<div class="page photo" style=""> <article> <header style=" background-image:url(/uploads/5470cf9744f0d.jpg); "> <div class="box"> <div class="intro" style="color: #ffffff;"> <h1 style="color: #ffffff !important;">The Bizzaro-world of Syracuse, New York </h1> <p class="summary">An Essay </p> </div> </div> </header> <div class="main"> <div class="container"> <p class="byline">Sam Fisher </p> <p>Most Eastern Ontarians will know about Syracuse. To them, it’s likely ‘that place with the big mall’. The shopping centre, located on the outskirts of the city, attracts vast numbers of Canadians due to its great deals and its proximity to the border. However, the people who go to Syracuse for the mall will almost never go into the town itself, as there is nothing there.&nbsp;</p><p>Initially, you might think ‘nothing there’ is just an expression to mean there’s very little of interest, and before I visited Syracuse, this was my understanding as well. But I have since been into the town and I have learned, much to my horror, that there truly is a void that exists within the heart of Syracuse. It is a labyrinth of nameless streets, nameless buildings, and no-name local businesses.&nbsp;</p><p>I was in Syracuse a couple days ago, accompanying my cousin Wendel and our uncle Matthew for his medical checkup. As it turns out, Syracuse is not only known for the mall, but also as a medical centre. My uncle was returning to the hospital a couple weeks after an operation that removed 70% of his stomach, mostly to check blood work. He’s had weight issues all his life, and this surgery was an easy (albeit extremely expensive) way to solve these issues. Oddly, at 350 pounds my uncle Matt still managed to maintain an extremely active and dangerous lifestyle as a foreign affairs/war correspondent. He is one of the liveliest people I’ve ever met, and fits the uncle archetype almost perfectly; he will often tell embarrassing stories or lame jokes, and will offer up great one-liners. One of his favourites is the ingeniously insulting ‘you’re not as dumb as you look’, which he follows by a shrug and a wry smile.</p><p>I’m not one to be outdone though, and whenever I see him I offer up my own lame jokes. As he pulled into my driveway, I went up to him and said “Hey Matthew, where have you been? I’m seeing less and less of you!” I got some eye-rolls, but pro-tip: the best jokes always do.</p><p>And so with that humiliating start, we left Ottawa for the three-hour road trip into the heart of northern New York. I won’t mince words about upstate New York; Other than Niagara Falls and the Adirondacks, there’s not much to see, and the landscape is best described as ‘scruffy’. Moreover, it’s one of the most economically depressed parts of the United States. Back in the 19th century, it had been an economic power-house, as it was one of the first places after England to become industrialized. The construction of the Erie Canal brought people, goods, and money into the area and it soon became a centre of textile manufacture, taking the raw cotton from the slave plantations in the South, and turning them into cloth to be sold on the world market. But since the collapse of the Old South and its slave-based plantation economy, not much has happened. It seems like northern New York’s best days are in the rear-view mirror.</p><p>As we come in on Highway 81, the first thing we see is a mall, bigger than anything I’ve ever seen in Ottawa. Out of the forest which lines the highway, it rises like a castle. But instead of housing feudal lords, it houses the lords of commercialism, whose names are TJ Maxx, JC Penny, and Nordstrom, among others. The parking lot (or tower, rather) is filled with cars, a doubtless many that come from north of the border. The sad truth is that this mall is likely Syracuse’s main tourist attraction; all these people have come from near and far to pay tribute to all their favourite brand names, and it’s weird to see something so explicitly commercial be the main centre of attraction. But in the end, who am I to judge this phenomenon? I’m sitting in the back of the car wearing my Polo Ralph Lauren shoes, which I think are just <em>so neat</em>.</p><p>As we come into Syracuse proper, we find a small city, with just over 200,000 people, and a very small downtown. But there is something about the city that immediately strikes us as strange. First off, all the architecture is red brick. This is common enough in Canada, but in Syracuse there seems to be nothing else. Also, there are nearly no retail signs anywhere. There are no stores. Just… buildings. It’s like everything’s been concentrated into that monstrous mall, and there’s nothing else left. It’s a bit odd, but I reassure myself that it’s just a couple of streets that are like this, right?</p><p>It takes a little while to find the hospital because the streets make us feel like we’re navigating a rabbit warren; half of roads are closed, and they turn away from where you expect them to go. After about ten minutes, we’re finally at the hospital, and we drop my Uncle off. Now, Wendel and I are craving cholesterol, so we go off to find a fast food joint. America’s the birthplace of fast food, so it shouldn’t be too hard.</p><p>We drive around at first, looking for a Wendy’s, a McDonalds, hell, even a Burger King, but there’s nothing. The downtown is utterly devoid of stores or familiar restaurants, though there’s about seven or eight Subways for some reason. Moreover, the small minority of buildings that <em>are </em>labeled almost always end up being medical buildings; Office of Pediatrics, Gynecology Specialist, Optician, etc.</p><p>The monotony soon turns into confusion, which soon becomes anxiety. ‘Where the hell are all the fast food places?’ Meanwhile, we pass ‘Deangelo’s Pub’, or ‘Tracey’s Burger joint’. I could literally not care less about Deangelo or Tracey, where the hell is Wendy? Between the no-name food places, there are rows and rows of those anonymous buildings. A strange terror begins to grip us, like we are trapped in some kind of bizzaro-world where nothing is familiar and everything is just some façade of reality. After forty-five minutes, we are panicking.</p><p>We pass by one building that has a huge parking lot, and people are getting out of their cars to go into it. But WHAT is this building?? There are no signs, symbols, or anything! What is it used for!? All I can imagine is a huge empty room where people just stand there for hours!