Otisco Street ‘green’ home will be replicated nearby

Taken From Post Standard.  Written By Marie Morelli

Syracuse, NY — While a construction crew builds the innovative green home named TED on Otisco Street, plans are being made to build TED’s brother in the same Near West Side neighborhood.

TED was one of three winners of the From the Ground Up architecture competition sponsored by Home HeadQuarters, Syracuse University School of Architecture and the Syracuse Center of Excellence.

The point of the competition was to come up with designs for sustainable, affordable, energy-efficient homes that would replace blighted properties and attract new residents to the Near West Side. The homes also would be a template for future development.

A second TED house is in the works, likely for Oswego Street, said Karen Schroeder, marketing and resource development manager for Home HeadQuarters. The group’s construction manager is working with the architects from Onion Flats, Philadelphia, to tweak the design.

“We’ve been looking to replicate some of these things,” Schroeder said Friday. “We just found a real response to the TED design.”

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Making spirits bright, one bike at a time

Via  The Post-Standard, Written by John Berry

The 14th annual Central New York Family Bike Giveaway will be Saturday at Fowler High School in Syracuse. The doors open at 11 a.m. and reservations are not required.

Bike donations can be dropped off through Thursday at the Toyota Exhibit Building at the New York State Fairgrounds; Wayne’s & Meltzer’s Syracuse Bicycle, 2540 Erie Blvd. E.; the Cricket store, 3150 Erie Blvd. E.; and Advanced Cyclery, 118 Seeley Road, Syracuse.

The seeds for this effort were planted during the childhood of project director Jan Maloff, of Syracuse, while he attended Charles Andrews Elementary School.

“I lived near Le Moyne College and would ride my bike past Elmcrest. In the ’60s, Elmcrest was an orphanage,” Maloff said. “It was really for kids that didn’t have a parent, or maybe had a parent with a problem, but nothing like you’d see today. Those kids all went to Charles Andrews School.

“I think they had two or three bicycles for five or six cottages up there. So I would play with these kids after school. They would ask to ride my bike, because that was a treat for them. They didn’t have a bicycle.

John Berry / The Post-StandardJan Maloff, a DeWitt funeral director, tests out an adult tricycle after making some minor repairs.

“That’s how you got around when you were a kid. If you wanted to go somewhere, you got on your bicycle and you went,” he said. “We did a lot on bicycles when we were kids. A real part of Americana was having a bicycle.”

Maloff is still seeking volunteers to help with this year’s giveaway. He believes the giveaway handed out 2,000 bicycles last year and he said donations are about 25 percent this year. But there are still plenty of repairs to be done at the work site, which for the second year is at the fairgrounds.

“Without this kind of space to say ‘this is this line, and this is that line,’ it’s impossible to do. You need to spread these things out,” Maloff said. “I hope we get invited back because I wouldn’t know what to do if we had to go back to the old way. We just couldn’t do the volume.”

Maloff can be contacted at 446-7570 for more information. Tax deductible donations can be mailed to the giveaway at 4612 S. Salina St., Syracuse, NY 13205.

Buyers lined up for all three “From the Ground Up” houses on Syracuse’s Near West Side

Taken from Syracuse.com Written by Marie Morelli / The Post-Standard

From a construction standpoint, it was a fairly quiet, and wintry, week at the three From the Ground Up homes being built on the city’s Near West Side.

Windy conditions stopped framing in its tracks on the two Otisco Street houses, R-House at 619 Otisco and TED at 621 Otisco. R-House is still just a foundation. TED’s four walls are up but it has no roof as of yet.

On Monday, the windows went in on the Live Work Home house, 317-319 Marcellus St., as you can see in the photo above provided by Home Headquarters. Also during the week, the basement floor was poured and the radon mitigation system was installed.

Home HeadQuarters, Syracuse University School of Architecture and the Syracuse Center of Excellence sponsored the “From the Ground Up” design competition that challenged architects to come up with affordable, sustainable homes to help inject new life into the Near West Side, a blighted urban neighborhood a stone’s throw from downtown.

Home HeadQuarters is acting as general contractor on all three houses and is marketing them to buyers — successfully, as it turns out.

Home HeadQuarters has letters of intent from “interested, engaged buyers” for all three houses, said Karen Schroeder, marketing and resource development manager for Home HeadQuarters. A purchase offer on the Marcellus Street house was withdrawn in mid-November but another buyer has stepped in.

Backup offers on all three houses are still being accepted, she said.

