Thirty years ago, Harry Lewis watched the elm trees canopying Lancaster Avenue wilt, yellow and die from Dutch elm disease. Fifteen years ago, a 135-mph wind blew through his neighborhood, sending a tree into his upstairs window. Lewis, who’s lived at 935 Lancaster Ave. for nearly 50 years, still worries about destruction. But it’s not raging winds or withering tree bark he’s concerned with, it’s the deterioration of a neighborhood he has watched change over a half century.

Over the years, Lewis, 81, has fought the city on housing ordinances. He’s fought Syracuse University on building the Carrier Dome, and he’s even fought the complaints of his own wife, who said she would rather not live among noisy student renters.

Lewis is the current treasurer and former seven-year president of the South East University Neighborhood Association, the oldest and arguably strongest neighborhood organization in Syracuse. He is a watchdog for a neighborhood he wants to protect and a living history of the changing university area.

But he remains here. This is his home. It has been for 49 years, 11 months and eight days. Through the years he’s seen the neighborhood change, but what brought him to Syracuse – and what keeps him here – is the hope that it doesn’t.

‘I knew from experience that cities constantly change, areas change,’ he said. ‘But I knew if we lived up near the university that the university area would never change. It will always be the same. Well, in some respects.’

Lewis voices the concerns and expectations of many university-area residents who’ve seen the student population move deeper into the neighborhood. When Lewis moved to his home on Lancaster Avenue nearly 50 years ago, he paid $17,200 for the three-story, four-bedroom house. At the time, there were only three houses with students on the block. The rest were families. Lewis’ children had a group of young friends who would walk to school together. Noise violations, property damage and annual block parties weren’t even on the radar.

‘The circus’

Tuesday’s MayFest block party on Euclid Avenue is about as nerve-wracking for neighbors as it is anticipated by students.

MayFest was established in 2005, and it established its notorious block party reputation in 2007. In an attempt to separate itself from the off-campus partying, the university renamed MayFest to SU Showcase this year. Last year, 36 houses along Euclid Avenue hosted more than 2,500 students, and police issued no citations.

But block parties haven’t always gone off so smoothly. Livingstock, a 1999 block party turned riot on the 700 block of Livingston Avenue, is fresh in the mind of Lewis and others who watched bonfires blaze late into the night and saw glass and plastic bottles flung at police officers who tried to break up the crowd.

Thirty-nine people were arrested that night, including 10 on felony charges of first-degree rioting. The Post-Standard described the scene as an ‘alcohol-fueled riot,’ with several bonfires set by intoxicated students rising 30 feet into the air.

‘By the grace of God we escaped deaths and serious injury, it became an ugly, ugly scene very, very quickly,’ Syracuse Mayor Roy Bernaldi told The Post-Standard the night of the incident.

The morning after the riot, Lewis drove around his neighborhood. He saw chairs in trees, charred furniture and blackened pavement. Complete destruction made starkly visible by daylight.

‘It’s the destruction that’s the worst part,’ Lewis said, shaking his head.

Opposition to MayFest from the community stems largely from the fear of another Livingstock, but it’s not the only concern. There’s neighborhood worry over local-area high school students getting mixed up in the festivities and illegal drinking.

‘If it’s illegal the rest of the year, why’s it legal on this day?’ Lewis asked. ‘But you know, it would take a myriad of police to make all those arrests.’

Kerry Fiesinger, program coordinator at SU’s Office of Orientation and Off Campus Programs, said members of the Department of Public Safety and the Student Association went around Sunday to student houses, giving out literature and explaining what the city ordinances are and how to stay safe.

Many neighbors tend to keep to themselves on MayFest, holing away in their houses or getting out of the neighborhood completely. Not Lewis. Last year he drove around video taping the masses of students.

‘I like to see the circus,’ he said.

Making noise

MayFest happens once a year, but Lewis has had to cope with the daily difficulties of sharing a neighborhood with college students. At least twice a week, Lewis and his wife, Mary, are woken up in the middle of the night. It’s the yelling, blasting music and sometimes drunken singing.

‘That’s the standard procedure. Thursday, Friday, sometimes Saturday. We’re awake. We can hear ’em,’ he said. ‘But I was a kid once, too.’

Lewis said he’s well aware of the mantra ‘kids will be kids,’ and he typically only calls the police when things get really out of hand – so far just once this semester.

