Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  We got into Michael’s SUV and drove past the ochre brick Hotel Syracuse—“our grandest and oldest hotel,” Ben said sardonically, nodding at a broken glass door behind a sawhorse. The War Memorial arena looked like an amusement park designed by Nikita Khrushchev, but it was the symbol of Syracuse’s zenith. Inside, the Syracuse Nationals, led by Dolph Schayes, the greatest Jewish basketballer, won the 1955 NBA title.

  The Nats moved to Philadelphia in 1962 and changed their name to the 76ers. Big-time sports never returned to Syracuse. The War Memorial was home to professional wrestling and minor-league hockey. Now the Syracuse Orange were the focus of local pride. Outside Las Vegas and Miami Beach, Syracuse is the only city where an orange blazer is considered tasteful.

  “We also won the NCAA football title in 1959,” Michael said.

  “In ’60,” Ben said, correcting him.

  “The ’59 team, they won the 1960 Cotton Bowl. I have a room devoted to Syracuse sports in my home.”

  “He’s actually an unofficial mascot,” Ben said.

  “I’m the voodoo doctor. I put on an orange top hat and face paint and put a hex on the other team.”

  “It’s too bad,” Ben said, “that we don’t have time to show you the traffic light on Tipp Hill.”

  “What’s so special about a traffic light?” I asked.

  “It’s upside down. The green light is on top. Tipp Hill is an Irish neighborhood. It was named after county Tipperary, because of the rolling hills. The people didn’t like the British red on top of the Irish green, so the kids threw stones at it until the city reversed it.”

  At the corner of Tompkins and Milton Streets was a bronze statue of a man in a floppy workingman’s cap telling Irish tales to a boy with a sagging slingshot.

  “My great-uncle was a stone thrower,” Ben said. “Fifty years later, they were grand marshals of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.”

  Then Ben made a confession: his grandfather, a Tipp Hill Irishman named William Francis “Billy” Walsh, was a former mayor of Syracuse who had also represented Central New York in Congress. His father, James Walsh, now held the same congressional seat. This was essential information for understanding Ben Walsh, but he rarely had to tell anyone. Everyone in Syracuse knew that was why he rode an elevator to the nineteenth floor every day, rather than driving a produce truck, like Chris. He was an Onondaga Valley aristocrat. What young person with a lineage like that would leave Syracuse?

  (Most people who come home to Syracuse do so for family reasons. Even the boosters concede you trade career for lifestyle. But there are financial enticements. In 2010, according to the National Association of Home Builders, it was the nation’s most affordable housing market, with 97.2 percent of homes sold affordable for a family earning the city’s median income. After Nate Desimone and his wife had a daughter, he submitted his résumé to the Come Home to Syracuse website, found a job as an executive recruiter, and bought a four-bedroom house for two and a quarter. Then there was Kathy Chappini, who came home to Syracuse from Maine—and got a $5,000 grant to open a candy store.)

  Dinosaur Bar-B-Que was not the best barbecue I’ve ever eaten. (I live in Chicago, you know.) The highlight was actually the men’s room, where the patrons were encouraged to cover the walls with what an academic once called “latrinalia” but we would call “dirty writing” or graffiti. I left Syracuse having seen an alligator in a fedora, carrying a harmonica labeled “Hohner Big-Ass Blues.”

  WHEN I SAW Ben Walsh again, five years later, he was working inside Syracuse’s city hall, a Romanesque Revival building of pebbled buff stone, with a turret and a tower wearing peaked red caps. It was an architectural brother of the Gilded Age’s Protestant temples. Ben was executive director of the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency, the body in charge of finding new life for the shells of the city’s abandoned factories. Not only had Carrier left, so had Allied Chemical, Chrysler, General Electric, and Fisher Body.

  The Air-Conditioning Capital of the World may have lost its title to the Confederates and the Chinese, but it was still home to skilled tradesmen and engineers who had refused to uproot themselves from Central New York. Where else did it snow enough for cross-country skiing?

  “You can lament the fact that these industries are gone, but that’s not to say their legacies are negative,” Ben said. “A lot of things they brought to our community define us today.”

