least for the eight years he’d hold it – one of the most challenging, tumultuous, and landscape-shifting in the history of U.S. mayors.

Even as Mayor-elect William F. Walsh stood on the steps of City Hall and placed his hand on a Bible that sunny morning in 1961, it was almost as though a slow-gathering storm of social upheaval had appeared on the horizon and was gathering momentum as it rumbled its way toward him, gaining fury with each twist of time and fate.

In telling the story of William Walsh in the context of a single high school basketball game during his time as mayor of Syracuse, it’s almost impossible to determine where to start, since there were so many moving parts to his tenure and its impact on the city's 15th Ward – a section of town that, given his time as a social worker, he understood better than just about every other politician in town.

First and foremost, there was the New York State highway situation, which had only been amplified with the passage of Ike’s Interstate Highway Act. That situation, like those to follow, was not of Bill Walsh’s making. In fact, construction of the Empire Stateway (or Penn-Can Highway, depending in which of the two naming camps one stood) had already broken ground and was well underway; one half heading from the North, up near a tiny lakeside community called Brewerton, the other rumbling toward the Salt City from Cortland and the South.

As is usually the case in politics, though, because the two parts of the same public works project met head-on in Walsh’s town and on his watch, the project became his and his alone.

Next, there was the continued degradation of the physical structures of his city’s 15th Ward – compounded by what, seemingly overnight, had exploded into an overcrowding crisis. The 1950 U.S. census determined there were roughly 5,000 “Negroes” in the Ward. When Walsh took office a decade later, that number had swelled to nearly 13,000 – with no additional housing of consequence added in the interim.

What had happened was that throughout the decade black migrant farm workers from the South had come to Syracuse knowing there was a chance to land full-time factory work – especially in some of the foundries and nearby mills where the nature of the work was so intensely hot and so brutally physical that any man with options wouldn’t do it for long. As hard as it was, such work was steadier and paid better than sunup-to-sundown farm work. As a result, hundreds of migrant African Americans and their families chose not to leave the Ward at the end of the growing season, but to stay on and try to find factory work.

Meanwhile, according to the same 1950 Census, over half the buildings (51%) in the Ward qualified as “dilapidated,” while roughly a third (34%) lacked any running water. And in that decade of the ‘50s, things had only managed to get worse as little or no money got spent to upgrade or even maintain the Ward. By the time Walsh took office, Syracuse’s only Black neighborhood had become, in the parlance of the day, a full-fledged “slum.”

Syracuse's new mayor was presented with one other consideration as well, a funding source that had become available to cities across America, particularly in the industrial Northeast; a funding source designed to tackle the very problem that Syracuse’s 15th Ward represented to countless locals, including Walsh himself.

Urban Renewal, as the program became known, was an outcropping of two Federal Housing Acts (one in 1949, the other in ‘54). And that simple two-word phrase – Urban Renewal – quickly became more than a buzzword or some measure of bureaucratic speak. Like the New Deal, Urban Renewal quickly became verbal shorthand for an ambitious attempt by the government to do something compelling, if not groundbreaking; eradicating, once and for all, the most blighted and cancerous slums in America – while at the same time (at least in theory) modernizing and reenergizing the cities that housed them.

Yet, those two largely innocuous words would develop a sinister meaning for millions of people of color across the U.S., including thousands in Syracuse’s 15th Ward. In fact, when used in tandem those words would become two of the ugliest in the entire English language – at least among those holding the shit-end of a very shitty stick. They'd become code for what many believed Urban Renewal ultimately was – institutional and government-sanctioned racism. In fact, countless residents of the Ward, young and old, soon started referring to Urban Renewal in Syracuse by a phrase more reflective of what they believed it to be: Urban Removal.

As for Walsh, just like the interstate hot potato and the Ward tinderbox, both of which were waiting for him his on very first day in office, Urban Renewal had, from the get-go, little to do with him personally. He was simply the guy who held the job the moment the music stopped and he looked around to find himself standing, alone and chairless. Bill Walsh may have been a mayor with a vision and a plan. He might have been a good, decent and hard-working public servant. But, unfortunately for him, he was also the inheritor of a three-headed monster of epic, if not biblical, proportions.

Not that the man didn't have his eyes open when he took the job. Or know that he was going to have his work cut out for him to clean up, arguably, the most blighted section of any city in New York State (using hundreds of millions that, to make matters worse, carried a use-them-or-lose-them tag). But, just like the I-81 mess and 15th Ward quagmire, Walsh accepted the Urban Renewal baton with a full understanding of its consequences, knowing it would likely define him as both a mayor and a man for the rest of his life.

Yet, even then, Walsh could never have known the extent to which Urban Renewal would emerge as a lightning rod, an era-defining issue in Syracuse, right up there with race, political assassinations and Vietnam, and it would change forever almost everything and everyone swept up in its wake.

A German from the 5th Ward on the East Side, a Republican named Anthony Henninger, who’d held the office of mayor before Walsh, had submitted an application for a grant built around the ambitious (but rough) idea of taking a large portion of the 15th Ward, razing it, and creating what the application described as a “Community Plaza” near the County War Memorial. The plaza would include, among other things, a new City Hall, a pedestrian walkway, a new police station, government offices, below-ground parking, an art museum, shops, restaurants, an inner-city green space, and a reflecting pool that in the winter would double as a skating rink.

Henninger’s modern and slightly futuristic vision for his town was designed to not only clean up its most blighted neighborhood, but draw the kind of people and businesses back to downtown who’d been slowly but steadily staking out their future in the city’s growing ring of suburbs.

But now, for Walsh anyway, Henninger was gone and it was nut-cutting time. For Syracuse’s newest mayor, a proud resident of Tipp Hill, it was time to roll up his sleeves, dig in, and start the process of putting bricks and mortar (along with a wrecking ball or two) to his vision for a re-imagined Syracuse.

Bill Walsh’s time had come.

 

 

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Syracuse had spent much of the 20th Century as a proud and virile exporter. Yet, by the 1960s, the city's exporting had managed to ratchet up to an even higher level and become part of the national conversation. Not only were the GE color televisions made in town selling as quickly as they could be loaded onto skids, but hundreds of thousands of Carrier air conditioners, also made locally, were dramatically altering the American landscape, making possible an explosion of boom towns across a stretch of land in the South many would soon be calling America's Sun Belt.

Meanwhile, in 1963 alone, as millions around the world tuned into the funeral services of martyred President John Kennedy and the recently fallen pontiff, Pope John XXIII, they did so as the former lay in state in a Marsellus casket carefully hand-crafted in Syracuse, while the latter was haloed by candles that just might have come from any one of three ecclesiastical candle makers in the Salt City; Meunch-Kreutzer, Will & Baumer, and the Cathedral Candle Company, all of three of which, as small but internationally renown companies owned and operated by generational Catholic families, would intermittently send a few cases of their finest candles to the Vatican for use there.

Yet, for all the exporting Syracuse did in the ‘60s – a decade that began with such promise under Kennedy, the first-ever Roman Catholic president – that ten year stretch also saw the country's most ambitious exporter of durable goods become infamous for actually importing something. And seemingly overnight, humble and hard-working Syracuse began importing that thing at a head-spinning rate, if not in mind-numbing quantities.

On top of that, the more this particular import flowed into Central New York, and the more it began to manifest itself locally, the more it began to make the bulk of Syracuse's civic, business and religious leaders (not to mention thousands upon thousands of its rank-and-file workers) uncomfortable, if not downright angry.

That import was, oddly enough, left-wing politics – or, to put a much finer point on it, radical left-wing politics.

The mechanism that triggered such an influx of far-left radical thinking into an otherwise conservative, blue-collar and (largely) Republican community was the ongoing demolition of Syracuse's 15th Ward. Because once the systematic plowing under of that largely Black neighborhood reached fever-pitch, and once the razing of so many African American homes came to the attention of prominent civil rights leaders across the country, many of those self-same leaders began to take a long hard look at what was really happening in the Salt City.

What they found was not just the destruction of hundreds of family homes, or the wanton displacement of thousands of law-abiding American citizens – people who lacked the clout to do anything about their situation – they found the apparent lack of any cogent or workable plan for relocating them.

The issue for activists, was not about a single decaying neighborhood in a Rust Belt town, however booming, or the building of yet one more highway between Points A and B. It was about something far more important. It was about people. It was about individual rights. It was about human dignity. And, at least for some, it was about the exploitation of the most vulnerable by those ostensibly charged with protecting them.

The sanctioned (and, to be fair, often tone-deaf) razing of Syracuse’s 15th Ward, not to mention the plowing under of hundreds of African American homes, restaurants, clubs, shops and churches, might have begun with the best of intentions, but any goodwill that may have existed seemed to dissipate the moment the work crews showed up and began breaking ground on the all-new Interstate 81.

Because that’s when Urban Renewal, at least for many in the Ward, went from something more or less benign to something predatory, if not full-on evil. That’s when the vast majority of African Americans started feeling not just inconsequential to their mayor, but betrayed by him.

That’s also when, for many in town, including the vast majority of the Ward, the name Bill Walsh became virtually synonymous with Urban Renewal.

Part of the animus toward Urban Renewal stemmed from the fact that, even though it gave the appearance of being reasoned and logical in terms of which buildings would be spared and which would be demolished, in the end it was neither.

One Jewish merchant, for example, a hardware store owner, was elated to learn his shop would be spared the wrecking ball. But the man’s joy quickly faded when he discovered that every home on the block on which his shop was located – the homes of all his customers, in other words – would not be. With no customers nearby, the man soon went out of business.

One of the main reasons so little reason or logic seemed to be at play in the execution of Urban Renewal in Syracuse was because the project quickly became less about creating the modernized and integrated city that Walsh had hoped for, or improving the living conditions of his poorest constituents. Instead, it became about something else altogether; something bigger than he or any other local official.

Certainly, the Ward under Mayor Walsh remained desperately in need of modernization, if not a complete overhaul. And, certainly, for all its tight-knit hominess, it represented a part of the city whose spine continued to rot from years of neglect. Yet, when all was said and done, the systematic razing of Syracuse’s one and only Black neighborhood turned out to be, above all, about one thing: federal officials using whatever means necessary, including the sweeping power of eminent domain, to acquire the land they desperately needed to connect the two rapidly converging halves of the same interstate highway; two halves that continued to chew up land and bear down relentlessly on Walsh and his city from points north and south.

In the urban lingo of the day, a “Tenderloin District” was a part of any city given to widespread political corruption. Reportedly, the term arose because one especially dirty cop in San Francisco in the 19th Century, after having been promoted to top dog in a notoriously corrupt precinct, said something to the effect he was looking forward to finally being the guy into whose pockets the money flowed. “I’ve been eating ground chuck long enough,” he is said to have told a colleague. “Now, I get to eat tenderloin.”

In Syracuse, however, that euphemism carried a slightly different connotation. The Ward was, indeed, known as the Tenderloin District – at least by a handful of Syracuse’s most cynical public officials, reporters and bureaucrats. But that had little to do with police corruption. In their case, it was all about political muscle.

To such cynics, the 15th Ward was their city’s Tenderloin District during the debate over where to put Interstate 81 because it was the one neighborhood in town that had “little fat and no muscle,” and would offer virtually no resistance during the land-grab phase of the project. As a result, even though some plans proposed the interstate be cut through the muck land east of town, in the end it was determined to continue to follow U.S. Route 11 (as engineers had done to the north and south) and carve out a path for the all-new highway directly through the heart of the city.

Like just about everything else during his administration, the discussion about where I-81 should go (and how to integrate it into the city) had begun long before Bill Walsh even decided to run for mayor. Like almost every other hot button issue under him, the origins of the project mattered little to the men and women who called Syracuse home. What mattered was how their current mayor was going to deal with it.

Which leads us back to the radical outsiders who started showing up on Syracuse’s doorstep early in the new mayor's tenure.

As homes in the Ward started to come down by the handful, and African American families began getting displaced, the situation drew attention from people far beyond the largely provincial Syracuse media.

What’s more, this wanton displacement – and the hue and cry it triggered – was exacerbated by the fact few Ward residents were actual property owners, even the shopkeepers. By far, the vast majority of those inside the Ward's well-defined limits were tenants, often without a lease and many times on a month-to-month agreement. So, while there was, indeed, compensation attached to the razing of the Ward's many residential structures, it was directed to the absentee owners of them, not to the men, women and children who actually inhabited them.