In the height of the partying season (usually as the weather warms up, beginning a few weeks before MayFest), Corey Driscoll, government and community relations associate at SU, said her office will receive about two to three disturbance calls per week. The numbers, she said, rise and fall over the course of a year but have remained steady year to year.

Shea Lambert, a senior conservation biology major at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, has lived across from Lewis for two years. He said these complaints are often justified.

‘It’s loud. Weekends are noisy,’ Lambert said. He said he and his friends are also to blame: They’ll throw parties, though recently they’ve cut back.

One day after a party, Lambert was playing basketball with some friends when a little boy from down the street who typically liked to shoot around with them dropped by. He mentioned the party, that he’d heard the noise, it’d kept him up, and that he knew it was coming from their house.

‘That killed,’ Lambert said. ‘It’s easy to forget people live here.’

Hanging in the balance

For neighbors today, the root of concern is not so much student behavior, but the density of student renters.

In 1974, as enrollment at the university increased, so did student population in the surrounding neighborhoods. The 1970s brought a relaxed enforcement of today’s two-year university housing requirement in an effort to accommodate rising numbers of students.

The result was an influx of student renters. Fiesinger said her office works with the roughly 8,000 off-campus students in more than 2,500 houses and apartments. She said the increase in off-campus student housing and over-capacitated residence halls are also sending students further away from the university, which makes outreach difficult.

Patricia Tinto, a professor in the School of Education, moved to 835 Livingston Ave. in 1976. She liked the school, the urban-yet-suburban feeling of the neighborhood, and, perhaps most importantly, the nice mix of students and families.

But that mix soon disappeared as larger renting corporations bought up properties. As they began to charge by the bedroom, families couldn’t afford to move in, and students were hard to keep out.

‘My daughters come home now, they’re 30 and 34, and I wouldn’t even have them walk by themselves,’ she said. ‘Whereas when they were eight and nine, they could go to their friends houses at midnight and I wouldn’t worry.’

Over-renting and the deterioration of rental properties became two primary concerns for members of SEUNA. Dining rooms, basements and attics become bedrooms, Tinto said. Four-bedroom houses often sleep six, and cars are parked everywhere.

So when the house next door to Tinto was sold to a larger rental company geared toward students, she fought back. ‘It was so important to us to keep the house next door a family house,’ she said.

Tinto said she sold the property next door, under the impression it would remain ‘family-owned,’ only to see it re-sold to a larger rental corporation that ignored city zoning and certification guidelines.

Earlier this month, a state Supreme Court judge ruled that the house was not certified to be rented.

‘My daughters come back and they get angry and say, ‘Why do college kids think that our home is a place to trash?” Tinto said. ‘People don’t seem to think that we’re a long-term community with roots. We are, and that’s what angers us.’

In addition to reporting violations of city ordinances, which say buildings must be certified before they can be rented, SEUNA also tries to attract families to the area. Lewis said SEUNA receives $250,000 a year from SU, and much of this money goes toward attracting more families to the neighborhood.

But it’s not animosity toward students driving the initiative, Lewis said. He wants the neighborhood to be better for them as well.

‘We like having students. We’re not against having students, understand that,’ he said.

An ongoing battle

Lewis has been a face for the neighbors, a staple of a past generation. He makes a point to attend every SU-neighborhood event – from chili cook-offs to Westcott welcomes – and shakes the hands of new student neighbors every fall. Residents call him the most dependable person on the block.

He’s a firm believer in the neighborhood he thought would never change. Sometimes the things that upset him are hard for students to understand.

He was deeply angered recently. Last weekend, when the steps leading up to Westminster Park were destroyed, Lewis called it the worst case of vandalism he’s witnessed in recent memory.

The long set of steps on the 800 block of Euclid Avenue – 100 years old and restored by SEUNA in 1977 – were torn up by students who used them as the base of a fire pit.

‘They don’t give a damn,’ Lewis said, irritated. ‘If they really were interested in the neighborhood at all, they would protect it in so far as not tearing it apart.

After all these years, tensions and misunderstandings continue as student presence in the neighborhood grows. Some expect the relationship between students and permanent residents to sour, yet some still hope it might improve. Maybe tomorrow will tell.

jmterrus@syr.edu

Published on April 19, 2009 at 12:00 pm