I've lived in Syracuse for most of my life. I lived through the Labor Day Storm, the second longest Division I basketball game where Syracuse finally beat Connecticut at 1:22 am after going into triple overtime, and Bath Salt City. I've seen this city grow and change and it will always be home to me.
Here are six things that all Syracusians feel.
1. Extreme pride in SU basketball.
From the men's team making it to the Elite 8 to the women's team also making the Elite 8 after beating South Carolina on Friday night, we are so proud.
2. You resent it when someone not from Upstate complains about the cold and snow.
Just found out this morning that there might be another polar vortex in April. Not surprised.
3. Living between two worlds of extreme poverty and violence and being one of the top college towns for drinking and nightlife.
The Atlantic wrote about it. There's a highway that goes through the middle of the city that was built in a poor black neighborhood and created white flight into the suburbs.
Combine that with weird zoning laws and you have kids going to school with a ~50 percent chance of graduating two blocks down from a school district with an 89 percent graduation rate and surrounded by college kids going downtown to drink, buy drugs (illegal and prescription) and the strip club that has the decorations from Kahunaville.
Okay, Paradise Found is over by Le Moyne, not downtown, but #stillbitter. It's really evident when you leave the University area that you're in areas of concentrated poverty as soon as you go under the I-81 underpass. And sometimes you'll see patches of these beautiful Victorian houses that are owned by politicians and professors in Sedgwick, the Valley, and Strathmore surrounded by beautiful Victorians, converted into duplexes, board up and falling apart.
It's living between two worlds, there's the shiny mall where people pay for valet parking and then on your way home and you remember that Syracuse has one of the highest rates of concentrated and radicalized poverty in the country.
4. Being unimpressed by the architectural masterpiece and cultural center that is Destiny USA.
They don't have Kahunaville anymore so what's even the point? Plus you're there so much that it just doesn't have the appeal anymore. Besides, you're not gonna find parking anyway.
5. Extreme embarrassment about Bath Salt City and Spike.
Recently, a man high on spike a kind of synthetic marijuana lit his mattress on fire. And then there was that woman, from Fulton not Syracuse, who got "420" tattooed on her forehead to get free Spike from 420 Emporium.
And then there was Bath Salt City, a t-shirt designed by a guy I meet at concerts named Tom, referencing the time in 2010 that a bunch of people did a lot of bath salts across the street from City Hall and ended up paralyzed. A guy who ran for city council sold a bunch of stuff he called "molly" but it was really bath salts, something that came out of nowhere in 2009.
Apparently the DEA says Syracuse, known as the Salt City for its vast salt mines, was ground zero.
6. Not caring that Jim Boeheim picks his nose on national TV.