Red House brings a different breed of cinema to Syracuse

Written by Nigel Smith.  Taken from www.thenewshouse.com

Enter the Red House, a gallery and theater located on the periphery of Armory Square, vying to become an edgy cinema venue with annual film programs.

Their latest program, Overcoming the Spectacle: A Cinema of Pure Means, which opened in October and runs into late April of next year, features a total of 18 films. Billed as a series of films that “look specifically at the cinematic strategies that refute fabricated meanings, thoughts and desires,” the films range from Marxist-minded 1960’s French Situationist cinema to current-day leftist work by such auteurs as San Francisco’s Craig Baldwin and Hungary’s Peter Forgacs.

Though Red House is not easy to pin down as an arts venue - it houses a black-box theater, an art gallery and a bar – all of its exhibitions and programs are connected through a broad mandate of “transforming lives through intimate and distinct experiences in the arts.”

Seated on the third floor in Red House’s communal office space, executive director Natalia Mount said the avant-garde slate of films chosen by curator Lawrence Kumpf fulfills that mission. The program was conceived with the intention to both educate and advocate, Mount said.

“We want people to think about the issues we present, through the types of plays, the types of films and types of art we exhibit,” she said.

Mount met Kumpf through a past collaboration between Red House and Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room, where Kumpf is house manager. The two galleries have been working with the New York State Council on the Arts to establish a connection between upstate and downstate arts organizations in Central New York.

Kumpf – a longtime admirer of Red House – proposed the idea for his film program to Mount.

Over the phone from his office at ISSUE, Kumpf says he wanted to address a question that founded the basis for his interest in politically charged cinema: “What is the political action of the individual?”

Kumpf, who studied the work of Situationist filmmaker Guy Debord at Sunnybrook University during graduate school, took four months to finalize his program for Red House.

For the uninitiated – the kind of audience Red House is hoping to attract - Situationist cinema was a product of the Situationist International, a group of international artists and activists founded in 1957. French Marxist writer Guy Debord was the first Situationist to use the film medium when he adapted his highly influential book, The Society of the Spectacle, into a feature film.

His technique was to edit together pre-existing film and news footage in an effort to, as Kumpf put it, “charge the audience with creating a new meaning.” Given Debord’s influence, Kumpf chose to open the program with his early works.

With their lack of narrative structure, the films of Debord and other Situationists are challenging to even the most adventuresome of viewers, in Syracuse or elsewhere.

“They’re definitely difficult-to-watch films,” Kumpf said. “I sort of like to think about Debord’s use of the image in relation to pop art. Pop art uses images, so the viewer has to construct the meaning of the image. Debord uses popular imagery in his films. But what he’s doing is allowing the popular imagery to show how it’s constructed meaning, and show the fertility of that meaning.”

One of the few contemporary filmmakers who works in the same vein as the Situationists is Craig Baldwin, whose film Mock Up on Mu is being screened on December 3. Using the editing technique spearheaded by Debord, Baldwin sees his films more as essays than movies, and himself as a painter, not a director.

“My cinema is self-reflexive. It doesn’t try to suspend disbelief,” Baldwin said from his home in Los Angeles over the phone. “I wouldn’t say they’re an easy ride. I don’t make films that you can escape into. They’re more of an intellectual argument.”

Ultimately, Mount says, Red House is trying to provide people with something they can’t see anywhere else in Central New York.

“What we’re showing marks a huge departure from what’s at the mall or the Manlius,” Mount said. “We can’t really do what the mall is doing (cinema-wise), but we can’t really be an independent house as well. Just look at the independent houses that closed because they weren’t very lucrative. We’re trying to find a happy medium.”

High-tech walls go up on Marcellus Street “green” house

Taken From The Post-Standard.  Article by Marie Morelli

SubCat Music Studios in harmony with new neighbor, the Red House

Taken From The Post-Standard.  Written by Rick Moriarty on November 14, 2009

A commercial building in Armory Square will soon see new life as a cafe, a music recording studio and a place for artists to stay while performing at the Red House Arts Center next door.

SubCat Music Studios will relocate from Skaneateles and occupy most of the first floor and cellar level of 219 S. West St. when a recently launched renovation of the three-story building is completed in late spring or early summer, said Kristen Brandt, who speaks for the project.

Founded in Skaneateles in 2002, SubCat has expanded its studio services to include CD duplication and album art design and needs the extra space that the Armory Square building will provide, Brandt said. The studio is owned by three audio engineers — Ron Keck, Derek Yackel and Jeremy Johnston.

