Clear your Saturday, October 17. Zoo Boo, the Rosamond Gifford Zoo's Halloween event with trick-or-treat stations and a costume parade, kicks off the first of two weekends, homemade soapbox cars race at Burnet Park for the Tipp Hill Derby, the Crunch play Rochester at 5 and the Orange host Louisville at 7:30.
Image from Rosamond Gifford Zoo
Here's what's on our radar:
TL;DR:
The Lineup: Zoo Boo, Community Day at the Everson and the Tipp Hill Derby Saturday, and Making Strides in Clinton Square Sunday.
Live Music: Agnostic Front at The Song & Dance Thursday, and the Syracuse Orchestra's Firebird Saturday, Austin Chanu's first concert as music director.
The Tab: The Wedge, Eastwood's cheese-centric restaurant and martini bar, where the menu changes almost daily but each night it's open has a standing special.
The Spotlight: Rachel Callaghan of Callaghan Collective turned 26 Syracuse favorites into an ABC book, on local shelves starting today.
The Build: The county passed its 2027 budget with another property tax rate cut and $25 million for duplexes and townhomes.
The Block: Marcellus, the village named for the Roman general who conquered the original Syracuse, in Sicily, is deciding how to spend $4.5 million.
The Scoreboard: The Orange lost 28-25 at Virginia and host Louisville Saturday; the Crunch are home Saturday at 5
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THE LINEUP
Events this week — what's on, where, and how to get in.
Featured Event
Tipp Hill Derby Fest — Burnet Park, Saturday, Oct. 17, from noon (teen and adult races). Kids' races Sunday, Oct. 18, from 11:30 AM on Emerson Avenue at Saints Peter & Paul Orthodox Church, 401 Hamilton St.
Neighbors race homemade soapbox cars, with food trucks, live music and raffles, and proceeds go to the church's food programs. Bring a lawn chair. Details
Image from Ss Peter & Paul Orthodox Church
This Week
Wednesday, October 14
Fall Classic Reining Horse Show — Toyota Coliseum, NYS Fairgrounds, Wednesday through Sunday, from 8 AM. Free. Regional championships in Western-style riding. Details
Nosferatu, Silent Movie Wednesday — The Mizpah, 350 Montgomery St., 5:30 and 7 PM. Details on their Instagram, @themizpahsyr.
La Casa de Bernarda Alba — Community Folk Art Center, 805 E. Genesee St., 7 PM, Wednesday through Saturday. $10. García Lorca's play, in Spanish. Tickets
Thursday, October 15
Thinning of the Veil V: The Damsel and the Damned — The Venue at Lakeside, 1002 State Fair Blvd., Thursday through Sunday. $40 suggested donation. Immersive theater; book a time. Tickets
Friday, October 16
We Are The Tigers — CNY Playhouse, 116 W. Glen Ave., 7 PM, through Oct. 31. A cheer-squad murder-mystery musical. Tickets
The Utterly Predictable Rise and Fall of Congressman Cassidy Brown — CNY Jazz Central, 441 E. Washington St., 7:30 PM Friday and Saturday. $29. A new political comedy from Covey Theater. Tickets
Phylla Mae Fall Fest — United Church of Fayetteville, 310 E. Genesee St., Fayetteville, Friday 7:30 PM and all day Saturday. $30 a session or $75 for the weekend, at the door. A weekend of contra and English country dancing. Details
Saturday, October 17
Toyfest — Science & Industry Building, NYS Fairgrounds, 9:30 AM to 3 PM. $5 cash, kids 12 and under free. About 120 tables of toys, comics and cards. Details
Zoo Boo — Rosamond Gifford Zoo, 1 Conservation Pl., Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM to 3 PM. Included with admission. Details
Community Day at the Everson — Everson Museum of Art, 401 Harrison St., 10 AM to 2 PM. Pay what you wish. Details
Trunk or Treat — Plank Road Park, 5471 Mud Mill Rd., Brewerton, 3 to 6 PM. Trick-or-treating from decorated trunks for kids 2 to 12. Details
Great New York State Marathon Weekend — Empower FCU Amphitheater at Lakeview, Saturday 9 AM (5K, 10K) and Sunday 8 AM (full and half). Expect runners on the lake roads. Details
Sunday, October 18
Making Strides Against Breast Cancer — Clinton Square, activities from 9 AM, walk at 11. Free, rain or shine. Details
Tuesday, October 20
Trick or Cheese — The Wedge, 2802 James St., 6 PM. $50. Halloween sweets paired with cheese; costumes welcome. Tickets
Dead Silent mystery dinner — Home Team Pub, 7990 Oswego Rd., Liverpool, 7 PM. $49.99 plus tax and tip. An interactive murder mystery set in 1927, served with dinner. Details
Live Music
Thursday, October 15
Harmonic Dirt Duo at Songwriters Live — Munjed's, 505 Westcott St., 6 to 8:30 PM. Details
Agnostic Front — The Song & Dance, 115 E. Jefferson St., 7 PM. Punk band, with three openers. Tickets
Dead to the Core — The 443 Social Club, 443 Burnet Ave., 7 PM. Grateful Dead songs, played acoustic. Tickets
Friday, October 16
Deraps with Fossil — Sharkey's Event Center, 7240 Oswego Rd., Liverpool, doors 6 PM. $15 to $35. Late-'70s-style guitar rock. Tickets
NEO Project — The Fitz, 321 S. Salina St., 8:30 PM. Free. Details
Saturday, October 17
McArdell & Westers — 1911 Tasting Room at Beak & Skiff, 2708 Lords Hill Rd., LaFayette, 2 to 4 PM. Free. Details
The Jamie McLean Band — The 443 Social Club, 7 PM. Southern soul and blues-rock. Tickets
Ravel & Stravinsky's Firebird — The Syracuse Orchestra, Crouse Hinds Theater, 421 Montgomery St., 7:30 PM. Austin Chanu's first concert as music director. Tickets
Atlantic Guitar Quartet — Skaneateles Library, 49 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles, 7:30 PM. Contemporary classical guitar. Details
Sunday, October 18
Hohenfels Trombone Quartet — St. Paul's Syracuse, 220 E. Fayette St., 4 PM. Free, freewill offering. Details
Coming Soon
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Cosmic Collisions, Landmark Theatre, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 7:30 PM.
