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

Syracuse Arts & Crafts Festival — Historic Columbus Circle and the surrounding downtown streets, Friday–Sunday, July 24–26 (Fri 10 AM–6 PM, Sat & Sun 10 AM–5 PM). Free. Details

Now in its 55th year, the festival brings around 140 artists and crafters to the streets around Columbus Circle, nearly all of them picked by a jury from applications rather than buying a booth. Food and multicultural performances run alongside. It anchors a weekend stacked with festivals; the other three are down in This Week.

Tuesday, July 21

Downtown Farmers Market — Clinton Square, Tuesday, July 21, 8 AM–2 PM. Free. Thirty-plus vendors and lunchtime live music; every Tuesday through October 13. Details

Wednesday, July 22

Sunrise Yoga — Clinton Square, Wednesday, July 22, 6:30–7:30 AM. Free. No sign-up needed — bring a mat or towel; Wednesdays through July 29. Details

Friday, July 24

Syracuse Ukrainian Festival — St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church, 207 Tompkins St., Friday–Saturday, July 24–25 (Fri 4–10 PM, Sat noon–10 PM). Free. Ukrainian food and dancing on Tipp Hill, in the hall behind Coleman's. Details

St. Mary's Egyptian Festival — St. Mary & St. Mina Coptic Orthodox Church, 106 Church St., North Syracuse, Friday–Sunday, July 24–26 (Fri 4–9 PM, Sat 11 AM–9 PM, Sun noon–7 PM). Three days of Coptic food and culture. Details

Skaneateles Antique & Classic Boat Show — Clift Park, Skaneateles village waterfront, Friday–Sunday, July 24–26. Free to view. Wooden boats on the lake. Details

Saturday, July 25

Ready Ent 2nd Annual All-White R&B Day Party — Everson Museum of Art, 401 Harrison St., Saturday, July 25, 7–11 PM. Presale sold out; door tickets $75–$100. All-white dress code, strictly enforced. Tickets

315 Burger Battle: Sliders & Ciders — Beak & Skiff, 2708 Lords Hill Rd., Lafayette, Saturday, July 25, 12–8 PM. Free entry. Sliders and hard cider at the orchard. Details

Sunday, July 26

The Princess Concert — Oncenter Crouse Hinds Theater, 411 Montgomery St., Sunday, July 26, 4 PM. Tickets from $61. A singalong revue of Frozen, Wicked, Moana, and Taylor Swift hits. Tickets

Tuesday, July 21

Phish — Empower FCU Amphitheater at Lakeview, 490 Restoration Way, Tuesday, July 21, 7 PM. Ticketed. The summer tour's Syracuse stop. Tickets

Matt Maeson — Paper Mill Island Amphitheater, 136 Spensieri Ave., Baldwinsville, Tuesday, July 21, 7 PM, doors 6. Ticketed. Alt-rock headliner of 95X's Island Takeover series, with Hazlett and Jon Lunden. Tickets

Wednesday, July 22

Harmonic Dirt & Friends — The Whiskey Coop, 120 Walton St., Wednesday, July 22, 6 PM. Central New York Americana at the Coop's bluegrass-and-wings night. Details

Thursday, July 23

The Chris O'Leary Band — The 443 Social Club, 443 Burnet Ave., Thursday, July 23, 7 PM. Ticketed. Roadhouse blues from the award-winning harmonica player. Tickets

Friday, July 24

Tony Furtado Quartet — The 443 Social Club, 443 Burnet Ave., Friday, July 24, 7 PM. Ticketed. Roots and Americana in the 443's listening room. Tickets

Jane Zell and the Zelltones — The Fitz, 321 S. Salina St., Friday, July 24, 8:30 PM. Free, no cover. Details

Saturday, July 25

Toto + Christopher Cross + The Romantics — Empower FCU Amphitheater at Lakeview, 490 Restoration Way, Saturday, July 25, 6:45 PM. Ticketed. A triple bill of '80s hitmakers. Tickets

