For decades, Syracuse’s 15th Ward was the nerve center of the city’s Black community.

That ended when urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s — including the construction of Interstate 81 and new civic, municipal, and medical facilities — decimated the neighborhood, leaving only scattered structures behind.

Felicia Young-Wilkinson’s family grew up in the 15th Ward and she said that while she only lived there for the first part of her childhood, the neighborhood plays an important role in her family’s history and her memories of growing up in Syracuse.

“It may have looked like a problem area from the outside, but internally the families were very cohesive and tight knit,” she said of the former neighborhood, located immediately east of downtown.

Despite now living more than a thousand miles away in Louisiana, Young-Wilkinson said multiple generations of her family called the ward home.

“As far as family history, it’s probably from the 1930s all the way up to the 1960s, between my grandmother raising my father and my uncle there, and our family,” she said.

She said her family lived in the Pioneer Homes housing development for the first several years of her life.

“I think as the neighborhood began to change, my parents moved us into a two-family home on Madison Street," she said.

If you drive along Madison Street today, you’ll see mental health offices, clinics and parking lots, before running right up against an on-ramp to I-81. Prior to the 1960s however, it was right in the heart of Syracuse’s Black community. 

“My memories of the ward as a small child, there was definitely a sense of community there.” Young-Wilkinson recalled. “My mother would take us grocery shopping and we would stop and walk through the courts, and visit with other wives and chat them up.”

A birds-eye view of what once was for Syracuse's 15th Ward neighborhood, prior to the construction of I-81.

Despite having those personal memories of her own, she emphasizes that one of the ways the 15th Ward has impacted her the most is through her father’s childhood memories of growing up there, in particular his friendship with a young Italian-American named George Tolone.

“He tracked my father down in the 1980s and that’s when I was introduced to him,” she said. “I used to sit in when I would visit Syracuse on some of their conversations and listen to what that history was about.”

Robert Searing, curator of history at the Onondaga Historical Association, who is featuring Young-Wilkinson's story in their monthly publication, said that melding of different cultures was a common experience for individuals who lived in the 15th Ward back in the early part of the 20th century.     

“When you were living in the neighborhood, you had an African American friend, you had a German friend, you might have had a Jewish friend,” he said. “Everybody was kind of on the same page and united by that neighborhood feeling.”

But he said as demographics changed, the 15th Ward became a predominantly Black neighborhood over the course of the next two decades.

When federal urban renewal funds became available in the mid 1950s, highways were also cutting through cities across New York. In Syracuse, city officials turned to the 15th Ward, where the housing stock was aging, and in some cases in disrepair, when it came time for the city to take its turn at redevelopment.

While the construction of I-81 is the best known source of the ward’s destruction, urban renewal projects on either side of the highway meant far more land was cleared that what would be needed simply for a highway right of way. The Everson Museum of Art, the Justice Center, Madison and Jefferson Towers, and Upstate Medical University, among other buildings, all stand on land that was once a part of the 15th Ward, with I-81’s footprint taking up space on either side of Almond Street. Much of the land to this day remains empty parking lots.

“We’re going to make this old city with some of the buildings that are 100 years old, and we’re going to clear them out and build new, build new concrete and steel. We’re going to revitalize our urban center,” Searing said of the thought process at the time.

Young-Winkinson said while she wasn’t aware of it as a child back in the early 1960s, those plans had her parents planning their next move.

“It was never told to us they are going to tear down these houses,” she said. “They never discussed things like that, so it wasn’t until they started to tear down the houses on Madison Street during that three-year period that my dad said, ‘OK, this is a steppingstone to something better.’”

While property owners who were forced out received compensation, many residents felt they weren’t compensated fairly and didn’t have enough of a say in the process.

For Young-Wilkinson’s family, there was another factor they encountered as they charted their course in post-urban renewal Syracuse. The discriminatory loan policies of the day made it nearly impossible for her father, who worked in medical research, to take out a loan for a home.

“My father was pretty dejected after being rejected the first two times,” she said.'

She said at that time, it took the help of a white colleague on the third try—which took place in Cortland, not Syracuse — to get the bank to budge. The family was then able to move into their own home in a different part of Syracuse, but she stresses that the dispersal of the ward’s residents left a lasting hole in the fabric of the city.

“That sense of a tight knit community was lost because of all of the ‘urban renewal,’” she said.

That’s why Young-Wilkinson said it’s important that people like herself continue to share the history of the Syracuse’s 15th Ward. 

“Memories that my father and his friend George had, and I had, and we share are what made that neighborhood what it was back then."

Young-Wilkinson said that while her father passed away in 2016, she still keeps in touch with his good friend George who is now in his 90s.

She also emphasizes that any future development stemming from the anticipated I-81 project must take the community’s wishes into account.