Ragtime, Baldwinsville Theatre Guild at the Everson, Oct. 22 to 25, $40.
Crunch vs. Rochester, Pink in the Rink, Friday, Oct. 23, 7 PM.
THE TAB
One food or drink spot a week — what's new, what's worth the trip, and what to order.
What to Order at The Wedge When the Menu Changes Daily
The Wedge 2802 James St., Eastwood — cheese-centric restaurant and martini bar
Sarah Simiele opened The Wedge in April 2025, next door to The Curd Nerd, the cheese shop she's run since 2022. She won the 2023 Cheesemonger Invitational, the country's top cheese competition, and she and her husband, Matt, built The Wedge as the Eastwood restaurant they wanted for themselves.
None of the cups, plates or glasses match, and much of the room, including the bar, looks thrifted or donated. The owners say they wanted it to feel "a little bit like you're having dinner at a friend's house," and it felt warm the minute we walked in.
Several people at our table loved the lamb shank and the steak frites, and our tequila-vanilla cocktail was outstanding. The bar leans on gin, with cider and mocktails too. The fryer and grill are 100% gluten-free, and most of the menu is gluten-free or can be made that way.
We enjoyed so much we didn’t get our own photo (Steak Frites - image from @thewedge_syr)
The menu changes with what local farms have in season, and the nightly specials rotate monthly. Right now: Wednesday cheesy hot dogs and $2 off wine, Thursday chicken cutlets, Friday steak frites, Saturday housemade mozzarella sticks, and Sunday $5 off cider bottles.
What to order: go on a Friday for the steak frites, and start with a cheeseboard for the table.
Coming up: the Seven Deadly Sins Dinner, seven courses on Sunday, Oct. 25, plus monthly cheese classes and a craft night every third Wednesday.
Hours: dinner Wednesday through Saturday, 4 to 10 PM (happy hour 4 to 6, Wednesday through Friday); Sunday brunch, 11 AM to 4 PM. Menu, events and reservations
THE SPOTLIGHT
A deeper look at one person, place, or project in Syracuse.
A Love of Photography Became a Syracuse ABC Book
Rachel Callaghan started taking landscape pictures in about fifth grade, on long walks past the barns and cows around Fabius, where she lived. Parents driving by would pull over to ask if she needed help. "No, I'm just taking photos," she'd tell them. She still uses some of those photos in her work today.
Rachel never stopped shooting. She did weddings for a while, which she found fun but stressful, and now calls herself "wedding-retired." She still does senior photos and holiday mini sessions, but the camera really comes out when she travels.
Rachel and her husband take at least one big trip a year, mostly to national parks, and they're Adirondack 46ers (having summited all 46 of the high peaks). She'd come home from trips with 5,000 photos sitting on a hard drive, and she wanted them on her walls as art, not just photographs. "I wanted something a little softer," she says. So she developed a digital editing style that gives her photos a watercolor look, keeping the detail and softening the rest. That became Callaghan Collective, which turns 2 this November.
Her first prints took her to local markets, and the markets led to Syracuse postcards. That's where she saw how much people love their own corners of the city. Tipp Hill and Strathmore each have what she calls a cult following, and people would pick up a postcard to send to a friend who lives far away. A postcard makes a good gift, but she wanted something even more giftable to bring to her markets, and a podcast about designing a book gave her the idea. "Never would I ever have pictured myself writing an ABC book," she says. But then Greetings From Syracuse: The Salt City ABC Book was born.
The book has 26 local favorites in her watercolor style, from the Dome and Green Lakes to Heid's and the Fair. She picked some of the letters with the help of her Instagram followers ("kind of a community effort") and tried to spread them across the region. A is apple picking at Beak & Skiff. K was the hard one, and she went with Kitty Hoyne's, which she admits is "definitely not super kid focused," but every adult reading the book will know it. Plenty of people wanted Kahunaville, the old restaurant and arcade at Carousel Center, for K. She didn't feature it since it's gone, but the places parents grew up with got their own pages at the back instead: Greetings From the 1990s and Greetings From the 1960s.
