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

Drumlins Centennial Summer Block Party — Saturday, August 22. Food trucks starting 4:30 PM, music 5 to 9, fireworks 9:15 — Drumlins Country Club, 800 Nottingham Rd. Free to walk in. Details

Drumlins turns 100 this year, and it's opening the grounds to everyone for this one: food trucks, a fireworks show, and Prime Time Horns, the 8-piece Syracuse rock, rhythm and soul band, on the main stage. We'll be there. Find the Salt City Club table and come say hi for a shot at a $100 gift card to Bistro 1926, the restaurant on site that is always open to the public.

Tuesday, August 18

Trivia on Tap — Talking Cursive Brewing, 301 Erie Blvd W. 6 to 8 PM, free. Winners get gift cards; it runs every Tuesday through October 27. Details

SkanFest U: American Revolutions — First Presbyterian Church, 97 E Genesee St, Skaneateles. 4 to 5 PM, free. A talk on the Americans who changed the music, with Festival musicians playing the examples live. Details

Wednesday, August 19

Curator's Tour: A Long Look — Everson Museum, 401 Harrison St. 1 to 2 PM, free with pay-what-you-wish admission. Steffi Chappell, the Everson's Director of Curatorial Affairs, walks the documentary photography show. Meet at the front desk. Details

Skaneateles Festival: Musical Trail Walk — Baltimore Woods Nature Center, 4007 Bishop Hill Rd, Marcellus. 6 to 7 PM, free, no ticket. Musicians stationed along a quarter-mile trail, running continuously for the hour. Details

Friday, August 21

Tim's Brew Barn opens — Tim's Pumpkin Patch, 2901 Rose Hill Rd, Marietta. 11 AM to 8 PM, then daily 11 to 8 through August. Their own beer, brewed from crops they grew for it, themed cocktails made with New York spirits, wine and non-alcoholic options, and Kaleb Dorr playing. Five years in the making. Details

Spotted Lanternfly & Tree of Heaven Workshop — Green Lakes State Park, 7900 Green Lakes Rd, Fayetteville. 5:30 to 7:30 PM, registration required, $10 per vehicle to get in before 7. How to identify and report the invasive planthopper, and where it is in New York now. Register

Rodgers & Sondheim's "Do I Hear a Waltz?" — Jazz Central, 441 E Washington St. 7 PM, from $29.08. A concert staging of the musical set in Venice; also Saturday. Tickets

Friday Evening Wildlife Walks — Beaver Lake Nature Center, 8477 East Mud Lake Rd, Baldwinsville. 7 to 8 PM, free with $5 per vehicle park admission, no registration. Owl, deer, fox and osprey. Details

Saturday, August 22

Minoa Green Bridge Block Party — North Main Street, closed between North Central Ave and Willard St. 2 to 9 PM. Second year, run by Trappers II; Keep Up plays the Trappers patio 2 to 5, ColdFront takes the main stage under the bridge 5 to 8. Details

Syracuse Urban Gardens Tour — starts at 4141 South Salina St. 10 AM to 4 PM. A bike ride, a potluck and a bus tour of the city's growing sites. Details

Anthony Rodia — Funny Bone, 10301 Destiny USA Dr. 6:30 PM, doors 5:30. $37 to $47. Tickets

Sunday, August 23

Bark in the Park — Syracuse Mets vs. Worcester Red Sox — NBT Bank Stadium, 1:05 PM. From $21.50, $5 per dog. The last one of the season. Tickets

Tuesday, August 18

Chris Cain — The 443 Social Club, 443 Burnet Ave, 7 PM, sold out. Blues guitarist. Details

Wednesday, August 19

Boots at the Brewery — Middle Ages Brewing, 120 Wilkinson St. Doors 6:30, 7 to 10 PM. $12.88 in advance, $10 cash at the door. Line dancing in the beer hall. Tickets

Thursday, August 20

315 Thursdays — Hanover Square, 5 to 9 PM, free. DJ Joey D at 5, the Jessie Elizabeth Band at 6, Dirty Blanket at 7:30. Details

CNY Jazz in the City: Latin Night — La Casita Cultural Center, 109 Otisco St, 6 to 9 PM, free. Alex Torres y su Orquesta, twelve pieces, with La Familia de la Salsa opening and dance lessons before. Last one of the series; bring a lawn chair. Details

Honker with Concept — Funk 'n Waffles, 307 S Clinton St. Doors 7, show 8 to 11. 18 and over. Tickets

