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A visit to the Everson Museum of Art.

My first stop on this year's upstate New York journey was the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. A small museum, in a "rust belt" city, the best exhibits were of modern ceramics. The building is an I. M. Pei late 1960s concrete collection of cubes in the brutalist style. Not my favorite style, but he did a good job of laying out the very open interior.

It was built on a site in Syracuse's (failed) mid-century Urban Renewal project, surrounded by expressways, parking lots and an arena/convention center that apparently is empty most of the time.

I'm sure there are nice parts of Syracuse, but the area near the museum is an urban wasteland. It once was a vibrant neighborhood before being leveled and then isolated by now crumbling overhead expressways. Another example of what was so wrong with 1960's "urban renewal".

The museum, which acquired its property for free after other redevelopment plans failed, to its credit devoted most of a gallery to the history of the area and the disastrous results of "slash and burn" land clearing. The area around the museum was supposed to become a cultural "community plaza" The plaza was in fact built, as was the museum, but there was no longer any community to occupy it.

August 7, 2022