After 10 years in advertising and graphic design, she designed the whole book herself, found a printer, got an ISBN and copyrighted it. "I've kind of come to learn that everything's figure-out-able," she says.
Rachel printed 1,000 copies and has already sold more than 450. Kids flip through it saying, "Oh, I've been here. I've been here." A checklist in the back lets families mark off the places they've been, and she's hoping to add coloring postcards of spots from the book in November, like Beak & Skiff, Gannon's and the stadium, to color in and mail. "Just trying to get people out in the community more," she says.
The book is on Etsy, and code LOCALPICKUP skips shipping for pickup in Fairmount. Starting today, Wednesday, October 14, it's on the shelves at Manlius Supply Co. in Manlius, Miss Daisy's and Parthenon Books downtown, BeeKind on Tipp Hill and Mesa 22 in Marcellus. She's signing books at Parthenon Books on Saturday, October 24, from noon to 4 PM. Her next markets are Fringed Benefits at Crazy Daisies (November 6–8), the Sky Armory Night Market (November 28) and the Crazy Daisies Winter Market (December 9).
THE BUILD
Construction and development around the city, in plain English.
The County Passed Its Budget, With $25 Million for Housing
Onondaga County lawmakers passed the county's $1.7 billion budget for 2027 on Tuesday, Oct. 6. Here's what it does.
Property taxes. The county's property tax rate drops for the ninth year in a row. If you own property in the county, that's a lower rate, though your actual bill still depends on what your property is assessed at.
Housing. The county is moving $35 million out of its savings. Most of it, $25 million, goes to a new county-run lender called ONHOME, which will make low- or no-interest loans to builders putting up duplexes and townhomes. The goal is more homes for people across a range of incomes.
Land for Micron suppliers. Another $7 million goes to the county's Industrial Development Agency to buy land around the county and get it ready to build on, for companies that supply Micron, the chipmaker building in Clay. County Executive Ryan McMahon's case: if those sites aren't ready here, the suppliers could go to other states or elsewhere upstate.
Coverage from Central Current, Spectrum News and the legislature's Oct. 6 session packet.
THE BLOCK
One neighborhood at a time — what's there, what's changing.
Marcellus
Marcellus is named for a Roman general who conquered Syracuse in Sicily, the ancient city our Syracuse is named after. The town was founded in 1794 on land set aside for Revolutionary War veterans, where towns were named after famous people, many of them ancient Greeks and Romans. That makes Marcellus's name older than Syracuse's. The settlement that became Syracuse went through a string of names, Corinth among them, before taking the name Syracuse in 1820.
When the first settlers arrived in the 1790s, they built along Nine Mile Creek, which runs along the village's eastern edge. The creek powered a sawmill by 1796 and, later, wool mills that made uniforms for the Union Army in the Civil War. The village had the old lower mill torn down in 2016, and Green Gateway Park now sits where it stood.
Ninemile Creek running through Marcellus Park
What's changing: in March, the state gave the village $4.5 million to fix up its downtown, and 13 projects are competing for it, from a balcony at the Village Tavern to repairs to the village clock. The public weighs in Wednesday, Nov. 4, at 6 PM at Marcellus High School.
Where to go:
Sage & Thyme, 4 E. Main St. — coffee, bagels and breads; get the sage-and-thyme shortbread.
That's What She Read, 16 E. Main St. — new, used and vintage books.
Ember + Edit, 15 North St. — a boutique in the old Calley's Hardware.
Riseform Brewing, 19 North St. — a brewery; bring your own food.
Stone Creek, 69 North St. — weekend brunch.
Holy Cow Cheesesteaks & Fish Fry, 3 North St. — cheesesteaks and a Friday fish fry.
Chocolate Pizza Company, 3774 Lee Mulroy Rd. — chocolate pizzas made in Marcellus.
The Village Tavern, 6 E. Main St. — a longtime local bar.
Mesa 22, 22 South St. — a local shop carrying Rachel Callaghan's ABC book.
Marcellus Free Library, 32 Maple St. — open Monday through Saturday.
Green Gateway Park, 71 North St. — a footbridge over Nine Mile Creek on the old mill site.
Baltimore Woods Nature Center, 4007 Bishop Hill Rd. — 6 miles of trails, open dawn to dusk.
Sycamore Hill Gardens, 2130 Old Seneca Turnpike — garden tours by reservation, $45 per car.
History from the Village of Marcellus and the Marcellus Historical Society.
THE SCOREBOARD
Local sports — what just happened and what's next.
Orange football lost 28-25 at Virginia after leading 17-7 at half. Next: Louisville at the Dome, Saturday, Oct. 17, 7:30 PM on ACC Network.
The Crunch lost the home opener 3-2 to Belleville on a goal in the final minute. Next: Saturday, Oct. 17, 5 PM vs. Rochester at home.
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— Salt City Club Team