I was born one heartbeat on the frigid and still-dark morning of December 21, 1954, sixty-three years to the day after Dr. Naismith first hung two peach baskets on opposite ends of a tiny gym in Springfield. So, I guess you could say basketball and I not only share a bond, we share a birthday.
I’m a writer now, living in Chicago. But while life has moved me to different places, and done so many times over, I am – and suppose always will be – just another scrappy, streaky undersized shooting guard from the West Side of Syracuse. Ask anyone who shares my background. Having the bustling, vibrant, mid-20th Century version of my hometown in your blood is a bit like having a certain eye color. You may be able to hide it, but you’re sure as hell never going to change it.
In 2003, I began writing a book about a now-defunct high school league in the Syracuse of my youth. My intent was to do one chapter on each of the ten schools of the old Parochial League, all of which had been unlike any in the country, where Catholic grammar schools existed solely to feed what were, almost without exception, a handful of giant, sprawling Catholic high school academies.
But in Syracuse things were fundamentally different. In the Parochial League, the nuns and priests of its ten parish-based schools took kids in as kindergarteners and taught them intellectually and spiritually every year of their primary, elementary, and secondary school lives, right up through and including their senior year in high school. It was a self-contained and self-reliant factory system of almost stunning efficiency and impact; one that gathered thousands of impressionable minds on one end and churned out an army of young Catholic men and women on the other.
What’s more, each of the ten Parochial League parishes served a microcosm of a European village, with each “village” representing a different group of 19th Century American immigrants. Assumption was home to the German kids, Sacred Heart, the Polish kids, St. Pat’s and St. Lucy’s, the shanty Irish kids and Most Holy Rosary, the lace-curtain ones, St. Vincent’s, the Italian kids, and so on – with each team from each neighborhood adopting a style of play highly reflective of the immigrant group that begat, nurtured and, in many ways, defined it.
But as much as I was convinced the Parochial League would make great fodder for a book, as I began doing my research about that unique (and mostly all-white) league, I began to discover there was an equally compelling story in another part of town. It was the story of the kids of Syracuse’s mostly Black and soon-to-be-demolished 15th Ward, east of downtown, and the remarkable sense of place those kids, their families, and their ill-fated neighborhood all shared.
That remarkable sense of place, however, found itself quickly shattered when plans were hatched to take the all-new Interstate 81 straight through the heart of downtown Syracuse. That’s when the city’s leaders determined that their all-new highway should be built directly atop what had long been the Salt City’s one and only Black neighborhood, the 15th Ward, and that’s when everything – and I mean everything – changed in Syracuse.
That, I realized, was the story I wanted to tell and was, perhaps, put here to tell; the story of two once-parallel worlds – one white, the other Black – that were no longer parallel at all, but on an almost unavoidable collision course. That, dear friends and readers, is what my book, Floor Burns, is really about.
It’s the tale of the building of a single stretch of interstate highway in the early 1960s as seen through the prism of a single high school basketball game played on a cold, crisp night in the winter of that decade’s seventh year. And it’s the tale of how the shadows and dead ends Syracuse’s all-new elevated highway created changed the city forever and, in the process, turned one of the most interconnected, colorful, and productive collection of neighborhoods in American history into a far less certain and far less connected place.
To those of you who buy and read Floor Burns, please, enjoy the journey. And to all of you, whether you buy my book or not, thank you for visiting and God bless.
M.C. Antil
Chicago
December 1, 2021
