The following is an excerpt from “The Gilded Age on Syracuse’s James Street,” by Dennis J. Connors, Copyright 2025.
On a chilly January day in 1883, the out-of-towner sat in his small hotel room overlooking downtown Syracuse’s main commercial thoroughfare. It was named Salina Street, having originated as the road to Salina, an early village centered on salt manufacturing. Salina had later merged with the village of Syracuse in 1848 to become the rapidly growing City of Syracuse, and the road’s name held.
He was penning a letter to his brother but was thinking of another Syracuse street. Referencing the local man who had given him a brief tour of the city, he wrote: “Munroe drove me this afternoon, in spite of the cold, along James Street, the 5th Avenue of Syracuse, one of the handsomest American Streets I have ever seen—named after our poor grandfather!”
The writer was none other than the famous novelist Henry James (1843–1916). Although born in New York City, he had lived for many years in London. He had already published several successful novels including Daisy Miller, Portrait of a Lady, The American, The Europeans, and Washington Square. More would come, including one of his most famous, The Turn of the Screw, in 1898.
In calling his grandfather “poor,” Henry was not commenting on his economic status, as the ancestor was a millionaire. He probably was referencing the fact that William James (1771–1832) was deceased and, perhaps, showing a degree of sympathy toward an ancestor who had seemed so consumed with accumulating wealth.
The worldly Henry James had been obliged to visit Syracuse to help settle the financial affairs of his recently deceased father, Henry James Sr. (1811–82). The James family, under the leadership of his grandfather, had invested heavily in Syracuse real estate and salt manufacturing in the early nineteenth century through a partnership called simply the Syracuse Company. William lived in Albany and rarely visited Syracuse, leaving management details to his agent and brother-in-law, Moses Dewitt Burnet.

In laying out streets for development, Burnet made sure that the investors and their family members were memorialized with some of their names, including his own in today’s Burnet Avenue, along with Isaiah and John Townsend, James McBride, and, of course, William James.
William James had made such a large fortune in his various investments, including his Syracuse properties, that his descendants, through three generations, were supported by his wealth. His grandson Henry, the author, could afford to live a life of leisure with his inheritance, residing in Europe and devoting his time to writing. Long after William had died, his descendants were still collecting rents from properties in Syracuse; hence, the writer’s need to be in the city during the middle of winter in 1883. Yet, despite his knowledge of many fashionable streets in major American cities, the writer ranked James Street near the top.
It was not always called James Street. At first, it was a rough dirt road. In the early 1820s, it led out of the village toward a small settlement, located in today’s Eastwood neighborhood, settled by a man named Asa Foot, so it was commonly called the Foot Road. Eventually, in the early 1830s, it was graded, and gullies smoothed out, but it was not yet the impressive boulevard it was destined to become. There was not much built yet along the future James Street, beyond where it left Clinton Square and crossed the Oswego Canal.
Leading citizens like Moses Dewitt Burnet and Syracuse’s second mayor, Elias Leavenworth, led the way and, by the early 1840s, built impressive homes on the renamed James Street. Many other wealthy and prominent individuals followed. Over the next twenty years a remarkable transformation would occur along that thoroughfare.
The change was well underway by the 1860s. Where the street began, near bustling Clinton Square with its Erie Canal landing and surrounding hotels, the street quickly became commercial. A few blocks from the square, there was a bridge that carried James over the banks of the busy Oswego Canal, which ran north from the Erie toward Onondaga Lake and beyond. Another block past the canal, James encountered State Street. Past that, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, it suddenly was not “Kansas anymore,” or at least it wasn’t the gritty businesslike neighborhood of canal-side Syracuse anymore. James Street now became a lovely residential haven.
While other neighborhoods, like Genesee Street, Fayette Park, and later West Onondaga Street, would also see fine mansions built, James Street had the advantage of topography. As it runs northeast from downtown, it rises over an ample hillside, affording views to the west and south, down the picturesque Onondaga Valley and across its bordering hills. Not everyone in Syracuse lived in such splendor. The city in the 1800s was home to its share of modest middle-class residences as well as substandard housing. Some of each could be found within a few blocks of these mansion boulevards.
Many James Street property owners would erect large residences, showcasing the latest styles of the nineteenth century. Lower James was developed with relatively narrow lots, as was typical in the first decades of the nineteenth century for upstate, “frontier” settlements like Syracuse. Houses were close together. Farther out James and higher up its hill, larger lots were carved out from what had been essentially farmland. These more expansive sites, primarily beyond Lodi Street, could be measured in acres and boasted of greenhouses, elaborate gardens, and even orchards.

The 1850s and 1860s saw several homes built on the street, mostly below Lodi Street, as James became a fashionable address. Beyond Lodi, there were just a handful of homes then. This residential development would continue after the Civil War, especially past Lodi, reflecting the variety of architectural styles that flourished decade after decade in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Rows of elm trees were planted along the street. As they reached their grand, arching maturity toward the late 1800s, the street caused one Chicago visitor in 1897 to astutely comment:
I know of no city in the country which possesses a more attractive residence street. The great natural beauty of this beautiful avenue is due very largely to the fact that the ground is of a rolling character and is not flat and unprofitable in an artistic sense as are most of the noted residence avenues of the leading cities of the country. A flat street wearies the eye with its sameness, although it may be lined with most ornate and picturesque homes. By reason of its incline as well as by reason of its foliage . . . James Street to my mind far exceeds in attractiveness and beauty such streets as Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Euclid Avenue, Cleveland and Delaware Avenue, Buffalo. The houses which adorn the Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit Avenues may surpass in elegance and cost those of James Street, but the latter street far more than makes up for the deficiency by its natural beauty.
Over a century later, a man who had a newspaper delivery route on James as a young boy in the 1930s wrote, “I recall standing near the Century Club and looking up James Street marveling at the tall Elm trees as they formed a gothic arch over the street.”
The Gilded Age on Syracuse’s James Street is available for preorder now.