Events this week — what's on, where, and how to get in.

Syracuse Latino Festival — Saturday, August 15, Noon to 10 PM, Clinton Square, S Salina St at W Water St, Free, walk-in. Details

Ten hours in Clinton Square, free to walk into. Nine acts including Anthony Colón, Tony Rivas, Salt City Salseras and DJ Lorenz, plus a dominoes tournament, vendors and cultural demonstrations.

It ran for years under the Spanish Action League, then went dark. Fanny Villarreal and Hugo Acosta spent the last 3 or 4 years rebuilding it.

Thursday, August 13

A Film on the Field: The Sandlot — NBT Bank Stadium, 1 Tex Simone Dr. Screening 7:30 PM, gates 5 PM. $25, free for kids 12 and under. A movie in the outfield with fireworks after, benefiting the Hospice Foundation of Central New York. Tickets

Friday, August 14

Shakespeare-in-the-Park: The Taming of the Shrew — Thornden Park Amphitheater. 5:30 PM Friday and Saturday, 2 PM Sunday. Free on the lawn, $28.03 premium. Tickets and details

Saturday, August 15

Syracuse Ceramic Guild Pottery & Hot Arts Fair — DeWitt Community Church, 3600 Erie Blvd E, DeWitt. 10 AM to 5 PM Saturday, noon to 4 PM Sunday. $5, free under 12. Live glass and metal work alongside the pottery. Details

Bug Day — The MOST, 500 S Franklin St, 9:30 AM to 5 PM. $18 adults, $14 kids and seniors. Bug Guts Slime in the STEAM Cafe at 11:30. Details

Vintage Market — Crazy Daisies, 4693 Kasson Rd, 9:30 AM to 4 PM. Free. More than 30 vintage dealers from around the state, plus live music and food. Details

Sunday, August 16

KlezFest — Jewish Community Center, 5655 Thompson Rd, DeWitt, noon to 4 PM, free. Klezmer, the Eastern European Jewish dance music built on clarinet and violin. Details

79th Pakistan Independence Day — flag raising at the City Hall steps at 1 PM, cultural celebration at Art in the Atrium at 2 PM. Free. Details

Tuesday, August 11

Kill Bill: The Rapper — The Song & Dance, 115 E Jefferson St, 7:30 PM. $26.44, $67.89 VIP. Tickets

Wednesday, August 12

On the Lash — The 443 Social Club, 443 Burnet Ave, 7 PM. From $33.77 plus a $15 food and drink minimum. Tickets

Liverpool is the Place: Prime Time Horn — Johnson Park, Liverpool, 7 to 9 PM. Free, outdoors, no ticket. Part of the village's summer concert series. Details

Thursday, August 13

315 Thursdays — Hanover Square, 5 PM, free. Double Tiger and the Emanuel Washington Project on the bill. Details

Friday, August 14

Sip, Step & Spin — Beak & Skiff, 2708 Lords Hill Rd, LaFayette, 6 to 9 PM. $10, cash or Venmo. Dancing in the orchard. Details

Ripe, with Seven Suns and Isaac French — Paper Mill Island, Baldwinsville, 7 PM, all ages. Isaac French opens as the local bill. Tickets

Tay & Travis' Honeymoon Staycation, with Cruel Summer — Middle Ages Music Hall, 120 Wilkinson St, 7 PM, doors 6. $30.86, all ages. A Taylor Swift tribute night. Tickets

Saturday, August 15

Endless Fires Festival, with Three 6 Mafia and GWAR — Sharkey's, Liverpool, Saturday and Sunday, doors noon both days. $115 a day, $200 the weekend. The $60 headliner ticket does not admit you until 6 PM. Tickets

Salt City Honk: Shake Your Brass Fest — Paper Mill Island, 1 to 7 PM. Free, walk-in. Six hours of brass bands on the river. Details

The Shylocks — Middle Ages Loading Dock, 120 Wilkinson St, 4 to 7 PM. Free, outdoors, no tickets required. Details

Billy Idol, with Devo — Empower FCU Amphitheater, 7:30 PM. $35 lawn, $55.50 and up for seats. Tickets

Sunday, August 16

Soul Risin' — Middle Ages Loading Dock, 4 to 7 PM. Free, outdoors, no tickets required. Details

Slightly Stoopid, with Denm and Bumpin' Uglies — Beak & Skiff, 7 PM, doors 6. The orchard's summer concert series. Tickets

Monday, August 17

Liverpool is the Place: Four on the Floor — Johnson Park, Liverpool, 7 to 9 PM, free. Same series as Wednesday. Details

Coming Soon: The Mets come home Tuesday the 18th for six against Worcester. The Great New York State Fair opens Wednesday the 26th, and Pitbull plays the amphitheater the same night.

