At 4:37 on Sunday afternoon, two employees from Cosmo’s Pizza and Grill stood on an otherwise empty Marshall Street sidewalk enjoying a cigarette break while talking basketball and listening to the end of the North Carolina-Wisconsin game being broadcast over the speakers outside El Saha, the restaurant next door.

Thousands of fans had come to Syracuse for the game – which was being played just a short distance away in the Carrier Dome – but, for the first time since the third round of the NCAA tournament opened in Syracuse on Friday, there were almost none to be found.

‘The weekend’s been great,’ said Bill Nester, a partial owner of Manny’s, an SU apparel shop. ‘It’s been fantastic having all these people in town.’

With the presence of the visiting basketball fans, the Syracuse economy was estimated to be inundated with an extra $25 million, and yesterday seemingly everyone on Marshall Street was scrambling to grab a share of the pie. Though the game had provided area workers with a much-welcomed and needed rest, retailers like Nester waited patiently for the fans – and their wallets – to return afterward.

As the game came to a close at 4:45, the people Nester spoke so fondly of finally did. They entered the street at both ends – clad in Carolina Blue and Wisconsin Red – in a stream that continued strongly for over half an hour.

As the fans poured onto the street, vendors appeared from out of the woodwork to man apparel stations set up outside a number of high-traffic areas: Shirt World, the Sheraton Hotel and Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwich Shop. A panhandler named Kevin joined them, hoping to do the same.

‘This is the last payday of the year,’ he said, briskly walking from one fan to the next as he extended a nearly-empty plastic cup toward the hands he passed.

It was everybody’s last chance to enhance their profits before the weekend came to an end, and buyers were everywhere.

Still, not all of them could be accommodated. Nick D’Ambrosia, a private vendor from Hamden, Conn., stood outside Jimmy John’s with only North Carolina State shirts and generic NCAA apparel left to sell. Though many Wolfpack fans had already left the city, D’Ambrosia touted his remaining items, and, somehow, the wad of money in his fist continued to grow in size.

‘My North Carolina stuff has been sold out since noon today,’ he said, unapologetically.

With the games finally over, D’Ambrosia said people were just looking for something to take home with them. True to form, at the stand outside of Shirt World, Dan Krapen of Elkton, Md., sifted through the piles of SU apparel laid out in front of him. Krapen, an avid North Carolina basketball fan, hoped to find something – maybe a Syracuse basketball item, he said – to take home to show his friends.

‘I don’t know when I’ll be back here again,’ Krapen said.

By 5:30, though, many fans had left the sidewalks – some for the bars and restaurants, others for home. As some vendors began to pack up their belongings, their competition remained open, trying to reap as high a profit from the weekend as possible before it ended.

Kevin the panhandler stuck around, too. After all, the weekend wasn’t over.

‘These people have been real generous,’ he said, his voice trailing as he scurried off toward another group of fans. ‘It’s a good weekend.’

Published on March 27, 2005 at 12:00 pm