Sunday, July 26

Noisy Boys — Beak & Skiff 1911 Tasting Room, 2708 Lords Hill Rd., Lafayette, Sunday, July 26, 2–4 PM. Free. An afternoon set at the orchard tasting room. Details

Five Finger Death Punch — Empower FCU Amphitheater at Lakeview, 490 Restoration Way, Sunday, July 26, 6:45 PM. Ticketed. Heavy metal headliner; Cody Jinks and Eva Under Fire open. Tickets

Coming Soon: The Head and the Heart — Beak & Skiff, Friday, July 31. Jesse Welles — Beak & Skiff, Saturday, August 1. Tim McGraw & 49 Winchester — Empower FCU Amphitheater, Friday, July 31. Middle Ages Brewing's 31st Anniversary Party — Sunday, August 2. InterFaith Works "Building Bridges" Community Festival, celebrating 30 years — Saturday, August 1, free.

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.

Kofta Burger — 128 E. Jefferson St., downtown. Open daily, 11 AM–8 PM.

Jullen Merrill was executive chef at Lemon Grass, the Hotel Syracuse, and Craftsman. That resume usually ends in another white-tablecloth kitchen. Instead, he opened a burger counter at 2802 James Street in Eastwood, a few miles from where he grew up, in February 2023.

He's said the math argued against it: a big pay cut, real risk, three young boys at home. His wife told him he was doing it anyway. What he wanted was the part fine dining wouldn't give him, actually knowing the people he was feeding, and he'd spent a career cooking food he didn't particularly want to eat.

Kofta Burger ran about a year in Eastwood before moving downtown to E. Jefferson in early 2024. The namesake burger is a halal beef patty seasoned like kofta, the Middle Eastern ground-meat tradition, under white cheddar, sumac onions, a tomato-and-parsley salad, and garlic sauce on a challah roll. We've had it. It's very good.

Next time you're downtown and craving something different, it's an easy answer.

Menu and ordering at koftaburger.com.

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

In June 2025, Zain Ghanim quit a product-manager job at General Motors to go all in on the least glamorous corner of advertising: billboards. He had gotten fascinated by them, then frustrated. The medium had barely changed since the 1800s, and he was sure he could fix it.

Ghanim is the founder of Cavline, a Syracuse startup that turns any business's idle TV screen or empty wall into rentable ad space. Think of a map of the city where the screen in a barbershop or café is a bubble an advertiser can book in a few taps.

He came to the U.S. from Iraq by way of the Emirates in 2017, at 17, and stayed for Syracuse University, where he studied computer science. A General Motors job offer took him to Michigan for 2 years, but the role never fit.

What pulled at him was a problem on both ends of advertising. Online, you can buy cheap impressions, but a lot of them are bots; "you could never know 100% that every single impression is a real human being," he says. A billboard reaches real people and tells you nothing about who they were. Cavline is his swing at both.

The pitch to a business is simple: that screen behind your counter can pay for itself. A shop becomes a host and earns from the ads it runs. An advertiser reaches people actually sitting in a room, with data on every set of eyes, and can launch a campaign in about 4 minutes instead of the months a billboard company takes. A third group Cavline calls cohosts earns a cut for signing local businesses up, think your neighbor onboarding her favorite shops.

That local loop is the part Ghanim talks about most. He says about $4 flows back to the community for every $1 Cavline keeps. More than 50 city businesses are already running screens, and he has bootstrapped the whole thing to its first outside investment. And he says bigger names have started circling before Cavline has spent a dollar on marketing: a national energy-drink brand, a regional grocery chain, and players in food delivery and live events, all in early conversations.

Cavline is live now on the App Store. Worth a look if you have a screen (or space for one) in your business or a product or service you want in front of locals. And if you know a lot of shop owners, signing them up pays.

Construction and development around the city, in plain English.

