We're throwing our first events. Come claim your spot as a founding member.
All it takes is showing up and helping us support local businesses. We're rolling out gatherings over the next few months, and everyone who comes to these early ones is a founding member, here from the start, with a say in what we build next.
It kicks off with a private Sunday afternoon downtown at Talking Cursive Brewing. They're normally closed Sundays, so they're opening up just for us.
We're doing it the way we do everything here. Ask you first, then build around your answer. So this is a real vote, not a "we already picked" formality:
Click the August Sunday that works best. One click, done.
More than one works for you? Click "any of these" so we know you're flexible.
Not your scene, or downtown's a haul? There's a button for those too. We'd rather hear it, so we can plan something for you soon.
If enough of you want in on different afternoons, we'll add a second date, maybe a third.
One heads up: it'll be ticketed, but that's not a cover charge. Your ticket goes toward food and drinks, and we'll share exactly what's included soon.
Nothing to pay today. Just tell us what works for you, and we'll build around it.
Which Sunday should we make it?
The heat is back. Real-feel temperatures are pushing 105 today, with a heat advisory in effect until 8 PM, and the city's public pools are open. You can follow Syracuse City Parks and Rec on Instagram for up-to-date information on the pools.
The big draw this week is the Syracuse Nationals, the Northeast's largest car show: 8,000 cars out at the Fairgrounds, Thursday through Saturday.
One more thing worth noting. Andrew Lunetta, who has spent a decade building small permanent homes for people coming out of homelessness in Syracuse, was just named a CNN Hero. He is also this week's Spotlight. Here's the week.
TL;DR:
The Lineup: Syracuse Nationals brings 8,000 cars to the Fairgrounds Thursday through Saturday, Party in the Square goes 80s on Friday, and the World Cup final gets an outdoor screen at Everson Plaza on Sunday.
Live Music: Harmonic Dirt at the Whiskey Coop (Wed), a stacked week at The 443 (Longley Fri, Janiva Magness Sat), a Foo Fighters tribute at the Westcott (Sat), and 311 & Dirty Heads at the amphitheater (Sun).
The Tab: The Mizpah, a self-pour wine bar and event space in a restored 1914 gothic church tower on Columbus Circle, opens to the public Saturday — and SCC readers got the first look last weekend.
The Spotlight: Andrew Lunetta, the new CNN Hero behind A Tiny Home for Good, on why his kind of landlord can house the people the private market can't.
The Build: Phase 2 of the East Adams rebuild — about 125 affordable senior apartments — is getting under way on the ground the 15th Ward lost 60 years ago.
The Block: Solvay and Westvale — a company town, from the Tyrol Club and Eva's Polish kitchen to Singers karaoke and a Ukrainian deli in Westvale Plaza.
The Scoreboard: Mets host the Buffalo Bisons all weekend, with First Responders fireworks Friday and Star Wars night Saturday.
…and more!
THE LINEUP
Events this week — what's on, where, and how to get in.
Featured Event
Syracuse Nationals — New York State Fairgrounds, 581 State Fair Blvd Thursday–Saturday, July 16–18, 8 AM daily (Thu until 9 PM, Fri/Sat until 6 PM). From about $24 per adult per day, kids 12 and under free, $15 parking. Tickets
Billed as the largest car show in the Northeast, the Nationals fill the Fairgrounds with 8,000-plus cars, 400 vendors, a swap meet, live music, and this year a lineup of movie cars including the Back to the Future DeLorean and the Ghostbusters Ecto-1.
This Week
Friday, July 17
Party in the Square: 80s Night — Clinton Square, Friday July 17, 6 PM. Free outdoor concert with 80s cover band Pop-Rox. Details
Saturday, July 18
Festival of Orature — Clinton Square, Saturday July 18, 11 AM–7:30 PM. Free spoken-word festival downtown. Details
Lipe Art Park Art Extravaganza — Lipe Art Park, 1003 W Fayette St, Saturday July 18, 11 AM–4 PM. Free art unveiling at the near West Side sculpture park. Details
Lantern Walk around Round Lake — Green Lakes State Park, Fayetteville, Saturday July 18, 8:30 PM. Free after-dark walk: make a candle lantern and hike the Round Lake shore by candlelight (meet at the Reserve Shelter ballfield). Details
Sunday, July 19
FIFA World Cup Final Watch Party — Everson Plaza, 401 Harrison St, Sunday July 19. Free, on an outdoor screen in front of the museum. Details
Ted & Amy's 4th Annual Clambake — Burritt Motors Pavilion, Liverpool, Sunday July 19, 1–5 PM. Clams, cold drinks, and live music from The Mid Daze; $75 general, $25 kids 12 & under. Tickets
Live Music
Wednesday, July 15
Harmonic Dirt & Friends — The Whiskey Coop, 120 Walton St, Wednesday July 15, 7 PM. Roots and jam-rooted local band in an Armory Square listening spot. Details
Bob Halligan Jr — The 443 Social Club, 443 Burnet Ave, Wednesday July 15, 7 PM. Longtime Syracuse songwriter (he wrote for Judas Priest and KISS) in a 75-seat room. Tickets