Friday, August 21

Island Throwback: 90's Night — Bud Light Amphitheater at Paper Mill Island, Spensieri Ave, Baldwinsville. Gates 6, show 7 to 10, all ages. Outdoor on the river. Tickets

Syracuse Country Fest — Middle Ages Brewing, 120 Wilkinson St. Doors 5, 6 PM to midnight, upstairs in the Music Hall. $20 advance, $25 at the door, all ages with a guardian. The Steven Cali Band, Jonah Ladd and DJ Just Chris, plus the Shotgun Line Dancers and a mechanical bull. Tickets

Joanna Connor — The 443 Social Club, 443 Burnet Ave, 7 PM. Chicago blues-rock guitarist. Tickets

Saturday, August 22

The E-Block — Middle Ages Brewing, 120 Wilkinson St, 4 to 7 PM. Free, no tickets, outdoors on the loading dock. Details

Compatible Textures — The Fitz, 321 S Salina St, 8:30 to 11:30 PM. Never a cover. Details

SIRSY — The 443 Social Club, 443 Burnet Ave, 7 PM. A two-piece: the singer plays a full drum kit standing up and throws in the occasional flute solo. Tickets

Sunday, August 23

Indigo Girls — Beak & Skiff, 2708 Lords Hill Rd, LaFayette. 7 PM. Tickets

Coming Soon

The Great New York State Fair opens Wednesday, August 26 and runs through Labor Day, September 7. Admission is $8.32 with fees, parking $12.41, and it is free every day for anyone 65 and over and 12 and under. Details

Pitbull with Lil Jon — Empower FCU Amphitheater, Wednesday, August 26. Tickets

315 Thursdays wraps its Hanover Square run Thursday, August 27 with Sophistafunk. The series moves to Westcott in September. Details

Apple Grove Adventure Park opens Saturday, August 29 at Beak & Skiff. A $1 million build on 6 cleared acres, with a zipline, a petting zoo and what they say is the largest farm slide in the country. Day pass $20. Details

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.

CNY Regional Market, 2100 Park St — Saturdays and Sundays, 7 AM to 2 PM — brujasaf.com

Look for the little purple shed, and say hi to Joannie.

Joannie and Josue Villegas moved from Houston to Syracuse in December 2016. Joannie was laid off in 2024, started cooking the food she grew up with, and had a stand at Taste of Syracuse that same year.

Order the breakfast tacos. Texas-style, which means a warm flour tortilla with scrambled eggs and cheese and your pick of bacon, sausage, chorizo, or potatoes, salsa on the side. Joannie walked us through the whole menu and helped us decide: the barbacoa breakfast taco she had on special that morning, plus a kolache, a soft roll with a sausage and cheese filling baked into the middle.

We had already picked up coffee from Peaks a few sheds over, so the aguas frescas are still on our list: fruit blended with cane sugar and water, no alcohol. She pours the traditional ones — tamarindo, jamaica (hibiscus) and horchata — alongside ones made from local elderberry, blueberry and concord grape.

The specials change and so does the menu, week to week, depending on what fruit is in season. If you are at the market on a weekend morning, this is where you eat breakfast.

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

It started in 1972 with a few people in North Syracuse cooking dinner at home and driving it to neighbors who could not get out. Last year the North Area Meals on Wheels organization put out 163,901 meals, still made from scratch.

It runs out of a kitchen and office at 413 Church Street in North Syracuse, covering Cicero, North Syracuse, Liverpool, Mattydale, Brewerton and Clay. The 551 people on the routes are seniors, people who are homebound, and people living with disabilities.

On Thursday, August 13 they cut the ribbon on a $1.2 million expansion, paid for by donations. It added 2,400 square feet and made the building about 50% larger: office and storage room, a dedicated space for bottles and recycling, and a training area for staff.

The meals kept going out while the building was rebuilt around them. Executive director Randy LaManche said the staff "continued doing their jobs and serving our clients while adapting to changes."

Their own line for the work is that "it's as much about the wheels as it is the meals." A route averages 12 stops, and they describe the connection that comes with a delivered meal as "unique and hard to find elsewhere."

LaManche put the credit on the drivers. "Most importantly, I want to thank our more than 300 volunteers," he said. "They are the heart and soul of North Area Meals on Wheels."

They are always looking for more. Routes leave at 10:45 AM and take about an hour, you can drive as many or as few days as you want, and they keep a list of substitutes for the weeks you cannot. Kitchen help works mornings until noon. Sign up here

Expansion details per CNY Central. Everything else from namow.org.

Construction and development around the city, in plain English.