  To see how high technology has replaced mass production in Syracuse, I visited Bitzer Scroll, which occupies a good-sized corner of the old Fisher Body plant. By promising to fill it with high-tech business, the city had persuaded General Motors not to tear the plant down.

  A German-owned company, Bitzer Scroll manufactures compressors for chillers and commercial air conditioners. Heavy-duty jobs. The most important component is the scroll—a cylinder with a whorl-shaped groove cut into one end. Driven by a crankshaft, the scroll compresses refrigerant from a liquid-vapor mix to a pure vapor. Since the correct depth of the groove is measured in microns, it must be designed and produced by engineers and skilled tradesmen. The assembly line, in a building whose address was still 1 General Motors Drive, was in a room where UAW workers once put together dashboards and interior moldings. Girders holding up the distant, Sistine ceiling were the only reminder that this had once been an auto plant.

  Richard Kobor, the facility’s president, was a former Carrier engineer who had spent seven years working for Bitzer in Germany. His bosses tried to open a compressor plant in their native country but couldn’t assemble an engineering team. Germans are wonderful engineers, but their mathematical qualities do make them rigid.

  “You can’t get people to change from a company across the street from your company, and it’s impossible to get someone to move from Munich to Stuttgart,” said Kobor, a loud, blunt executive whose Corvette Z06 occupied a prime space in the parking lot. “This wouldn’t be here if this could be done in Germany. Syracuse is where the engineers were that had the experience in the product.”

  Kobor got $1.4 million in incentive money from the state and hired several engineers away from Carrier, including his plant manager, Michael McKee. McKee had managed Carrier’s Syracuse chiller plant, until it moved to Charlotte in 1998. As a salaried employee, McKee was offered a transfer down south. The hourly employees were left behind, replaced with local, nonunion labor. Unimpressed with the educational system in North Carolina—many of his workers had rudimentary reading and math skills—McKee was glad to return to Central New York, whose scholastic heritage goes back to the religious revivals of the mid-nineteenth century. (Syracuse University, Colgate University, Cazenovia College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Hamilton College, Utica College, Elmira College, and Alfred University are all liberal arts colleges with roots in the Second Great Awakening, the evangelical movement that was so powerful in Central New York that the region became known as “the Burned-Over District,” because there was no one left to convert.) The Syracuse workforce is 20 percent more educated than the national average, according to the Metropolitan Development Authority.

  McKee took me on a tour of his plant, working backward through the process, from a craftsman polishing a scroll to the upright stainless steel cabinet where the scrolls were inscribed in cast iron, a process that took an hour. This quiet, clean, high-tech manufacturing was Syracuse’s work now.

  “Syracuse has always had a heavy industrial base,” McKee said. “Certainly in the last ten years, the area’s taken a hit with the large companies. There are small companies that have grown and continue to do well, but certainly, when you look at, starting back in the early nineties, General Motors pulling out of here, Carrier in the late nineties closing the large chiller plant … Crouse-Hinds is now a division of Cooper. They still do electrical boxes, but they’re a fraction of what they once were.”

  Among its sixty production workers, Bitzer Scroll employed a handful of Carrier refugees, including a machinist. Unlike Carrier, which had been organized by the Shee
t Metal Workers International Association, Bitzer Scroll was an open shop. Kobor had some strong opinions on unions and made sure I heard them before I left. He’d just been to Flint, to look at an auto plant scheduled for demolition.

  “The UAW sure had a lot to do with it,” Kobor said. He had a voice so loud it created its own echo. In his office, trying to convince a visitor of the folly of collective bargaining, it sounded especially hard and argumentative. “Is everybody around here who’s dying union? Yes. Are there companies in the area growing? Yes. Are they union? No. That’s a big deal. Until unions unionize China or Mexico, it’s very difficult to have a surviving business here that’s a union business. We don’t have the flexibility. But you know, most of it’s management. Management caused the unions by treating people so badly. Are you going to write about unions in your book?”

  I promised Kobor I’d get both sides of that story. And the next day, I did.

