5 Fascinating Things To See In Syracuse

Head to Hanover Square, the city's oldest commercial district, to find America's best disguised parking garage. A building gutted by fire was turned into a parking structure keeping the facade in tact.

Visit: The Vanderbilt/Larned Parking Facility

You'd be excused to think the Niagara Hudson Building is an opulent movie palace. It's not - rather the headquarters of the area's power utility, National Grid. Completed in 1932, the building on Erie Boulevard near Franklin Street is on the National Register of Historic Places which describes it as,

The building became the headquarters for the nation’s largest electric utility company and expressed the technology of electricity through its modernistic design, material, and extraordinary program of exterior lighting.

In the vast rural Tug Hill Plateau north of Syracuse sits the abandoned settlement of Happy Valley. There are persistent rumors about why the hamlet was deserted. The Haunts and Legends of NY Crew set out to explore the area now nestled deep in a state forest and only accessible by seasonal roads.

Located past the dead end of Onondaga is Split Rock Quarry.  A massive explosion occurred here in 1918 and it's a favorite of paranormal investigators.

A what? A meromictic lake is one in which the water on the surface never mixes with the water on the bottom. Green Lake at Green Lakes State Park is only of only 15 in America. The reason the waters don't mix is due to the high salt concentrations found around Syracuse. The bottom waters are loaded with saline which keeps them denser and heavier than the surface water. Round Lake and Glacier Lake are two other Syracuse area lakes that are meromictic.