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The State Tower Building excites the eye and the imagination. Notice the three levels of ever-lighter bricks at your eye travels upward.


Fancy and Groucho, Syracuse's pair of peregrine falcons, successfully raise a brood every spring at the top of this urban cliff. USA Datanet, major tenant of the building, helps support the annual project including a live cam which is well worth bookmarking:


http://www.wvtc.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=555


Fancy starts investigating the box by late March and lays around 4 eggs by early April. As they incubate Groucho plays a major role, and they both feed and teach the eyeses to fly and hunt.  It is an exciting time in the skies over Syracuse.


Kodak in Rochester plays a similar role for their pair, and their watchers. 

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Proposed in 1808 to connect the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal wasn't completed until 1825, nearly two decades after Lewis and Clark completed Voyage of Discovery.  Thomas Jefferson thought the canal couldn't be built. Long before the Gateway Arch, the Erie Canal was called Gateway to the West.

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The Syracuse zoo cannot hope to hold a candle to the St. Louis Zoo, 

and I will miss the StL zoo. Still, the Syracuse zoo has a wonderful 

collection of cold climate mammals who really come to life 

in the winter, including caribou, reindeer, markhors, 

Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, red pandas, snow leopards, 

wolves both gray and red, Eurasian lynx, Amur tigers, 

and Humboldt penguins.

Very few people appreciate the nature of this strong collection 

of cold weather animals.

  

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The height of Art Deco design, 

the Syracuse landmark Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. building 

was completed in 1932 in the middle of the Depression. 

Melvin L. King of Syracuse was the architect, 

with consulting architects Bley & Lyman of Buffalo.  

Today it is the regional headquarters of National Grid. 

After a huge renovation in the 1980s, the lights were all brought back to life, 

so that now the tower lights give us infinite possibilities for color combinations 

using helium-filled tubes, and the colors can be set to rotate on timers. 

It is still as wondrous a building as it was when it was built.

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The view from our house east toward Syracuse University.

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Syracuse sits on Iroquois homeland.  The Onondagas are and always have been box lacrosse champions. Before they built a modern arena for lacrosse and ice hockey, the Redhawks played outdoors at a field at the Onondaga Nation.  I like this portrait painted on the wall of the refreshment stand. I highly recommend a New Yorker article published in 1998 by John Seabrook about the Onondagas and box lacrosse. John Seabrook, The Sporting Scene, “The Gathering of the Tribes,” The New Yorker, September 7, 1998, p. 30 

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The famous traffic light on Tipperary Hill!

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Our gardens!  There are built-in boxes on the back deck, and hens-and-chicks gone wild!

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Onondaga Creek:  Syracuse's River des Peres.  In St. Louis, the River des Peres is utterly channelized as it flows through the city, and so is Onondaga Creek.  And both become channels for an overflow mixture of sewage backup and street run-off when it rains a lot. Poor planning, and now extremely expensive to remedy.


How clear it is flowing right now!  We have run the creek in our canoe, and participated in the annual creek cleanup.  You would not believe how much stuff ends up in the creek...bikes, teevees, baby strollers, tires, pipe, wallets.  

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Crows!  There are tens of thousands of crows here, and I am crazy about them. They are smart, they talk, they have family ties, they clean up the roadsides, and more, much more.


Back in Syracuse for the week, this time with a Syracuse daily photo blog in mind, I am finding so much old familiar stuff that jumps out at me in a different way as subject matter for the blog.


Thinking in terms of a daily photo blog has been and will continue to be a great and wonderful challenge.


Now for a name!

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Coffee!  Freedom of Espresso has a good history.  Originally named Federal Espresso, soon FedEx or actually Federal Express before they rebranded their name, thought this little coffee shop was competing and went to court. The big guys had more money and so then, at least for a time, the name might have been ExFederal Espresso. Big guys nixed that too. Freedom of Espresso finally emerged, grew to 4 locations and brews great coffee.

I drove 900 miles to Syracuse, from whence we came to St. Louis last year, and to whence we return at the end of this year, to work on the house we kept and are so happy to be able to go back to. It is a week of reminders of why we like upstate NY.

Syracuse

our zone 5 garden