Autos – Syracuse, NY

Syracuse (/ˈsɪrəkjuːz, ˈsɛr-, –kjuːs/ SIRR-ə-kewz, SERR-, -⁠kewss)^[4][5][6][7] is a city in New York, United States, and the county seat of Onondaga County. With 148,620 residents,^[8] and a metropolitan area of 662,057 people, it is the most populous city in Central New York, as well as the fifth-most populated city and 13th-most populated municipality in New York.^[a]

Syracuse lies in the homeland of the Onondaga, the Firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which according to tradition was founded on the shores of Onondaga Lake. Named in 1820 for the ancient Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily, incorporated as a village in 1825 and chartered as a city in 1848, it grew around brine springs that made it the nation’s leading salt producer in the 19th century, earning the nickname “the Salt City.” The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, and later the New York Central Railroad made the city a crossroads of commerce and ideas, and it became a center of the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad.

From the late 19th century through the mid-20th, Syracuse was a major manufacturing center, home to Carrier, General Electric‘s television operations, Syracuse China and the Franklin automobile, and it drew Irish, German, Italian, Polish and Jewish immigrants and, during the Great Migration, Black families from the South. In the 1950s and 1960s, urban renewal and the elevated Interstate 81 viaduct destroyed the 15th Ward, the center of the city’s Black community. Deindustrialization from the 1970s cost the city much of its industrial base, and its population fell from a peak of about 220,000 in 1950.

Today Syracuse is the economic and educational center of Central New York. Its largest employers are SUNY Upstate Medical University and Syracuse University, whose sports teams have made the city’s name nationally known; other institutions include SUNY ESF, Le Moyne College and Onondaga Community College. The city lies at the interchange of I-81 and I-90, where the state is replacing the I-81 viaduct with a street grid, and Micron Technology has begun building a semiconductor complex in nearby Clay that is expected to be the largest private investment in state history. The Great New York State Fair is held each summer on the city’s western edge.