  GARY GALIPEAU DROVE into the Denny’s parking lot in a black Ford F-150 with the Empire State plate “NAZGUL.” If J. R. R. Tolkein’s Black Riders had driven pickup trucks instead of galloping around Middle Earth on dark-haired workhorses, this was exactly the color, make, and model they would have ordered from the showroom.

  “I’ve had this plate on four trucks,” Gary said. “Always a black four-by-four. I was a fan long before the movies.”

  In his early sixties, Gary was stocky and bald, but he was bald in the authoritative way John Glenn, or his on screen alter ego, Ed Harris, is bald. His head made hair look like an affectation unworthy of a mature man. With him was his wife, Barbara. Gary and Barbara had met while working at Carrier. They’d been recommended to me by the business manager of Sheet Metal Workers Local 58, because no couple in Syracuse had a more distressing story about what happens when a corporation divorces you in middle age. Perhaps no one in the Rust Belt did.

  Gary had grown up on the west end of Syracuse. When he’d hired in at Carrier, at age nineteen, the sign on the plant still read “AIR CONDITIONING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.” Barbara was from Downstate—Long Island—and sounded it. She’d moved to Syracuse to attend the university, dropped out, and got laid off from an industrial laundry.

  In 1978, when Barbara was laid off from the laundry, it was still possible to jump from factory to factory. Barbara didn’t know anything about Carrier. She and a friend were simply driving around Syracuse, looking for work, when they spotted the big factory on Thompson Road.

  “Must be jobs in there,” Barbara said.

  They walked up to the security office and announced, “We want to fill out an application.”

  “Listen, honey,” the guard said, “we’re taking applications at one o’clock.”

  So Barbara and friend went to lunch and returned in the afternoon to fill out applications with hundreds of other job seekers. Three days later, she was offered a job on the window unit assembly line, spraying glue on the fiberglass insulation for four hundred air conditioners a day.

  “After five years, you’ll be golden,” Barbara was told. “You’ll have a job for life.”

  The year after Barbara was hired, Carrier was bought, in a hostile takeover, by United Technologies. After promising to keep the headquarters in Syracuse, UTC moved it to Hartford in 1986.

  “That was the downfall,” Barbara said. “Then we lost one part of the business after another, to either down south or Tennessee.”

  In 2004, Gary and Barbara lost their jobs when Carrier moved the last of its Syracuse manufacturing jobs to Singapore. There, even the most skilled workers were paid only half the $27 an hour Gary had earned as a metalworker. The couple were lucky their jobs had gone to Asia rather than Georgia. That that made them eligible for Trade Adjustment Assistance—extended unemployment benefits from the federal government. A clause in the union’s collective bargaining agreement required Carrier to reimburse its discarded workers for four years of tuition and books, if they completed their courses with a C average. Congressman Walsh and Senator Hillary Clinton worked out a voucher program, so the local public colleges waived their fees until Carrier paid in full. Barbara went to Onondaga Community College for a two-year degree in health information technology, “which is a fancy way of saying medical records.”

  Even with the degree, Barbara couldn’t find work in the health care field, so she took a job at Goulds Pumps, a sump pump manufacturer. It paid $12.47 an hour, a substantial drop from her job in production controls at Carrier, but decent money by the standards of Central New York in the A.D. of A/C.

  At this point in the story, Gary stood up and excused himself from our breakfast table. He hadn’t finished his French toast. The coffee wasn’t making him antsy. He knew what Barbara was about to tell me, and, as the man who loved her, he didn’t want to relive it.

  On Barbara’s ninth day at Goulds Pumps, a loose thread on her glove wrapped itself around a drill press, taking Barbara’s hand with it. Her index finger was torn off at the first knuckle. The nailless digit was a stub of glossy flesh. The amputation kept Barbara out of work for eight weeks. When Barbara returned to work, she found the factory so distressing that she soon took a medical records job in a hospital, paying $2.50 an hour less.

