Students looking for a place to party file into houses on Euclid Avenue and its surrounding areas. They may see some partygoers sipping from red Solo Cups on the houses’ slanted and sagging second-level covered porches. They enter dark, crowded and scarcely furnished rooms.

They dance to loud music and spill alcohol on original hardwood floors. If it gets rowdy, someone may fall and break a lattice window. Weekends turn the century-old houses lining Euclid into the party central of Syracuse University, which has continually ranked in The Princeton Review’s Top 10 Party Schools and claimed the top spot in 2014. Most of those decrepit party houses have been around for a century.

“The aesthetic quality of the building rarely figures in a student’s decision to rent,” said Sam Gruber, president of The Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York.

Gruber, who lives on Allen Street near the University Hill neighborhood, was recently elected president of the society. After moving to Syracuse 25 years ago, he spent years as an active participant in the Westcott Neighborhood Association.

Since the late 1980s and ‘90s, Gruber observed that landlords started buying homes and turning them into student housing. He said many landlords can pay in cash and above the seller’s asking price, making a landlord deal more attractive than a regular sale. And as more college students move in, more families move out.

“At some point, people are not going to want to raise a family when there are loud parties going on every night, when there are four or five students living in each house and each one has a car and they’re parking all over the place,” Gruber said.

Josh Shub-Seltzer | Staff Photographer

These streets often reach a tipping point when they become more student-populated than family-populated. Gruber said it happened at least 10 years ago on Lancaster Avenue and Ackerman Avenue. And it’s still happening: The halves of Sumner Avenue split by Euclid have different population majorities. One half is composed of a majority of students, and the other a majority of homeowners, Gruber said.

There are several landlords in the area who do restorative work on their properties, Gruber said. Any home renovation requires generous financial resources, but when the house in question is historic, it can often be more expensive.

The Post-Standard reported on a family who began renovating their Ward Wellington Ward home on Ackerman Avenue in 1984. They weren’t finished until 1994, and the kitchen alone took seven months to complete. They spent more than $50,000 dollars on renovations — about $84,000 adjusted for today’s inflation. The average home renovation costs about $39,000, according to HomeAdvisor, and the Syracuse housing market, Gruber said, is a buyer’s market.

By expending more resources on a home, these landlords are able to attract permanent or long-term residents who are less likely to damage properties. These homes are also located outside the rectangle comprising Clarendon Street, Comstock Avenue, Lancaster Avenue and Stratford Street — where most undergraduate students in off-campus housing live.

Art historian and University Hill neighborhood aficionado Jean-Francois Gabriel told the Post-Standard in 2005 the solution is to “accelerate neighborhood sweeps and put the sting on landlords and tenants for every violation.”

At the turn of the century, the University Hill neighborhood was one of several pockets in the city where the arts and crafts architectural movement flourished. The arts and crafts movement developed in Europe before Americans adapted it to their lifestyles.

“It was a response to the god-awful factories that did nothing but belch smoke,” said Bill Bowen, office coordinator for the art and music history departments at SU and one of the first presidents of the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York. “Syracuse was a big deal in the story of decorative arts.”

Josh Shub-Seltzer | Staff Photographer

In many ways, Syracuse’s location in the center of New York state by the growing university and the ever-important Erie Canal made it an arts and crafts epicenter, Bowen said. From 1900 to 1905, it was the epicenter, he said. Remnants of that time still surround University Hill residents today.

Ward Wellington Ward was an architect in the central New York area who designed more than 250 houses in Syracuse and 20 houses that still stand from Lancaster to Comstock and Clarendon to Stratford. Several of these houses are recognized on the National Register of Historic Places. Some of those houses are currently occupied by students, and one of the Ward homes on the NHRP is currently occupied by students.

Ward’s “small house made into art” — as an essay by Ward historian and Westcott local Cleota Reed quoted — was always built to suit his client’s desires. He was among the first designers to include central vacuuming systems in his homes.

When World War II ended in 1945, the GI Bill allowed returning soldiers to attend college with expenses paid partially or completely by the government. Bird Library Archives cite that in the 1946-47 academic year, total enrollment at SU increased by 9,000 students — about 7,000 of which were veterans. Enrollment peaked at nearly 20,000 in 1948-49.

Bowen’s mother, who graduated from SU in 1942, told him that most everyone living on Euclid and the surrounding streets were families because the school was still small.

But a 1990 newspaper article found in the Onondaga Historical Association archives said that some Ward houses in the University Hill area were gutted and made into apartments to accommodate more people and veterans with families.

Even then, the university built temporary housing and classrooms across campus. The University Hill neighborhood was largely residential up until landlords started buying up properties in the ‘80s, Gruber said.

A Ward house on the 600 block of Euclid stands today with chipped siding and a broken lattice window frame on the upper floors. But underneath the gray peeling paint is a century-old artistic legacy.

Published on November 29, 2017 at 8:47 pm

Contact: cmrussel@syr.edu | @caseymrussell