Butternut Street’s Otisca Building, with some of its 19th-century-era Beaux Arts oval medallions (shown at above in its still-standing phase last January), bid farewell to Central New Yorkers last week (below), as a demolition crew was providing the final kiss-off to the abandoned structure, which for years was either the target of kids on a breaking-windows binge or as a paradise for pigeons. Modern apartments are forecast for the site, which held the turn-of-the-20th-century Thomas Ryan Brewery as late as the Roaring ’20s.(Ryan was even elected as Syracuse’s mayor during the 1880s, which might give Middle Ages Brewery’s Marc Rubenstein some ideas. Construction workers were also salvaging the building’s bricks, some marked with the word “Onondaga,” and stacking them on neatly arranged palettes (with signs that firmly discouraged taking away the reddish-orange blocks), demonstrating that everything old could be new again. One nagging question: Why is that gray two-story condemned house on McBride Street physically attached to the Otisca?
