One sound seemed to last all night when Carl Johnson lived in an old house on Marshall Street in the early ’80s — bartenders shattering glass at 2 a.m.

‘They would come out and break the bottles in the dumpsters late at night, and that was always an enjoyable sound,’ said Johnson, a Syracuse University alumnus who lived above a sandwich shop and grocery store on the street from 1981 to 1983.

The noise has now faded. The house Johnson lived in is a mere memory, as are many of the street’s businesses that have come and gone over time. The opening of a Chipotle Mexican Grill on April 5 will signal yet another change to a block that has undergone multiple transformations.

Fires. Seediness. Houses. High rent. Family-owned businesses. Chain restaurants. Marshall has had them all.

Like a carnival

Trashy with a carnival atmosphere. That’s how John Vavalo recalled Marshall when his store, J. Michael Shoes, opened on the street nearly 30 years ago.

‘It’s made a big turnaround,’ he said. ‘It used to be pretty honky-tonk. Everybody had their goods out on the sidewalk, and it looked like the state fair. It didn’t look very nice.’

As more people bought the handful of houses that originally sat on Marshall and turned them into businesses, the street deteriorated in the early ’70s, said Jerry Dellas, co-owner of Varsity Pizza and Faegan’s Café and Pub.

‘This area started to turn and go downhill, and it continued to go downhill,’ he said.

Sidewalks fell apart. Brochures cluttered utility poles that ran along the street. Students occasionally lit those brochures on fire.

The block became so run down in the late ’80s that Dellas started soliciting help to get a grant that would change the streetscape and fix the sidewalks.

His calls fell to deaf ears.

Then in the late ’90s, SU got on board with Dellas and played an instrumental part in securing a $3.8 million Housing Urban Development grant to bury utility poles, fix the sidewalks, cover the street in red and brown bricks and update electrical service. The renovations, completed in 2001, were an incredible improvement for the merchants on Marshall, Dellas said.

‘We’ve gone from when it was just old homes to a vibrant business community and then getting all run down,’ he said. ‘And now it’s back again.’

Knowing what’s missing

McDonald’s, Baskin-Robbins, Burger King, a liquor store, a record store, and Pizza Hut all dotted Marshall or the neighboring South Crouse Avenue at various times.

They didn’t last.

While high rent is a common complaint on Marshall, some business owners say lacking a niche on a street where burgers and pizza dominate the landscape leads to failed ventures.

‘If you’re just another food place that’s serving just the same old thing, it’s going to be difficult to survive,’ Dellas said.

Since Varsity and Faegan’s opened decades ago, both have transformed their original business models to match changing needs. For Dellas, the word ‘need’ means providing what’s missing on Marshall.

A much smaller version of Faegan’s opened in 1978 with a simple sandwich menu and no sit-down table services. An instant hit, the place was 80 percent bar and 20 percent food, Dellas said. Today, those numbers have switched around, as the menu has become much more elaborate and waiters or waitresses serve tables.

Varsity had a similar sit-down service when it opened in 1926, when fields and houses were more common than businesses in the area, Dellas said. His grandfather started Varsity at the time in a house in which his three sons lived upstairs. The building was half-restaurant, and the other half was a place where one could purchase toiletries.

As later family members took over, they realized the need to process customers more quickly and made the restaurant a cafeteria style, Dellas said. Known for its pizza today, Varsity didn’t offer the slices until the early ’60s.

Surviving the cost

Though Varsity has maintained its spot on campus for 85 years, the façade on other parts of Marshall has changed. Inside the same building as a former Burger King sits Panda West Chinese Restaurant, which has served food on Marshall since December 1992.

Next to the front-door entrance, a framed newspaper article about the restaurant from April 1, 1993, sticks out from the wall. Just a few feet away, the restaurant’s owner, Alfred Lam, explains he doesn’t see how chain stores make it on Marshall, where most businesses make a bulk of their profits while students are in school and withstand a drop in customers during the summer.

‘It’s a lot of competition here,’ he said. ‘The good survive. The bad are eliminated.’

To survive, Lam had to sign 10-year leases to the property. He plans to sign another one next year.

The landlords pose the biggest problem on Marshall because they charge high rent for its desirable location, said Maurice Krohl, owner of Student’s Choice Market, a fixture on the street for at least 30 years. When students leave for the summer, Krohl has enough to pay the bills but not enough to make a profit.

Businesses can’t beat the location, though, he said, even with the landlords charging expensive rent.

‘They realize that if I don’t pay it, somebody else will,’ said Krohl, who declined to reveal how much he pays.

Rent is close to $1,400 per month for Some Girls Boutique, said manager Kaleigh O’Brien. The rent is definitely up there, considering the lack of parking on Marshall and lack of a bathroom in the store, she said.

Varsity and Faegan’s have survived on Marshall for so long because their rents are not nearly as high as other properties that have changed hands between landlords, said Dellas, co-owner of the two restaurants. The Dellas family has owned the Varsity property since 1926 and can charge $2 to $3 less per square foot than other places, he said.

Chipotle officials originally wanted to rent from the Dellas family in the space between Dunkin’ Donuts and Varsity. But the family gave the property to a clothing store instead, believing it was better for the area than a food establishment, Dellas said.

Chipotle crept onto Marshall anyway. Kevin Dick, who works for marketing in Chipotle, said he expects the restaurant to be pretty busy when it opens, but admitted there could be a big lull in business during the summer. The Marshall location will be the chain’s second restaurant in the Syracuse area.

‘It’s still a new concept,’ Dick said. ‘And we’re going to do our best to get food in people’s mouths.’

Change over time

The family who owns King David’s Restaurant, which had run its business on Marshall since 1974, is leasing the lower floor of its property to Chipotle.

As the economy tumbled into a recession during recent years, customers stopped spending as much, and business declined, said Charlie Hatem, who will open a smaller version of his family’s restaurant above Chipotle.

‘Why have 50 customers downstairs in a 100-seat restaurant and look empty, rather than have a 50-seat restaurant upstairs and look full?’ he said.

King David’s was already forced to undergo a change after a fire on SU’s graduation day in 1987 leaked water damage to the restaurant. The Hatem family chose to knock down the building and construct the one that exists today.

Down the street at Manny’s Clothing Store, it’s not a fire that changed the look of the place but rather the customers and trends. Manny’s, a mainstay on Marshall since 1949, used to sell tobacco products and men’s dress clothes. It also sold books before SU stopped providing the store with the list of classes.

As the SU lacrosse and football teams dominated in the late ’80s, Manny’s started selling more SU apparel, which is mainly what it sells today.

‘It just evolved into more of a Syracuse store because that’s all everybody wanted,’ said Bill Nester, one of the owners at Manny’s who has worked there since 1983.

Sales also exploded in the late ’90s when Nester chose to sell Beanie Babies, he said. Lines wound out the door and down the block, and they stretched all the way to where Bruegger’s Bagel Bakery is today during Manny’s Beanie Babies parties, when the newest collectibles were sold. The only time the line extended that long again was when SU men’s basketball won the national title in 2003.

‘It’s every retailer’s dream to have a line like that,’ Nester said.

Today, Beanie Babies are a phenomenon of the past, moving out just as many businesses have on Marshall. 

But one thing has remained the same over the years: what Johnson, the student who lived on Marshall in the early ’80s, always tries to do when he returns to Syracuse. He sits down at Varsity and eats a slice of cheese pizza.

To Johnson, it’s exactly the same as it’s always been.

‘The slices,’ he said, ‘have not changed in 30 years.’

mcboren@syr.edu

Published on March 29, 2011 at 12:00 pm