</p><p>My cousin eventually points out that it’s a church, so really…</p><p>Before long we get tired of looking, so we turn on the GPS, something we should have done in the first place. We search for the nearest fast-food restaurants. As we go down the list, we pass what looks like several local food places and fifteen Subways, which confuses and angers us, as we are not in the mood to ‘eat fresh’ nor support local economies. This town does not make sense. This bizzaro-world we’ve passed into, where the medical centres outnumber the fast-food chains ten to one, seems to be the antithesis to everything we hold dear. Only the GPS can release us from this terror.</p><p>And finally, it comes. As we keep scrolling GPS list, we see it… a lone Burger King, located on a solemn promontory in the most run down part of the city. It’s not quite the McDonalds with a ball-pit, but it’ll do.</p><p>As we come the Burger King, we find the parking lot littered with bottles, and there are a few vagrants sitting near the entrance. For my cousin and I, two sheltered white kids from upper-middle-class suburban Ottawa, which is ranked no. 1 on Canada’s list of ‘places to raise a family’, the nightmare continues. </p><p>This feeling of fear is interesting, as it’s something I’ve remarked in many of my travels south of the border. There’s something that happens when cross into the states, which is perhaps unfair to say, but you feel like you’re on your own more. It’s like every stereotype you’ve seen in movies and shows applies to this place, when in fact it’s not all that different than Canada. A film-noir detective story comes to mind, set in the gritty streets of urban America. It’s grim, it’s cutthroat, and the grizzled investigator is utterly alone in his struggle against a city that ‘chews you up and spits you out’, to borrow a phrase. In Syracuse, I see this world pass by me in the passenger seat. Everything is run down, the sidewalks and street corners are lined with hoodlums, and it all kind of exudes this hopelessness. You are truly presented with a reality that is stark, oppressive, and confrontational. It is you vs. it, and all the bets are against you. </p><p>But as I consider this ‘stark reality’, I realize that it’s really not that different from what I know. In a relative sense, Canada and the United States are nearly identical. We speak the same language, often with an indistinguishable accent, we eat the same food (as exemplified by my need to find a familiar American fast-food joint), and we practice religion and politics in a relatively similar way as well. So what accounts for the difference I see, and more importantly, what accounts for the strangeness that pervades this city?</p><p>My initial instinct was to pin it on capitalism, which in its most extreme form is expressed in a brutal social Darwinism that leaves the masses impoverished and without hope. It makes sense really. All the wealth is localized, both literally and figuratively, in that giant mall on the outskirts of the city. Perhaps it’s more like a castle than I thought. And yet, Canada has poverty and economic segregation. Though not as bad as the U.S. generally, it is still present and therefore not a distinctly American characteristic. Though it was no doubt a part of why Syracuse seemed so alien, it alone did not account for it. There had to be something more. </p><p>My next instinct was to blame it on ‘racial tension’. For example, once we get inside the Burger King, there’s a group of black guys in do-rags who give us a short stare. There’s a TV beside the counter, tuned in to CNN’s coverage of the situation in Ferguson, Missouri. Maybe I’m just imagining things, but maybe this imagining is part of the problem; when you presume a place has social tension, like so many Canadians presume of the United States, it tends to skew your perspective. Suddenly you are seeing things that aren’t there, like a look that maybe lasts a bit too long, or the way someone is standing next to you. For Americans who live this every day, the perception of tension alone probably exacerbates the problem. But again, Canada is a nice place but also sees racial tension. It is not an alien concept, and this could not fully account for Syracuse’s odd atmosphere. </p><p>I finally came to a realization that I was looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps reason for the strangeness of Syracuse does not lie within the differences between Canada and the United States, but rather the similarities. Perhaps the differences I see are more imagined than real; the fact that we are almost the same has caused us to identify ourselves and see each other in strange, even artificial ways. There’s the classic ‘poutine and hockey’ as an identifier of Canadian culture, which is pretty weak if you ask me. Even more shocking, Canadians often identify themselves as <em>not </em>American, as though our virtues could not exist without the supposed vices of America being there to contrast them. Compared to the way other nations identify themselves, this is again pretty tenuous. If anything, our existence as a country that was bi-lingual since its inception is something that is both more interesting and more pertinent, yet that interpretation seems less popular. </p><p>In the end, the differences between the U.S. and Canada are present, but not evident. Part of the reason Syracuse seemed so weird was because I’d seen this place before, I was familiar with the style of the buildings, the way the streets were organized. It was undeniable that I was not far from home. And yet, the very small differences were what threw me. In ways I could not initially perceive or understand, this place was different. The signs were unfamiliar or non-existent, the streets were just a touch narrower, and the buildings were all very similar-looking. It was as though this city had entered the municipal equivalent of the ‘uncanny valley’, where something is so close to reality, but because of some small or even imperceptible differences, it often seems disturbing. </p><p>When you add on the socio-economic woes that plague Syracuse, the result is a city that seems soulless, as though part of it died with the textile factories. In the end, there is no way I can fully describe the city itself, but I can describe the feeling. It’s like being in a racing video-game, where you drive through the sad imitation of a city that has no people, with buildings that serve no purpose. There are only the roads.</p><p>And with no place to go, the roads can only lead nowhere.</p> </div> </div> </article> </div><!-- /page-->