The Bagg’s Square memorial building was erected by the widow of the last Bagg to run the Bagg’s hotel on the same spot. The hotel was torn down in 1932. She intended it to be a museum to the busy travel history of that spot (going back to the pre-railroad stagecoach days !).

NY state is responsible for trashing a lot of Utica. One interpretation is that (oddly) the nearly useless “arterial” limited-access highway that bisects Utica today was a peacepipe to Utica’s democrat machine boss Rufus Elefante from then governor Averell Harriman. After the embarrassments of the Appalachian meeting in ’57 (q.v) and the partially related Sin City investigations of Utica by the state and feds, Harriman and Elefante are alleged (by Elefante) to have made a peace of sorts by Harriman promising to send highway money Utica’s way (Elefante had stayed mostly clean in the investigations, unlike mob types like the Falcone brothers of Utica. If you watched the mob meeting broken up by the FBI in “The Sopranos” with mob guys in expensive overcoats running away into the woods, that was inspired by the NYS police raid on the Appalachian meeting).

The highway got built and the already unfashionable Union Station area was cut off badly from the rest of the city. The highway also bisected neighborhoods and took numerous homes and small businesses by eminent domain. While the construction was a blast to watch for a small kid (me), it accelerated the misguided move to the suburbs post-WWII and the “anything new is better” movement like Robert Moses’ “improvements” in NY City.

Utica was, in my native’s opinion, artificially propped up by the boom at Griffiss AFB from 1954 onwards. In the late 50s, Congressman Alexander Pirnie rose to seniority that permitted him to direct lots of activity to Griffiss (today, it’d be pork, not largess). In 1959, we had flying over my house in Whitesboro the 40 or so aircraft of two SAC units, the 25 of an ADC fighter interceptor unit, uncounted cargo aircraft visiting the big depot of the Air Materiel Command (read “distribution center”), and the Rome Lab, employer of a lot of the parents of my classmates. We had spinoff aerospace companies like GE (when they still did radar) and Bendix (aviation hydraulics division). Pirnie retired. I left for grad school [out of state] at age 20 in ’73. Utica had been doomed since the 1950s, when industry left (disgusted by high labor costs), but we just didn’t know it yet. The air base was chipped away at and failed to hold its units (which, like the clothing mills, moved to the sun belt). In 1993, the Clinton Administration’s base closing list closed Griffiss completely (but left the civilian-USAF Rome Lab).

In the 1990s, Utica became a landing spot for Bosnian immigrants and large banking companies who found Uticans well-educated and willing to work their customer service phone banks. It is painful for a guy like me who abandoned the area as a young hothead, but who knew Utica in the late 50s and early 60s, to visit when I do research of my own on Utica. Gone are things like the wonderful donut smells from the New York Bakery (and even Hemstrought’s) and the diesel exhaust perfume of commerce as you enter the city.