  After earning a degree in human resources management, Gary found that fifty-eight was too old to start a new career and that he lacked the salesmanship for insurance. Fortunate enough to draw a full pension from Carrier, he was able to take a part-time job behind the meat counter at Wegman’s, a supermarket. It filled the health-insurance gap between the end of Carrier and the beginning of Medicare. Syracuse’s preeminent vocations are now education and medicine—the training of the young and the preservation of the old. Where nothing is left for the middle-aged or the middle class, it is difficult to be both. (The largest individual employer in the area is the Oneida Nation’s casino, which hired 150 former Carrier workers as bartenders and janitors.)

  “I like to tell people we can’t base an economy selling hamburgers and insurance policies to each other,” Gary said. “There’s a certain satisfaction within producing something tangible, something you can hold in your hand and say, ‘I made this.’ In fact, to my way of thinking, there’s a gratification there you can’t achieve any place else. At a time, I was regarded as a craftsman in metal. A lot of my learning for that particular field was passed down. Tribal learning from those who went before me. I would love to pass down what I have learned. I’m sixty-two years old, and I’m probably the youngest of the metal fabricators who knows how to make a Pittsburgh Lock Seam using brake valves. That’s an example of tribal learning that when I die will be gone.”

  Having met in the factory, Gary and Barbara are a couple who can complete each other’s philosophies of labor. Barbara did, at 10:50 in the morning, in a Denny’s overlooking exit 35 of the New York State Thruway.

  “… And I think when he’s talking about manufacturing, that sense of satisfaction that at the end of the day”—she meant this literally, not figuratively—“you can look at what you did. You can measure it. You know you did something. I work in an office now. We deal with medical records. I really can’t look at a body of my work and say, ‘This is what I did today.’ I never have that same sense of satisfaction.”

  THE CARRIER PLANT was just across a traffic circle from my motel, the Red Roof Inn Syracuse, so I jogged over there in the evening. The banner still boasted “WORLD’S LARGEST AIR CONDITIONING COMPANY,” but the white panels of its outer walls were already yellowing, like the pages of an unread book. An American flag, tattered at its tassled fringe, hung over the entrance. I ran through an open gate. There was no security guard to stop me. In a far corner of the parking lot, cattails grew from a dank slough. The weeds reminded me of a saying I had heard from Gary. “There are unbreakable rules when it comes to man’s interactions with the planet: Number one, gravity always wins. Number two, nature always bats last.”

  12.

  Lackawanna Blues

  Before I visited the ruins of Bethlehem S
teel’s Lackawanna Works, on the shore of Lake Erie, I purchased a pocket guide to wildflowers. I wanted to test Gary Galipeau’s maxim that nature always bats last, by finding out which plants it sends to the plate first. As I had discovered at the old Fisher Body site in Lansing, there are gardens that thrive on neglect.

  In the thirty years since its day-after-Christmas death sentence, Lackawanna Steel had been untouched by wrecking crews or landscapers. It was an open-air terrarium for the study of how quickly our discarded places become feral. I can’t say “return to nature,” because the land had lost its virginity over a century ago. Only the hardiest posthuman weeds can thrive in asphalt, slag, and dirt poisoned by sulfur. Lackawanna is an American Macchu Picchu or Angkor Wat, except the verdure is inclining up its slopes in full view of history, recorded by ruin pornographers, such as myself, with digital cameras. Atop the neoclassical administration building, with all its gables, periscope windows, and half-shell cornices, the bronze roof had oxidized to an aquatic green. The grid of windows in the storehouse, where the mill’s supplies and materials were received, was broken out in a crossword puzzle pattern. Between the frontage road and the chain-link fence, peppergrass burst from the ditches. I drove my Ford Focus across the railroad tracks, ignoring this warning: “NO TRESPASSING: PRIVATE PROPERTY. VIOLATERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. OWNER: TECUMSEH REDEVELOPMENT, INC.” By now, I was familiar enough with empty factories to know the sign could be disregarded without legal consequences, or even an uncomfortable encounter with a security guard. That was how little anyone cared about this land, which could no longer grow anything edible, produce anything salable, or support a home that was livable. Another sign, six words beneath an arrow, directed me to “IRON CITY PUBLIC SCALER SLAG PRODUCTS.” Ignoring that as well, I parked the car and climbed out with my camera, my notebook, and my Peterson First Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America. These are my field notes: