The Onondaga Creekwalk is a mostly paved, partly bricked, multi-use trail running in Syracuse, New York, which has so far seen more than three decades of planning, construction, and delays, starting in 1988. The trail is designed for bicyclists, skaters, and pedestrians to approximately parallel any desired portion of Onondaga Creek's run connecting Kirk Park on Syracuse's South Side, downstream through downtown at Armory Square, and then on to Onondaga Lake at the creek's ultimate mouth.
During both of the two overall phases completed so far, designers were able to route the trail partly as a brand new, dedicated path that stayed within view of Onondaga Creek. Other parts were built as compromises in the face of creekside obstacles, generally co-locating the trail with pre-existing street and sidewalk pavement, usually at a significant distance from the water.
When added to pre-existing parkways and city streets paralleling Onondaga Creek between West Colvin Street at Kirk Park, upstream to Ballantyne Road in The Valley neighborhood, the total available creekway distance can be interpreted as a paved run of .
Phase 1 Walking Tour Notes In April 2015, the Onondaga Creekwalk Phase 1 experience was enhanced by the addition of a series of 12 all-weather interpretive signage kiosks, along with an associated series of short local history videos, linked by a smartphone-readable code. This was during the then-mayoral administration of Stephanie Miner, working with the Onondaga Historical Association (OHA), and a design class at Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA).
For Phase 1, there are two single-page PDFs that map and describe the route. The first is "Tour Syracuse's History..." which covers the series of kiosks and videos. The second is the "Onondaga Creekwalk" brochure, which serves as a more traditional trail map.
Starting from Armory Square headed northerly, or downstream, here is an ordered summary of these signage and linked video locations, together with several other locations of note.
• Trailhead on West Jefferson Street, west side of The MoST in Armory Square. Kiosk 1) The Armory and the associated video tie into the former New York National Guard building, and the history of the guard's Troop D Cavalry unit, based in Syracuse.
• Between West Jefferson and Walton. Here, Onondaga County's "Save the Rain" project installed a showcase of four green infrastructure technologies.
• Walton Street intersection, south side. At this point, Phase 2 of the Onondaga Creekwalk connects, headed briefly west and then south.
• West Fayette Street intersection, south side. The sculpture by Brendan Rose and students, "Walt, the Loch West Monster", was installed November 2011..
• West Fayette Street intersection, south side. Kiosk 2) The Warehouse covers Syracuse University's so-named building nearby, and links to a video bio of Syracuse pioneer John Wilkinson.
• Between West Fayette and West Washington. Kiosk 3) Rumble of Trains explains the massive, surviving limestone wall and twin-arched creek bridge nearby, linking to a video showing how this formerly supported an eight-platform train shed attached to the New York Central's third downtown station.
• West Washington Street, north side. Kiosk 4) The Original Washington Station and the related video talk about Syracuse's brief, personal interaction with New York Central railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt.
• West Washington Street, north side. This represents the starting point for the first of two stretches where Phase 1 planners made routing compromises due to creekside obstacles. There are structures in this area built to straddle the creek: 1) The city-owned Washington Street Parking Garage; and 2) The Syracuse Office Environments building, as conjoined with Creekwalk Commons. Beyond Erie Boulevard West, National Grid's headquarters campus is apparently so tight to the creek (with the West Street Arterial hemming in things from the other side) that planners couldn't find a way to put the trail through here, even though the City of Syracuse is actually the titled owner of the creekbed in this area.
• Compass Rose Park between Water and Erie at Franklin. Kiosk 5) The Niagara Mohawk Buildling links to a topically matching video.
• West Genesee Street at Wallace, near old Fire Station No. 12. Kiosk 6) The Old Red Mill links to a video detailing Frederick Horner's once-nearby saw mill.
• Beneath Route 690 and associated overpasses. The "creek right" walkway is briefly carried above the splash zone for two large outflow pipes, which are county-owned outfall locations for the Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) problem suffered in Syracuse and many other cities. Direct discharge of untreated sanitary sewer, mixed with an overwhelming amount of storm water, is inevitable during high water times, so long as any significant part of the upstream infrastructure remains combined.
• Beneath Evans Street bridge. Here there is a connecting trail between the creekwalk proper and North Franklin Street, opening up options to travel in a loop in the Franklin Square district.
• Between Evans and Plum. This is the most likely zone for the creekwalk to be occasionally closed due to flooding, especially in spring.
• Old Plum Street Bridge. Kiosk 7) Coal Dust and Smokestacks links to a video covering the surviving and historically registered O.M. Edwards building nearby. Little known bonus fact: Plum Street formerly traversed in a dogleg, from the west side near the Erie Canal (today, Erie Boulevard West), under the elevated railroad, turning easterly toward North Franklin. The installation of Route 690 atop the rail corridor cut the street in two, but both disconnected portions today still retain the "Plum Street" designation.
