For more than three decades, the Mizpah Tower stood on the edge of downtown Syracuse as a building people walked past, looked up at, and wondered about. A six-story Gothic castle, built in 1914, vacant since 1988. One of those places that holds a city’s mystery in its stone.
That’s over now. The Mizpah Tower is opening as a self-pour wine bar and event space — and the team behind it has spent over a million dollars making sure the building’s century of history shows up in every room.
What’s Inside
The concept is a self-pour wine system — guests sample local and regional wines by the ounce, moving through the selections at their own pace. It’s a format that works because the room earns the lingering. This isn’t a place you walk in and walk out of. The architecture won’t let you.
Michael Greene, a former Syracuse Common Councilor and the founder of Harvey’s Garden, is running the operation. Developer Tom Cerio has owned the building since 2013 and has been working toward this moment ever since. New apartments are going in on the upper floors as part of the broader $1M+ investment.
The Building’s Story
The Mizpah Tower was built in 1914 as the home of First Baptist Church. The congregation left in 1988, and for nearly four decades the building sat — a Gothic silhouette off Columbus Circle that outlasted several attempts at revival. It has six stories, stone masonry, arched windows, and the kind of bones that most cities would have torn down and replaced with a parking structure by now.
Syracuse didn’t. And now the building gets to become something.
Why It Matters
Downtown Syracuse has had a complicated relationship with its own architectural history. Buildings with character get overlooked. Developers go after the easier projects. The Mizpah Tower sat vacant for 35 years not because no one cared about it, but because caring about it was hard.
Greene and Cerio did the hard thing. The result is one of the most interesting new hospitality spaces in the city — a room with “stories and scars,” as the team has put it, that finally gets to share them.
If you’ve walked past the Mizpah Tower and wondered what was inside, you’re about to find out.
The Mizpah Tower wine bar is located in downtown Syracuse near Columbus Circle. CNY Signal covers the people, places, and ideas shaping Central New York.
