The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

I have at hand a weighty marketing folio produced by the Pyramid Company of Syracuse, New York, for a mighty super-mega-mall they are proposing to build there called DestiNY. Get it? This "tourism destination" would be a six-level 3.5 million square foot addition to the already existing 1.5 million square foot Carousel Center Mall on the shore of Onandaga Lake about a mile north of downtown Syracuse. It would include a 900,000 square foot food court called "the Theatery Winter Garden, an indoor Erie Canal" featuring such historically challenged chain restaurants as the Rainforest Cafe, PF Changs, and Bahama breeze. Also 4,000 hotel rooms, a convention center, an aquarium, and a rock-climbing wall.

As if the United States needs an alternate mini Las Vegas in Syracuse. As if citizens of Worcester, Mass, and Allentown, PA, are going to drive five hours to buy their sneakers and enjoy a basket of fried mozzarella sticks in upstate New York.

The devil himself could not have cooked up a more baleful and ruinous scheme for poor seedy, beaten-down, Syracuse.

If ground were broken tomorrow, this monstrosity would open as the world passes the historic global oil production peak -- meaning at a time when life in our nation is due to change drastically. The Syracuse city officials have completely bought into this insane fantasy. It comes with something like $30 million dollars of federal brownfield remediation money and a shitload of tax abatement for the developer. This is the kind of idiocy that our nation is wasting its time and energy on, instead of rebuilding a decent passenger railroad system, or promoting import replacement to revive pitiful, moribund cities like Syracuse.

The Pyramid Company is one of the most ruthless and venal in the nation. Back in the 1980s, they were cited by a New York State government ethics commission for attempting to buy off the Poughkeepsie city council (in order to guarantee approvals for a mall). They were the pioneers in destroying local retail economies all over New York state the past twenty-five years. It's appropriate that they are based in Syracuse. In the end it will be seen that they had less regard for their own hometown than any other place in the US.