• Old railroad bridge near Maltbie Street. Kiosk 8) Remnants of Railroads and the video tie the rail spur formerly carried by this bridge with old manufacturers in the district, including the maker of the Bradley Forging Hammer. Little known bonus fact: This railroad bridge and a second nearby both carried sidings which split off of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad — back-tracking nearly all the way from State Fairgrounds, more than two miles away as the crow flies. This Herculean effort was required, despite the circumstance that the DL&W's main line already passed right through Syracuse's near west side, just seven or so city blocks to the south, sandwiched between what is today Erie Boulevard West and West Fayette Street. It was not so simple to route a siding north, however, as the city had gotten congested, and the competing New York Central already monopolized two intervening spaces, the first in the same near west side yard, and the second running parallel along what is today the corridor for Route 690.
• Second old railroad bridge near Maltbie Street. Supports the U.S. Geological Survey's outhouse-sized stream gauging station Onondaga Creek at Spencer Street.
• 150 feet upstream from Spencer Street bridge. There is a concrete structure often visible in the creek bed, which triggers a sharp dropoff and a small standing wave in times of strong current. This is a county-owned box-shaped pipe for sewer to flow, by the pressure of gravity, under the creek to the other side, en route to the Metropolitan Sewer Plant, fronting on Hiawatha Boulevard West.
• Between Spencer and West Kirkpatrick. Just east of the trail as built in this area, the creekwalk was restrained from being routed directly along the well-treed, government-owned corridor to either side of Onondaga Creek, because adjoining privately held acreage ranked as the American Bag and Metal Company's listed Superfund site. The land has since been remediated under the government's brownfields incentives program.
• Syracuse Parks Department's Headquarters Area, north of Spencer Street. Kiosk 9) Mineral Springs and Baths and the associated video cover a time period when several nearby resorts offered heated or cool baths in salty groundwater, which included natural chlorine and sulphur.
• Inner Harbor, north of West Kirkpatrick Street. Kiosk 10) A Harbor for Syracuse and the video cover a tradition of boatbuilding in this area of Syracuse, including by New York's canal maintenance department, which once manufactured its own work boats nearby.
• Inner Harbor, north of West Kirkpatrick Street. There are free, un-timed parking lots here for the waterfront park, which also serve as de facto trailhead parking.
• West Bear Street. More free trailhead parking, and the junction between the Onondaga Creekwalk and the combined stretch of Loop the Lake and Empire State trails, heading northwesterly at first alongside city streets.
• The Baby Maddox Lawrence plaque and bench. This memorial references a February 2016 murder committed by the father of the 21-month-old victim, whose body was recovered nearby from Onondaga Creek.
• Van Rensselaer at Hiawatha Boulevard. The vacant land alongside the water in this area will probably always remain vacant. This was the spot into which the "spoils" were pumped, within a temporary system of dikes, allowing silt to slowly settle from the water, during two prior rounds of dredging the waterway for navigation, 1998-1999 and 2018–2019.
• Ramp approaching Hiawatha Boulevard West. Kiosk 11) A Sea of 'Solar Salt' Sheds and the associated video talk about the large amount of nearby acreage that was once devoted to extracting salt from brine by evaporation. Plus a recently rediscovered tie-in to a silent black and white melodrama filmed in Syracuse.
• Beneath the bridge at Hiawatha Boulevard West. There is de facto trailhead parking here at the corner of Destiny's overflow parking lots closest to the creek/Inner Harbor water — accessible from either Solar Street, or through the underpass from the mall's main lots. This is about as close as one can legitimately park in order to access the lake view, when it's open, which is about 0.4 miles away. Unaccountably, trail designers made no provision for simply allowing visitors to park in the similarly situated corner of Destiny's main lots, then to cut across the mall's Harborside Drive ring road, and then through the trees to see the lake, or to get started on the trail from this end.
• Lake overlook. Kiosk 12) A Sacred Lake and the matching video cover Onondaga Lake's significance in the pre-contact formation of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Chronology of development Though long wished for by many citizens, Syracuse landscape architect Steve Buechner traces the origins of the Onondaga Creekwalk concept to 1965, when incoming Syracuse Parks Commissioner Jim Heath asked him, as a young staffer, to draft out several greenways, one of which wound up focusing on the creek. The idea didn't go anywhere for more than 20 years until Buechner, then in the private sector, mentioned it to Robert Congel of The Pyramid Companies, at a time when Congel and others were paying a burst of redevelopment attention to several old factory buildings in what is now known as the Franklin Square area.
Using computer technology against the newspaper archive, June 24, 1988, can be established as the first time the ultimately built version of the creekwalk was publicly mentioned. At that time, Pyramid described a plan to get a longer trail started by building just that stretch running through Franklin Square from near Route 690's overpasses, downstream as far as Spencer Street. That news was reported within the context of a large number of revelations from Pyramid and Syracuse's then mayoral administration of Thomas G. Young—regarding development plans for the shopping mall project which became Destiny USA, and for the larger industrial district formerly known as Oil City and now dubbed Lakefront, including Franklin Square.
First Part of Phase 1