The nation’s Fair Housing Act, which would make housing discrimination illegal, would not become law until 1968. So in the years leading up to that historic piece of legislation – years during which Urban Renewal uprooted hundreds of thousands of inner city families and cast them adrift – housing discrimination was not merely legal, it was quietly seen as “good business.” Banks and lending institutions frequently practiced what they referred to internally as redlining, in which certain areas of certain cities would be singled out, often on the basis of racial makeup, and loans and mortgages would be denied on all properties therein.

In Syracuse’s case, though, it wasn’t so much the sanctioned or organizational discrimination that had the greatest impact. It was the fuzzier, murkier kind, the kind that can crawl inside a man’s heart, take root and, in time, crush his spirit.

During the Ward's demolition, Marshall Nelson, for example, tried to relocate his family three times, and three times was told by a man over the phone that a house was available.  Yet when he showed up to look at the property, all three times he was informed it was no longer available.

Melvin and Dolores Morgan, meanwhile, parents of ten kids whose house had accidentally burned down during that same demolition, had an agreement to buy a house on the North Side, and had even given the seller a down payment. They were delighted, since at that point they’d visited seven other homes with cash in hand, only to be told each time that the house was no longer for sale. But the couple’s delight didn't last. The seller to whom they’d given their down payment, a white man, reconsidered after talking to a few of his neighbors who complained bitterly that their property value would plummet if he let a family of “niggers” buy his house.

Joe Reddick’s mother, Dorothy, who was barely making rent as it was, looked at almost two dozen apartments when she first learned her building was being targeted for demolition. Yet, in not one of those visits did she find a single landlord willing to rent to a Negro woman with kids and a sometimes-husband. Fortunately, around that time, Dorothy had a chance encounter with the ex-Nat and eventual Hall of Famer Dolph Schayes, who knew of her son through his on-court exploits. Schayes (who’d invested heavily in rental property after retiring from the NBA) said not to worry, he had a house on State Street near St. Anthony’s he’d rent to her.

While the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that funded the building of Interstate 81 and other freeways in cities across the country made provisions for the removal of any buildings that planners determined must be razed, not a single dollar had been set aside for the relocation of those living in those buildings. All such funds had to come from local city budgets, which in Syracuse’s case was a textbook example of supply drowning in a sea of demand. There was simply no money in the budget for such an ambitious project. Each displaced family, therefore, received stipends as low as $40 per family, barely enough to cover the cost of boxes and tape, let alone other expenses. New York Senator Jacob Javits eventually authored a funding bill to address the Highway Act’s most unintended consequence, but for many in the Ward its passage proved to be too little too late.

A few displaced families fared better, but they were among the 15th Ward’s handful of actual homeowners. Viola Fields, for example, took the money the Urban Renewal Corporation gave her for her well-maintained but soon-to-be-razed home on Renwick Place and bought herself the same style house near St. Lucy’s, where the decade prior her son Milt and his friend Ormie Spencer had been Parochial League stars. In fact, Viola bought a place just a few doors down from the Leo family, whose son Patsy – a white Italian boy – had also been a star for St. Lucy’s.

Though technically a “white” neighborhood, the area in which Fields bought near St. Lucy’s was anything but a showcase enclave. To the contrary, the Lower West End was low-lying bottom land near Onondaga Creek, a humble, working class cluster of small frame houses featuring hundreds of shanty Irish families, along with dozens of Italian and Slavic ones. As a result, there was not nearly the uproar over the sudden presence of a family of “Negroes” that there might have been had Viola tried to buy into one of Syracuse’s more upscale parishes.

The simple fact was that the housing crisis ignited by Urban Renewal – a crisis that subsequently exploded with the rash of demolitions that public officials sanctioned to appease the gods of the interstate highway – had grown into a full-scale epidemic. And that epidemic began drawing more and more unwanted attention as interested parties outside the city began standing up and taking notice.

As part of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 War on Poverty, an entity calling itself the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was established to administer the ambitious attempt by the feds to help millions of Americans rise above the poverty gripping them. A major function of the OEO was the approval and funding of hundreds of grassroots initiatives from Maine to California, initiatives developed by local organizations and, often, the communities themselves.

An essential component of Johnson’s self-proclaimed “war” was a bold new theory called, “maximum feasible participation,” built on the idea that the more you engage the poor in the political process and the more they can play active roles in the solving of their own problems, the more likely workable solutions can be found.

One day, a young S.U. professor named Warren Haggstrom applied for (and received) a $300,000 grant from the OEO, which he then used to created the Syracuse University Community Action Training Center (CATC). The otherwise meek-sounding name masked a larger, more ambitious goal of Haggstrom’s; to engender upheaval in Syracuse’s social order by planting and nurturing the seeds of community activism in the city's poorest areas – including, of course, its 15th Ward.

Haggstrom had been born on a small farm in Minnesota, and his family had lost everything during the Depression. For that reason, the Haggstroms were forced to live as migrant workers for years, traveling the U.S., planting, tending to and picking crops for poverty wages. He was, therefore, a man who’d come by his socialist leanings the hard way, and who'd spend the rest of his days living in the poorest neighborhood of whatever city he called home, while trying to organize his neighbors to rise up and be counted. In fact, following his death years later, an appreciation of his life’s work authored by three UCLA colleagues pointed out that Haggstrom had developed a lifelong reputation for being a "serial disturber of the peace,” a description they said he'd embraced with open arms.

One of the first things Haggstrom did upon receiving his grant in Syracuse was to take a big chunk of the money and secure the services of a notorious Chicago activist and union organizer named Saul Alinsky. Haggstrom hired Alinsky to come to the Salt City to conduct a series of grassroots seminars. Some thirty years prior, Alinsky had organized the very first community group in the U.S., a group calling itself the Back of the Yards that went toe-to-toe with some of the most powerful men in Chicago over the deplorable conditions in and around the Union Stockyards. In Chicago, Alinsky also managed to stare down the mighty Daley Machine without so much as blinking.

The legendary Cesar Chavez had , likewise, cut his teeth under Alinsky, then later utilized his methods to organize the migrant farm workers in California.

What's more, earlier that decade, Alinsky successfully lit a fire under the rank and file at the massive Kodak plant in nearby Rochester.

Given his track record for bringing about life-altering social change, by the 1960’s many activists had begun using Alinsky’s tactics for organizing workers and applying them to the men and women in the most downtrodden slums in America.

In a few short years, in fact, Alinsky would literally write the book on radical activism in the 20th Century. His Rules for Radicals: a Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, published in 1971, would serve as a virtual handbook for the far left in America for decades.

Alinsky, as a rule, hated everything about LBJ's War on Poverty, especially the notion that social workers, charities and the like were needed to help “save” America's poor, particularly its poor Blacks.  Such people, he believed, if given sufficient resources and opportunities, would be perfectly capable of rising up and improving their own lots in life.

So when he arrived in Syracuse in the fall of 1964, he did so not trying to unite or harmonize the city, but with a desire to turn it on its ear. His targets included not just the obvious ones like Mayor Bill Walsh, but a few under-the-radar ones like Charlie Brady, the so-called Saint of Syracuse, whose missionary work in the Ward, however well-intentioned, he viewed as patronizing and even borderline racist.

Alinsky’s ideas resonated with more than a few locals, both Black and white. And because they did, and because he’d proven so conspicuously successful elsewhere, it wasn’t long before pickets and protests inspired by his teachings became the order of the day. And no group was any more open to newsworthy and combustible acts of civil disobedience than George Wiley’s local chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality.

CORE, which would soon make a name for itself by orchestrating its now-famous “Freedom Rides” across Georgia and Alabama, was an organization conceived by individuals schooled in the art of rough, bare-knuckled union negotiations, and it was one whose strength was its deeply committed membership and its ever-expanding network of whip-smart, street-level activists.

Members of CORE regularly met at Wiley’s house in the Ward to brainstorm and plan. During the hiring protest at Niagara Mohawk, for example, CORE members chained themselves to a large crane across from the company’s main offices. It made for great television, which had been the exact thing they'd planned and hoped for.

CORE regularly picketed the home of Eugene Williams, the 15th Ward’s lone representative on the Onondaga County Board of Supervisors, and its lone voice in any governing body. Williams was an African American who, like Walsh (and just about every other local official of consequence), was a lifelong moderate Republican.

He had believed the experts when they told him Urban Renewal would be good for the Ward and its people. Yet every time he tried to address his constituents, or attempted to make the case for Urban Renewal, at the prodding of some well-placed agitators (often S.U. students recruited by Wiley himself), he’d be booed unmercifully and barraged with epithets, not the least of which were jeers about him being an “Uncle Tom” or a "puppet" for Walsh.

Many students and residents of the Ward, under the guidance and support of Wiley, regularly tied themselves to buildings targeted for the wrecking ball, or laid themselves in front of bulldozers until they were arrested and carted off to jail, all the while chanting anti-fascist and anti-racist slogans. In one instance, Roger Knapp, an S.U. grad student and CORE volunteer, took a page right out of the Saul Alinsky handbook and went on a prolonged and headlines-grabbing hunger strike in support of the Ward’s many displaced residents.

One other African American, an otherwise quiet and unassuming twenty-something Ward resident, who doubled as the organist at the A.M.E. Zion Church, was arrested for protesting on behalf of CORE. In an unprecedented move for a local religious leader, the church’s pastor – a fiery orator and divinely righteous man named Emory Proctor, who knew Brady well and who'd traveled with him to Selma to march alongside Dr. King – got up in front of his congregation one Sunday morning and bellowed out his support for his well-mannered, baby-faced organist ("a 'child of God,'" he called the young man, "who each week leads us in singing the praises of His son, our Lord Jesus"). At the same time, Proctor took it upon himself to castigate Walsh for his treatment of the Negroes under his watch. Emory Proctor, in other words, publicly sided with a Black law-breaker over the white officers who’d arrested him; a good boy who, in his mind, did nothing more than exercise his right as an American citizen.

But things didn’t stop there. Because so many of his students were engaged in CORE protests, Syracuse University Chancellor John Corbally took the bold step of issuing a blanket decree that, from that point forward, any S.U. student arrested for engaging in an Urban Renewal protest over the razing of the 15th Ward would immediately be suspended. His decision outraged many, both locally and beyond, who saw the right to protest as basic first-amendment stuff.

Corbally’s dictate put even more unwanted focus on an otherwise peaceful little Central New York city. In fact, his decree eventually caught the eye of an organization viewed by many in the Salt City, even moderates, as a pox on the landscape, the American Civil Liberties Union.  The ACLU took Corbally’s suspend-first/ask-questions-later decree as a categorical denial of a student’s first amendment rights and, before you could say “unconstitutional,” had a team on a plane and headed toward the Salt City armed to the teeth and ready to rumble.

Given the advantage of time and perspective, those dark and uncertain days – when a veritable alphabet soup of special interests seemed to descend upon City Hall almost daily, from the largest federal bureaucracy to the smallest neighborhood watch group – must have made poor Walsh’s head spin. During his eight-year run as Syracuse mayor, the number of organizations that regularly wanted to meet with him about the local rollout of Urban Renewal and Interstate 81 ranged from giants like HUD, the NAACP, the OEO and the New York State Department of Transportation to tiny, issue-and-neighborhood-specific groups with quaint (and sometimes ominous) sounding names like the Near East Side Development Plan, the South Side Homeowners Association, the People’s War Council Against Poverty and, of course, Warren Haggstrom’s Community Action Training Center.

And all those laser-focused special (or single) interest groups, with their dozens of specific (and often conflicting) agendas, pulled Bill Walsh in what seemed like a hundred different directions, keeping Syracuse's good-hearted and otherwise well-intentioned chief executive as twisted and tied into knots as the Gumby and Pokey toys that Santa had left under the tree last Christmas.

 

 

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One day, Jimmy Walsh, who was maybe eight at the time, was with some friends near his home on Tipp Hill, walking up Schulyer Street, when they happened upon two young Polish boys from the neighborhood, Jackie and Danny Kasunic. While the two Poles knew the Walsh family some, they certainly didn't know them well. After all, Bill Walsh was still four years away from being elected mayor.

The Irish kids with Jimmy took undue exception to the Kasunics’ presence in their mostly Irish neighborhood and started taunting them, calling the two, among other things, “dumb Polacks.”

Though he knew Jackie and Danny Kasunic slightly, and now and then might offer some passing nod of recognition, like countless schoolboys over the years, he somehow managed to find himself caught in the undertow of mob mentality and soon joined in the taunting.