Thursday, July 16
RADO with Glass Pony — Funk 'n Waffles, 307 S Clinton St, Thursday July 16, 8 PM. Local rock double bill. Tickets
Friday, July 17
Liz Longley — The 443 Social Club, Friday July 17, 7 PM. Nashville-based singer-songwriter, folk-pop. Tickets
The Nicksons — The Fitz, 321 S Salina St, Friday July 17, 8:30 PM. Free, no cover. Local band in the downtown jazz-and-more room. Details
Saturday, July 18
Janiva Magness — The 443 Social Club, Saturday July 18, 7 PM. Blues Hall of Fame vocalist, one of the genre's most awarded singers. Tickets
Back & Forth: Foo Fighters Tribute — The Westcott Theater, 524 Westcott St, Saturday July 18, doors 5 PM, show 6 PM. Dinner-and-a-show tribute night. Tickets
Michael Centore — Beak & Skiff 1911 Tasting Room, 2708 Lords Hill Rd, Lafayette, Saturday July 18, 2 PM. Free live music with the cider tasting. Details
Sunday, July 19
311 & Dirty Heads — Empower FCU Amphitheater, 490 Restoration Way, Sunday July 19, 5:30 PM. The So Glad You Made It Tour, two reggae-rock headliners, with Ocean Alley and ROME. Tickets
Coming Soon: Phish (Tue, July 21) at the amphitheater, one night only. Then the last-weekend-of-July festival wave: Syracuse Arts & Crafts Festival (July 24–26) at Columbus Circle, the Syracuse Ukrainian Festival (July 24–25) on Tipp Hill, St. Mary's Egyptian Festival (July 24–26) in North Syracuse, and the Skaneateles Antique & Classic Boat Show (July 24–26) on the waterfront. Plus Boeheim's Army in the TBT at the Upstate Medical Arena around July 23–24.
That’s just the short list
We track way more than we can squeeze into The Lineup. Refer 2 friends to the Club, and the full calendar unlocks:
THE TAB
This week in CNY food — what's opening, closing, and on the way.
The Mizpah — 350 Montgomery St., Columbus Circle Public opening Saturday, July 18
Stunning view inside The Mizpah
Last weekend we sent you something we were genuinely excited about, a first look at The Mizpah before it opened to the public. This Saturday, it opens to everyone. It's a self-pour wine bar and event space inside the old First Baptist Church on Columbus Circle: the castle-like 1914 gothic tower, stained glass and all, a downtown landmark that sat mostly empty for years and is finally getting its due.
Half the fun is the format: you pour your own wine and order food at the kiosks, then settle into what might be the most striking room downtown. It's the work of Mike Greene, who also runs Harvey's Garden and who kept the old stonework and stained glass intact. Go see the inside.
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THE SPOTLIGHT
A deeper look at one person, place, or project in Syracuse.
The Landlord Who Isn't in It for the Rent
This month, CNN named Andrew Lunetta a Hero. We sat down with him a few weeks before the call came. Here's what he told us.
Andrew Lunetta is a landlord whose business isn't built to depend on the rent. "Our livelihood depends on the livelihood of our tenants," he says. He calls it the secret sauce. Because rent isn't what keeps A Tiny Home for Good running, he can forgive a hard month and skip the adversarial relationship many landlords live inside.
A Tiny Home for Good builds, owns, and operates small, permanent homes around Syracuse and rents them to people coming out of homelessness. These are real houses, not tiny homes on wheels, most around 300 square feet. Rent is whatever a tenant can actually pay, often under $400 a month, with no cap on how long they stay.
One of the first units built by A Tiny Home For Good on Rose Ave
He grew up half in Syracuse and half outside Boston, did a gap year with AmeriCorps in Cleveland, and came back for Le Moyne. His first week of college, he signed up to make sandwiches for a downtown men's shelter, and he never really left.
What got him were the men nobody else saw, "forgotten men who have been homeless for a long time, who we've kind of just written off." By sophomore year, the shelter had him on overnight shifts, and the pattern stuck: the system saved lives at night but kept sending the same men back.
He's also the first to push back on his own press. Tiny homes are not the entire answer to homelessness, he says: "If someone moves into one of our tiny homes, that doesn't automatically mean that homelessness is solved." The building is the easy part; the case management and the relationship after move-in are what end it. And he won't pin the crisis on bad landlords either: there are good ones, he says, but no private landlord has "the capability" to take on the tenants his organization does.
Lunetta reads the city's housing news as closely as anyone. He figures plenty of the city's worst rentals are "owned by people who don't live here," and that the Syracuse building boom hasn't reached his tenants at all.
His fix for homelessness runs against the usual instinct to solve it with one big complex. Spread the homes across neighborhoods instead, he says, slower and more expensive, but after a decade, he knows it is one way that works.