Upstate is rebuilding its emergency department. The money is already in this year's state budget: $450 million for a new ER, a burn unit and an operating room, with a design contract worth about $35 million going to the Buffalo firm CannonDesign and running through November 2030.

Upstate wants to permanently close one block of East Adams Street, between Elizabeth Blackwell Street and Irving Avenue, so a ground-level corridor can run between the existing ER and the new building. The Syracuse Common Council has to approve that, and the councilors who have spoken are not committing yet. Donna Moore, who represents the 2nd District, says she has concerns and wants to sit down with Crouse and the Syracuse VA Medical Center, both on Irving Avenue. 

Fifth District councilor Jimmy Monto says it is too early to weigh in. "The [Upstate] level one trauma center is important. Crouse is important. The VA is important," Monto told Central Current. "We want to make sure that we are getting people that have medical emergencies to the place they need to go to as fast as possible. So we need to take all of that into consideration."

Crouse Hospital is against it. Laurie Clark, Crouse's communications director, told Central Current that "permanently closing Adams Street would also run counter to one of the central promises of the I-81 Community Grid: reconnecting Syracuse and improving access to essential destinations, including its hospitals." 

Matthew Chadderdon, Upstate's associate vice president and chief of staff, framed the other side: "Any and all steps taken as part of the design and construction process will follow expert guidance and are focused on saving lives and serving the patients who rely on Upstate Medical."

The community grid's central promise was reconnecting the streets the viaduct cut off. This closes one of them for good, to expand the hospital that runs the only level one trauma center for 14 counties and the only burn center for 37 counties across upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania.

If your commute runs through East Adams, nothing changes yet. Nothing has been approved and the design contract runs another four years, so most of this is still open. The street closure is the piece that needs a council vote, and it is one of the first parts people seem to be anyone is fighting over.

Per Central Current, August 12.

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

In 1836, the spot where Minoa sits was two or three log cabins and a blacksmith shop. Farm families from Germany and France were scattered around it, and they built St. Mary's Catholic Church out on Kirkville Road around 1837 so they could hear Mass in their own languages. Its cemetery is the oldest Catholic cemetery still standing in Onondaga County. 

Then the Syracuse and Utica Railroad opened through in 1839. The stop was named Manlius Station, and the place grew around the tracks.

The name changed to Minoa in 1895, pushed by a group of women who owned land around the station. Barbara Rivette, the Town of Manlius historian, traces the word back to the Bronze Age settlements called Minoa on Corfu and Sicily.

Residents voted to incorporate as a village in January 1913, and women drove that one too. State law let them vote on incorporation because they were property owners, four years before New York gave women the full vote and seven before the country did. Three months later, the village organized a fire department, and it ran straight into the problem that still shapes the place.

The tracks cut the village in half. The fire department's history page describes a village "divided by railroad tracks," where "trains passing through the village often made it impossible to reach fires." Their fix was to park two hose carts permanently on the south side: a second set of equipment for the half of town a freight train could seal off at any moment. That held until the Costello Parkway bridge opened in 1959.

The split is still how the village is laid out. Shops and civic buildings run up North Main and South of the tracks is a second, smaller cluster.

County money has been going into North Main for years. Onondaga County's Main Street Initiative pays for exterior work on village business districts — façades, windows and doors, roofing, siding, ADA access — and the property owner covers 25% of the project cost. Mayor Bill Brazill has put the total that has come into Minoa businesses at roughly $2 million.

Goodwood Tavern is one of them, and it is the newest thing on the street. It opened at the end of July in the old Johnny O's 19th Hole, a cocktail bar from Steve Perry and Jennifer Wood, who also owns Trappers II across North Main. Wood bought the building and spent nearly four years on it. She told CNY Central that people still ask her where Minoa is, and that she opened Goodwood partly as "a way to draw some more attention to Minoa."

Where to go:

The mayor holds his office hours at the pizza place and the coffee shop. Pizza with the Mayor at Trappers II, Tea with the Mayor at Spill The Tea, both back on the calendar this fall.

Local sports — what just happened and what's next.

The Mets are home all week, six against the Worcester Red Sox at NBT Bank Stadium. First pitch is 6:35 Tuesday through Saturday, 1:05 on Sunday.

Fireworks Friday, after the game. That is the only fireworks night in this homestand.

Sunday is Bark in the Park, the last of the year. Dogs are $5.

Gearing up for SU football season: the Orange open at home Saturday, September 5 against New Hampshire, noon at the Dome. Six home games this fall, closing with Notre Dame on November 28.

Every Tuesday, in your inbox and at saltcityclub.com.

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— Salt City Club Team