The city rolled out plans on Wednesday, July 8, for a full rebuild of James Street from South State Street out to Grant Boulevard, 2.1 miles of the road that connects downtown to Eastwood. If you drive, bike, or walk it, this is what's coming and why.

The project replaces aging utility and water lines under the road, resurfaces it, and adds pedestrian and cyclist safety upgrades along the whole run, past Lodi Street, Lincoln Middle School, and Teall Avenue. It stops at Grant Boulevard, right where Eastwood's business district picks up. City engineer Mary Robison told the public hearing the water main needs replacing and the redesign aims to make the street safer for people on foot, on bikes, and in cars.

Here's the part to file away and not stress about yet: construction isn't scheduled to start until spring 2028, and the roughly $40 million job runs about two years from there. Federal money covers 80 percent of it, with the state and city splitting the rest.

So nothing gets torn up this summer. But the plan for how James Street works for the next generation got drawn this month.

Coverage from Spectrum Local News.

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

The Inner Harbor has been the city's next big thing for about fifteen years. Here's where it stands.

The basin is the Barge Canal terminal, a dead-end spur dug in 1918. Coal, lumber, and oil came off the barges here, the first full cargo in 1921, with the oil piped straight into the tank farms that grew up around it.

The land spent most of the last century as "Oil City," a field of fuel-oil tanks, until the tanks went obsolete and got moved out to Van Buren by eminent domain. Then the land sat. It silted in so badly off Onondaga Creek that boats couldn't use it, and the state spent $10.3 million dredging it back to eight feet in 2018 before any of the rest could happen.

The state handed the city 34 acres in 2011, and COR Development won the RFP in 2012 on a $350 million, eleven-piece plan. Then came a tax-break fight with the Miner administration that the city lost in court, and the timeline stretched.

Two of the eleven pieces are up: the Aloft in 2016, and the Iron Pier apartments in 2019, now fully leased with a waiting list and Meier's Creek Brewing as an anchor on the ground floor. The Preserve at 405 and a small park with a creekwalk and an amphitheater filled in around them. COR's own site puts its private investment so far at about $75 million and says the full build-out is projected to take five to ten years.

Now the biggest bet yet. Onondaga County has put $103.8 million into the Harborview Aquarium going up on the water, well past the $85 million it was sold as, and the county now calls it fully funded. The naming rights still haven't sold.

The county is aiming for September. That's the third target: the opening was set for July, then August, and the aquarium's own site still says only "summer."

The county's own feasibility study projects roughly 490,000 visitors a year and about $50 million in annual economic impact. That's the number the whole thing rests on: a city of about 145,000 drawing half a million people to a waterfront most of them have never had a reason to visit. This is the year we find out if the feasibility study starts to become reality.

Two more developments: The Peacock, the cocktail bar that closed in Cicero in 2024, opened to the public Monday in the Iron Pier building (4 to 11, closed Sundays and Tuesdays), and the Onondaga Creekwalk's next extension is in planning to run south toward the Valley.

Some spots worth checking out right around the harbor:

If you go once this summer, make it a beer on the Meier's Creek patio, then a walk down to the water to see the latest at the aquarium. We're optimistic that it's the before-picture of a neighborhood starting to fulfill its potential.

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

Boeheim's Army is back in Syracuse. The Syracuse alumni team opens its first-round series in The Basketball Tournament — the winner-take-all summer bracket with a $2 million prize — against Hall In, a squad of Seton Hall alumni, in a best-of-three.

Game 1 is tonight on the road at Seton Hall, 7 PM on FS1. The home games are at the Upstate Medical Arena at the Oncenter War Memorial: Thursday, July 23 at 7 PM, and a Game 3 there Friday, July 24, if the series needs it. The roster runs deep with familiar names — Buddy Boeheim, Jimmy Boeheim, Cole Swider, Elijah Hughes, and Eric Devendorf. Schedule

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— Salt City Club Team