Nighttime pictures of I-81

Friday Follow

If you do one thing today, you should probably start following Future Syracuse Committee on tumblr (and on twitter as well @futuresyracuse), which is a wonderfully poignant look at remembering the group of political, business, and community leaders that originally fought against railroad elevation in Syracuse during the early part of the 20th century.

It's striking to see the resemblances with what these leaders were thinking at the time to the relationship that we have now between the city and its elevated highways (specifically the future of I-81).

"Elevation within the city would encumber Syracuse with the poorest and worst planned railroad plant of all the cities in this state, and one of the worst in the country. Our city would then have these barriers, these embankments, north, south, east and west. What use of any more city planning after such a series of walls are built? All we need is a moat alongside to complete our medievalism. This is the era of city planning. For their own comfort, and because of the desire to favorably impress strangers, people of various communities strive to make their cities more beautiful. Any factor which militates against this is sure to be tabooed by the forward looking element in every community." - Louis Will (former mayor of Syracuse), Syracuse Journal, March 14, 1923

Syracuse's Elevated Highways in Pictures

Here are some recent pictures of the elevated portions of I-81 and I-690. Having lived next to them for about 6 years now, I've walked underneath them many times, but had never walked the entire length of I-81 through Downtown before. Some opinions and observations from the experience...

It's huge. The amount of space that the elevated portions take up both horizontally and vertically is massive.

Homelessness is a real problem at the intersection near Erie Boulevard and Townsend.

There's almost no on-street parking around the highways and almost all of the surface lots are privately owned or owned by the NYSDOT.

It's loud. This is an uneducated guess, but I'd go out on the limb to say that the noise level hovers around 70 to 80 decibels; or the amount of volume that comes from a vacuum cleaner. In all seriousness, it would be interesting to see what the exact decibel levels are and how much exposure someone would need for potential ear damage generated by these highways.

I did not feel safe walking underneath the elevated portions; most specifically when crosswalks were poorly marked, but also in terms of personal safety from of the amount of desolation and isolation that they encourage.

There's no sidewalk on the western side of I-81 between Harrison and Adams streets, so anyone living in the Pioneer Homes who needs to walk north, has to walk on a dirt path (which you can actually see on Google Maps).

On to the pictures...

Food for thought on I-81

This is short, SimCity-ish video of Rio de Janeiro's plans to transform its entire waterfront district in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. The city is planning to demolish its elevated highway, construct an underground tunnel (totaling about 0.9 miles in length), and rebuild its streetscape along the old highway. Hat tip to The Atlantic Cities.

I can't say I like all of the ideas in this video (especially the parts that hint of neighborhood gentrification), but it's interesting to see what they might be doing there and compare that to what kind of effect those types of things could have on a region like Central New York; especially considering that an underground tunnel idea has been floated before, the possibility of bringing a real park to Downtown Syracuse, and what future changes to I-81 could have on I-690.