Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

It appears that DestiNY USA is dead, at least as far as Syracuse in concerned.

I've written about this before, the huge shopping/entertainment/amusement/hotel complex that's been percolating on the drawing boards in Syracuse for several years now. A few weeks ago, things came to a head when the New York State Legislature failed to enact legislation that would have given the Pyramid Company (the folks behind DestiNY) the tax breaks that they insisted were necessary to the securing of funding from investors, and thus to actual construction. The legislation was scuttled, pretty much singlehandedly, by a single State Senator from Syracuse, John DeFrancisco, who happens to represent the very district where DestiNY was to have been built.

The debate was pretty rancorous, but I've come to think that DeFrancisco was probably right on one very important point: Pyramid never really came clean with just what it was they were going to do. In the six months that we lived in Syracuse, the plans seemed to change almost daily. When we arrived, the project's opening was billed for 2004; then it was moved to 2006. While we were there, a big groundbreaking ceremony -- complete with an appearance by Governor Pataki -- was held for the big hotel that was to kick off the project; the construction was halted almost immediately and never restarted. Disputes as to just what land surrounding Carousel Center (the current shopping mall that was to be expanded into DestiNY) was to be used for the big project went on. And so on. Even the DestiNY website never showed any images of what the thing was supposed to eventually look like. Sure, they had some generic "This is what it will resemble" stuff, but never an actual set of architect-drawings of the finished project. In fact, I found it hard to escape the impression, as time went on, that there was no idea of the "finished project".

I suspect that, if the Pyramid Company really was serious about this project, then they'll probably look to build it elsewhere. That's not really a surprise, and while I liked the idea -- if they'd have built the whole thing, instead of just adding piecemeal here and there, which was the way they seemed to be planning to operate -- I was never sure if Syracuse was really the right place for it. The city just isn't big. But then, neither was Las Vegas, before all the building happened there.

So, who knows. Maybe DestiNY USA will end up someplace else -- outside Philadelphia, maybe, or near Boston, or maybe Cleveland or some such place. Or maybe it was all just a series of trial-balloons, and now that they've all vanished into the stratosphere, Pyramid will get back to operating the malls it already owns. Ah well....