We track way more than we can squeeze into The Lineup. Refer 2 friends to the Club, and the full calendar unlocks:

One food or drink spot a week — what's new, what's worth the trip, and what to order.

2601 James St, Eastwood — Saturdays noon to 7 PM, Sundays noon to 5 PM, weather permitting

Smash burgers made with locally sourced Wagyu. Ryan MacCammon runs it as a weekend pop-up across the street from the permanent kitchen going up at 2601 James, in the building that was Lee's Garden for 25 years.

The Wagyu comes from Deer Hill Wagyu in Cazenovia. The farmer handed MacCammon free ground beef and told him, "The first taste is free. I know you'll be back." The recipes came out of weekends of trial and error, and a seasoning blend he worked out while learning to smoke brisket.

Order the combo: the Fried Onion Burger with mac salad and a drink. Two 3 oz patties, paper-thin fried onions and Cooper cheese on a Heidelberg brioche roll. We've had that, the pierogies and the house pickles, and everything was outstanding. There's also a $5 slider, the perfect size for a kid.

Two days a week, and only if the weather holds. Follow Get Smashed on Instagram for pop-up updates.

And if you’re already a fan and want to be part of the Get Smashed story, you can help Ryan put the finishing touches on his new permanent location by contributing here (and you can get some awesome perks in return).

A deeper look at one person, place, or project in Syracuse.

When Syracuse's tech companies were all small at the same time, Jeff Knauss says the founders used to have meals together and talk about how they could help the region get better together.

He says some people here "may have an opinion, well, we're not New York City, we're not Boston, and kind of talk down to ourselves because we don't have the size and the scope. But to me that's always been an advantage. You go to New York City, you could spend your whole life going to events and not meet 10% of the population. But in Central New York, within a year, I felt like I had a really, really good community."

He is not "from here." Knauss was adopted from South Korea at 3 months old and raised in Phelps, about an hour west. In college, he won a scholarship to study abroad and picked Nice, France because it was the cheapest program on the list.

"It's like the most beautiful place in the world," he says. "I called it 'nice.' I did not know."

He met his wife Heta there. She is Finnish, so for the next 3 years she came to the States for 3 months at a time, the limit on her visa, then went home for 3, then came back. "And then eventually one day we're just like, screw this," he says. "We've got to do one or the other." They picked here.

He came for a job. He had sold television advertising in Rochester for 5 years as an account executive and says it took a while to break into that city. Then CNY Central offered him the manager of advertising job, and he moved east.

"Central New York just embraced me immediately," he says. "I felt like I had a duty to be additive to that community."

What that turned into: Digital Hyve, the marketing agency he started here in 2014 with Jake Tanner and sold in 2021. A seat on the board of Community Bank System. And three restaurants you have likely eaten at without knowing he was behind them: XO Taco on East Fayette, Hidden Fish in Skaneateles, and Clover's, the diner that took over the old Johnny Angel's. The Hidden Fish and Clover's profits go to local charities. He is also currently building the Knauss Family Foundation, which he and Heta started to work on generational poverty.

"You can't have a great community if there aren't great places to eat," he says.

His day job is Arcovo AI, leading a team of 20 people, some in the INSPYRE building on Harrison Street. He's building what he calls AI employees for small and mid-sized companies. Asked whether people push back on AI adoption, he didn't soften it.

"This whole narrative around AI and the big companies laying off tons, they were going to do that anyway," he says. "Because they need efficiencies. They're public companies." His own clients are smaller, and he says the pitch to them is not headcount. It is handing the invoicing and the data entry to software so the people already there can do the rest. "It's not about reduction of your current staff."

What slows any of it down, he says, is not the software. "Technology is not what's holding us back from a more autonomous future. It's human adoption. And to be honest, that's good for us."

Arcovo is not his only bet on what technology brings here. Out in Hastings, seven miles north of where Micron is building, he and Adam Weitsman bought 150 acres right after the announcement. It is still zoned for single-family homes and they still have not decided what goes on it. Suppliers follow a chip plant, and he says there is already a line of them waiting, not committing until they see the plants actually running. "Once that happens, it's going to be overnight. We're going to be flooded with suppliers."

On who all of that reaches, he was specific. "We need to ensure that we're bringing everybody up and not just a certain group of people," he says. "It just needs to be inclusive growth. And I think that's a very hard equation."

His advice for anyone who feels behind on technology or AI is to walk before you run. Pick one process, not twenty, and watch it work. "You have to see it to believe it," he says. If you want to see what that looks like in your own business, his company is at arcovo.ai.

