By Jeremy Boyer
syracuse.com
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Shortly after his 2014 retirement from the Syracuse Fire Department, James Ennis was visiting his sister in Texas when he solved a problem at the city park he and his fellow firefighters had been maintaining since the 1990s.
Ennis, a past president of the firefighters union who worked in the department for more than 37 years, saw a slanted wall embedded with engraved bricks at the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park. He then thought about the brick pavers surrounding the fountain at the Syracuse Fayette Firefighters Memorial Park that frequently became covered in dirt and lichens from the mist and foot traffic. The display at the Texas site would be a great way to showcase the bricks in Syracuse.
“Our red bricks with black engraving were looking like like an asphalt jungle,” he said.
More than 10 years after seeing the inspiration, Ennis is thrilled that a $400,000 project to build a pair of memorial brick walls at the park is about to start. The Syracuse Common Council last week authorized moving forward with a park improvement project that will begin in the spring and be completed by the summer.
It’s exciting news for the Syracuse Firefighters Memorial Fund, a nonprofit that firefighters formed more than two decades ago to support efforts to take care of the park on the eastern edge of downtown. Ennis has long served as the fund’s board chair.
The park between East Genesee and East Fayette streets has served as a public square since the 1820s, with boundaries drawn up in 1839 by what was at the time the village of Syracuse. The original name was Fayette Park. After the installation of multiple commemorative monuments honoring firefighters in the 20th century, the city officially renamed the site Fayette Firefighters Memorial Park in 1972.
But by the mid-1990s, the park had fallen into significant disrepair. “Firefighters Park was very unkempt, overgrown,” Ennis said. “The city didn’t have the funds to maintain it the way it needed to be maintained.”
The firefighters union wanted to change that. They approached then-Parks Commissioner Otis Jennings and asked if they could partner with his department to restore the site and assist with ongoing maintenance.
“That offer was very graciously accepted by Commissioner Jennings,” Ennis said. “We worked that first year as a team. We had over 100 volunteers that showed up one Saturday morning at the park — including off- and on-duty firefighters, their families, family members of some of the firefighters who are memorialized at the park, their grandchildren — and we kicked ass on that Saturday morning.”
In the years since the union and the memorial fund have held an annual cleanup day at the park. The park has hosted an annual memorial service for Syracuse firefighters killed in the line of duty.
On the east side bounded by South Townsend Street, engraved brick pavers surround a flag pole with the names of those 45 fallen firefighters, a display that’s called the Supreme Circle of Sacrifice. That memorial will be upgraded with an angled octagonal wall with newly engraved bricks.
In the park’s center is the fountain, which is surrounded by a brick path. In the early 2000s, the memorial fund raised money by selling commemorative bricks to be placed within that pathway. Newly engraved bricks to replace those will be embedded in another angled wall on the park’s west side, which is bounded by South State Street . That wall will surround the 1871 fire bell that was installed at the park about 40 years ago.
Ennis said the memorial fund plans to hold a new commemorative brick sale soon in conjunction with the project. He also encouraged anyone who wants to support the park’s upkeep to send donations to the Syracuse Firefighters Memorial Fund, P.O. Box 11791, Syracuse, NY 13218-1791.
In addition to the new walls, the project will restore the brick pathway around the fountain and stone-dust trail that runs around the park’s perimeter. New landscaping is also part of the design, which the memorial fund and parks department hired Terry Horst Landscape Architecture to complete.
Funding includes a $300,000 grant from the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York Local Community Assistance Program secured by state Sen. Rachel May and $100,000 from the parks department’s capital improvement plan supported by city taxpayers.
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