A glass-enclosed, one-story addition to the rear of the building will house a cafe that will offer a small menu of coffees, wines, beer, appetizers and snacks. It will be open to the public and double as a lounge where artists and patrons can mingle , she said.

“It will complement Red House shows,” Brandt said. “People can come here after a show and maybe listen to talks by the artists.”

Scott Allyn, a physician and a musician, owns the building and is heading up the project.

Allyn, a member of the Red House board of directors, has applied to the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency for a sales tax exemption on construction materials.

His application estimates the cost of the project at $3.1 million, city officials said. The agency will hold a public hearing Tuesday.

The project also is eligible for state Empire Zone property tax exemptions.

Red House Art Radio, an Internet radio station launched in May and temporarily housed at the arts center, will also occupy the cellar.

The second floor will become available for rental as musical or dance rehearsal space or for business meetings or cocktail receptions.

Part of the second floor will house music and performing arts classroom space under development by 219 South West LLC, the company Allyn has created to own and operate the building.

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Syracuse ceramic studio has big assignment: Fixing up the NYC subway

By Dick Case of the Post Standard

Bob Shenfeld is settling into his new ceramics studio on West Fayette Street. It looks like a go, after six months.

The dusty, one-story brick building used to be home to a company that made countertops. It’s next door to his former studio on the top floor of the ex-Porter Cable Co. redo and definitely in the neighborhood west of downtown where Syracuse University wants to grow an artists’ colony.

Bob’s already there.

He has a national reputation as the producer of what he calls “very particular work” from a studio that’s big enough to do major things but small enough to do them creatively. He has a contract to repair or replace decorative terra cotta tiles in several New York City subway stations. He also produces bathroom and kitchen tiles for architects and designers as well as custom bricks and tiles and glass for Stickley Audi Co.

Bob does this with a crew of six full-time workers and an equal number of part-timers. A few of the staff are immigrants from Nepal. He works with Tom Millar, the project manager, and Paula Burke, a sculptor. It’s a busy place.

Bob says he’s a workaholic, who is “obsessed by challenges” in ceramics. He taught art for 26 years at Corcoran High School before retiring (his mother, Doris, and great grandfather also were city teachers) and has been consumed with the subway project the last two years. Bob was recommended for the contract by folks at the Everson Museum and works directly with a contractor hired by the New York City Transit Authority.

The authority claims seven million riders a day in a system that was started in 1900. “They wanted to make subway stations art galleries,” Bob explains.

Most of the studio’s work involves either repair or replacing sections of station walls and friezes with pieces that are as close to the originals as workers can get them. Bob’s production has to pass the muster of conservators employed by the transit authority and the contractors. “I go to New York usually once a week,” he says. “Sometimes I’m holding up our work against a wall to see if it matches.”

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HUD secretary tours two Syracuse neighborhoods

By Maureen Nolan / The Post-Standard
October 23, 2009, 4:15PM

Federal Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan got a tour today of Syracuse’s Near West and North sides at the request of U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Dan Maffei last Friday.

Schumer, standing in front of a formerly vacant, newly renovated house on Marcellus Street, said he wanted Donovan to see first hand the challenges and promise of Syracuse and its neighborhoods. The Near Westside is marred by vacant and abandoned properties, but also are the targets of housing rehabilitation efforts. The Marcellus Street home was redone under the umbrella of the Near Westside Initiative.

Schumer was stumping for The Community Regeneration, Sustainability, and Innovation Act, which he announced in April at the corner of Marcellus and Wyoming streets. The bill has been introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

If it passes, Schumer said, it could mean money to fight Syracuse’s plague of vacant houses, develop green infrastructure and create a comprehensive strategy to fight blight. The city has nearly 1,600 vacant properties.

Schumer said the legislation would create a three-year, $300 million demonstration project and he and Maffei would make sure Syracuse gets selected for it.

Urban Arts and Crafts debut in Syracuse

By: News 10 Web Staff

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — A new event brought alternative arts and crafts to Syracuse on Saturday. The first ever Salt City Urban Art and Craft Market was held at the Case Supply Building on Wyoming Street.

The market showcased 40 local artists who offered unique handmade pieces including everything from jewelry to clothing. Both of the market’s organizers have previously lived in New York City and wanted to bring a bit of that urban edge to Central New York.

“We really wanted it to have an urban edge. So part of the downtown feel was really to really make it kind of a little bit grittier, that’s why we are having it in a warehouse. And we are having some interesting music choices today. We really looked for things that were different,” said Vanessa Rose, co-organizer.

One of the organizers plans to open a store so the “market” can be open all year long.