And go eat at XO Taco, Hidden Fish, or Clover's. The profits make a difference.

Construction and development around the city, in plain English.

Parkside Commons changed hands in 2025, and the new owners inherited broken-down buildings and a long record of trouble. "There have been a lot of crime issues on the property," Connor Kenney, a partner at the development firm SAA/EVI, told NewsChannel 9 in February.

They have since added security and cameras, and Syracuse Police now have an office on site. On July 31, SAA Canopy Group and BFC Partners closed a $269 million construction loan on the East Side complex, which runs between Westmoreland and East Fayette. Construction starts in September.

Four buildings are coming down. Six more get gut-renovated, 200 apartments in all. Two new buildings add another 193. Finished, that is 393 affordable apartments.

No one gets moved off the property. If your building is being renovated, you move elsewhere on the complex while the work happens. Anyone in the four coming down moves into one of the new ones. Kenney says it stays affordable for the people living there now. Syracuse Police reviewed the new site plan for safety. It cuts the number of entrances to manage who comes and goes, and puts a key fob on every building.

Genesis Medina, who lives there with her three kids, says the added security already has her feeling safer. "It's an amazing change coming. I know it's going to be for the better."

This is a private project on public money. Low-income housing tax credits raise roughly $101.6 million, $88 million federal and $13.6 million state. Goldman Sachs' Urban Investment Group lends another $116 million. New York State Homes and Community Renewal is behind the deal, and the City of Syracuse Planning Commission signed off in February, finding no significant environmental impact.

The site sits on the SY 68 bus route, downtown to the Transit Hub and east along Erie Boulevard. Renovated units are targeted for early 2028, the new buildings for late 2028. If you live at Parkside, September is the date to watch.

Sources: Allie Elkins, NewsChannel 9, February 3; the City of Syracuse environmental notice, February 11; the developers' announcement, July 31.

One neighborhood at a time — what's there, what's changing.

The Erie Canal came through in 1825. The town split off from Manlius 10 years later, named for Major Moses DeWitt, a county judge and militia officer. The railroad arrived in 1839, and in 1872 the New York Central, the east-west line across the state, bought up the north end for the yards that became East Syracuse.

On March 3, 1954, Syracuse's Eagan Real Estate opened an open-air plaza on 52 acres of Erie Boulevard East and called it Shoppingtown. Syracuse architect Fred B. O'Connor designed it. They enclosed it in stages, reopening as an all-weather mall in August 1975. For 66 years, the center of gravity of an entire town was that shopping center.

Moonbeam Capital, a Las Vegas firm, bought the mall in 2013. The anchors left one at a time after that: Macy's in March 2015, Dick's down the road that October, J.C. Penney the following April after 62 years. The public library, more than 50 years in there with nowhere to grow, got its own building on Jamesville Road in 2017. Sears, the last anchor, closed in September 2018.

By June 2019, Moonbeam owed roughly $9.7 million in back taxes and offered $10,000 against the bill, which County Executive Ryan McMahon called a joke. The mall closed in March 2020 and never reopened.

That December, the county bought the mall for $3.5 million and waived about $13 million in taxes, interest, and fees. It did not get the ground under Sears or Macy's. Transformco and Benderson Development owned those parcels, would not sell, and kept the site split for 5 more years. The Appellate Division cleared the county to take them by eminent domain in November 2024, the state's highest court agreed in September 2025, and Transformco settled that November for $4.5 million. In April, State Supreme Court Judge Joseph Lamendola approved taking the Macy's parcel from Benderson.

The county owns all 65 acres now, for the first time. On July 23, McMahon said two qualified proposals were in hand, that he was negotiating with both, and that he hoped to finish in three or four weeks and name the new owners. That lands right about now. He puts the private investment at $200 million to $400 million, planning this year, construction in 2027, and he wants what gets built to serve the semiconductor work arriving with Micron.

Mike Dunn, who lives near the site, told CNY Central it is "basically just like a crater, like dead in the middle" of his neighborhood. "We'll believe it when I see it. But at this point, it's just lip service." He wants a pharmacy on those acres, because DeWitt does not have one. His son Mason wants the movie theater back. When about 80 residents packed the DeWitt Town Hall courtroom on April 6, Angela DeSantis put it harder: "All these years, we've been held hostage by the county." McMahon told that room, "At the end of the day, the buck's going to stop with me."

Drive past the vacant Shoppingtown mall down Erie Boulevard and get just about any fast food you want. Here's where we'd actually send you in DeWitt:

Two reasons to be in DeWitt this week: the Ceramic Guild fair on Erie Boulevard East, and KlezFest at the JCC on Thompson Road.

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— Salt City Club Team