He has 22 more homes funded across 4 sites, every one built to run at a loss, because "it's impossible to rent for $400 not operating at a loss." The one he brings up himself is Dolphus. His very first tenant recently marked 10 years housed, after 22 years without a stable address, and now works on staff. "He's the exact kind of person we're here for," Lunetta says, "and our best marker of success."
A Tiny Home for Good runs on volunteers, grants, and donations. Sign up for a build day or give at atinyhomeforgood.org.
THE BUILD
Construction and development around the city, in plain English.
East Adams, Phase 2
The 15th Ward was the heart of Syracuse's Black community until urban renewal and the building of I-81 razed it in the 1960s, displacing more than 1,200 families. The plan to rebuild the neighborhood is now into its second phase.
Phase 2 of the East Adams redevelopment is about 125 affordable apartments for seniors — a four-story elevator building with community space on the ground floor, going up at South State and Burt streets. The lot sat vacant and contaminated for years; crews spent the winter cleaning petroleum, lead, and PAH-tainted soil off a $7 million remediation before anything could rise. Financing closed in December, at north of $100 million, and construction is getting underway now, with completion expected in 2027.
It is one piece of an 11-phase plan across about 118 acres, meant to replace more than 600 aging public-housing units and add 700-plus new homes. Phase 1, a separate $102 million project of 132 mixed-income homes on the old McKinney Manor site, broke ground in December.
The promise the Syracuse Housing Authority has made is one-for-one replacement and a right to return for current residents. Some of those residents have said publicly they are not sure it will hold. Both things are true at once, and worth watching as the buildings actually go up.
Coverage from Central Current and eastadams.org.
THE BLOCK
One neighborhood at a time — what's there, what's changing.
Solvay & Westvale
Solvay was built around a single company: the Solvay Process Company, which started making soda ash on Onondaga Lake in 1884, using the brine and limestone the Salt City had in surplus. The village took the name of the Belgian chemist behind the process, Ernest Solvay, and Cogswell Avenue is named for one of the company's founders.
The immigrants who came to run the plant were mostly Trentini, from Trentino, an Italian-speaking region then part of the Austrian Tyrol. In 1929, 29 of them founded the Tyrol Club, which still holds monthly polenta dinners. Polenta is a cornmeal dish their ancestors ate back in Trentino, and the club serves it to a few hundred people at a time. The dinners are on summer break now, back in September.
Polenta Dinner from the Tyrol Club of Solvay (photo from solvaytyrolclub.com)
New businesses keep opening here. A long-shuttered Westvale restaurant reopened as Plaza Grande, and a burned-out Milton Avenue bar just reopened as Scoops, next to taverns that have been around for years.
Some spots worth checking out in and around Solvay and Westvale:
Tyrol Club of Solvay (211 Lamont Ave) — the Tyrolean heritage club, and the whole town in one building.
Eva's European Sweets (1305 Milton Ave) — more than 25 years of authentic Polish cooking: pierogi, bigos, and a dessert case worth the trip.
Singers Karaoke Club (1345 Milton Ave) — Central New York's only all-karaoke bar.
Bianchi's Pizza Pad (2623 Milton Ave) — 50-plus years of family Italian pizza, and a stop on the Erie Canal bike trail.
Gracie's Kitchen (527 Charles Ave) — a family-owned breakfast-and-lunch spot with homemade cooking.
Scoops Ice Cream Shoppe (1623 Milton Ave) — just opened in a restored former tavern; 44 hard-serve flavors, soft serve, and a family black-raspberry frozen yogurt.
Bosco's Village Pub (201 Cogswell Ave) — one of the village's oldest pubs.
Lamont Tavern (108 Lamont Ave) — a food-forward village tavern with a scratch kitchen.
The Galley Holding Co. (2390 Milton Ave) — an intimate, speakeasy-style cocktail bar, open Fridays and Saturdays, 8 PM–1 AM.
European Specialties (2142 W. Genesee St., Westvale Plaza) — a Ukrainian and Eastern-European import market and deli; go for the pierogies, the kielbasa, and the Kiev cake.
Plaza Grande (2212 W. Genesee St.) — Mexican cocina in the old Westvale Kirby's space, fountain room and all.
Solvay Public Library (615 Woods Rd) — summer reading is on, with a Bluey story time this Friday.
One to save: Solvay-Geddes Summer Field Days returns to Woods Road Park August 6-8, with food, music, and fireworks — Thursday and Friday 5-10 PM, Saturday 2-10 PM. Details
THE SCOREBOARD
Local sports — what just happened and what's next.
Syracuse Mets vs. Buffalo Bisons — home stand at NBT Bank Stadium. Three games against the Toronto affiliate to close the week, and two of them come with a reason to stay late.
Friday, July 17, 6:35 PM is First Responders Day, with a jersey giveaway and postgame fireworks. Saturday, July 18, 6:35 PM is Star Wars night, with a light-sword giveaway. Sunday, July 19, 1:05 PM is a day game. Tickets
Every Tuesday, in your inbox and at saltcityclub.com.
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— Salt City Club Team