Walsh and his St. Pat’s buddies were relentless. One of the two Kasunics, who was around Jimmy’s age, turned abruptly and started walking home, briskly at first, but then quicker and quicker until he was in a full-blown sprint, followed closely by his little brother, who was struggling to catch up even as all those anti-Polish slurs hung in the air behind him.

Little Jimmy Walsh didn't give the moment another thought until his father got home that evening from a long day’s work and the phone on the kitchen wall rang. On the other end was Mr. Kasunic. The two fathers talked for the longest time, with Jimmy's father doing more listening than talking. The head of the Walsh clan kept his eyes cast down and his brow furled, and every once in a while he’d simply interject a noticeably subdued “Uh-huh.”

Then, with his wife staring at her husband in silence, the tips of the fingers on her right hand gently resting upon her lips, Bill Walsh finally said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Kasunic. I truly am. Thank you for letting me know. Yes. My wife and I deeply appreciate your telling us, and we’re very sorry for what your boys were forced to endure. Goodbye, and again, thank you very much.”

After hanging up the phone, Bill Walsh marched his second oldest to the basement, lectured him with fire in his eyes, and then gave the boy the granddaddy of all over-the-knee spankings. Jimmy Walsh had only been spanked a handful of times before, but none of them would ever measure up to the spanking he got that evening. It was a star-spangled beauty and, because of it, it was all little Jimmy could do to fight back the tears.

The mayor's son had long known there were any number of names he should never call a Black boy or girl at the risk incurring his father's wrath. But until that very night, and until he felt every thwack of the old man's hand on his backside, little Jimmy Walsh had never realized those rules also applied to Polish people – and, apparently, every other ethnic group.

After the spanking, Bill Walsh instructed his son to march over the Kasunics, knock on their door, and apologize to Jackie and Danny for what he’d said and done.

Mr. Kasunic, answered the door and invited Jimmy in, telling him to take a seat. Jimmy demurred and said he’d rather stand, too ashamed to admit his rear end still stung like the dickens.  To their credit, both Jackie and Danny, along with their parents, accepted Jimmy’s apology and Mrs. Kasunic thanked him for being brave enough to come over and own up to what he'd done. Mr. Kasunic, in turn, instructed his two sons to get up, walk over and shake Jimmy's hand.

The moment – both Jimmy's willingness to accept blame for his actions and the Kasunics’ grace in offering him their forgiveness – impacted Jim Walsh deeply and changed his relationship, not just with his Polish neighbors, but with his own sense of responsibility. In short order, Jackie, Danny and Jimmy became pretty good friends, played a few games of Horse and One-on-One in the Kasunic family driveway and, in winter, often took their sleds and flying saucers up to Burnet Park and rode the snow for hours until it was time for dinner.

As a government employee and social worker, Bill Walsh may or may not have had a good day that Thursday in the fall of 1956. No one will ever know for sure. But as a father and teacher, it's fair to say he had an exceptional one.

A number of times, especially in his early days in the public sector, the future mayor of Syracuse had come home and vented over family dinner about the attitude of at least a few of his co-workers toward a number of their “Negro” clients. It was not a level of anger equal to what he’d flashed the day of the now-notorious Kasunic affair, but it was not insignificant either.

His oldest son, Billy, remembered years later that one time his dad come home especially rankled by his co-workers’ continued insistence on referring to the Ward as the “Tenderloin District” for its lack of political muscle. After all, he’d cut his teeth in the Ward, and in the process developed a gentle affection, if not an abiding respect for a number of people he'd gotten to know there – even if, over the years, he began to view their neighborhood as a liability to his city's future.

Unfortunately for Bill Walsh, the man, his politics overshadowed just about everything else about him. For many, particularly countless African Americans in the Ward, he was not Bill Walsh, Tipp Hill homeowner, devoted husband, father, and St. Pat’s communicant. He was Mayor Walsh, the very embodiment of Urban Renewal, and the man seemingly hell-bent on taking people's homes from them and reducing their one-of-a-kind neighborhood to so many piles of smoking rubble.

Regardless of whatever else he might have been, regardless of what he really believed or held dear, the more Mayor Bill Walsh railed against CORE, the ACLU, and even, the NAACP, the more he dug in his heels and resisted their agitation and demonizing tactics, the deeper such perceptions grew. And the deeper they grew, the more convinced people in the Ward became that they were dead right about their mayor and that privileged white agenda of his.

 

 

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