By Matt Russo, Senior Reporter
The wind off the canal flats catches the brick at Tompkins and Milton in the late afternoon and lights up the traffic head from below. The green bulb is on top. The red is below. A driver coming up the hill from Geddes Street stops on a red and starts on a green and never has to think about which color is on which side. On the southwest corner, four bronze figures stand on a granite base. The boy has a slingshot in his back pocket. The father is pointing at the light.
This is the only traffic signal in the world known to be installed with the green bulb above the red. It went up in 1928 in its current orientation. The story of how it got there is part Irish-American Syracuse, part stubborn city engineer, and part neighborhood lore that the city eventually agreed to put in writing.
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The intersection
The light hangs at the corner of Tompkins Street and Milton Avenue on Tipperary Hill, a neighborhood on the western side of the city named for County Tipperary, Ireland. Most of the families who built the neighborhood arrived as Erie Canal labor in the 1820s and stayed when the canal was finished. By 1928, when the city installed traffic signals on the hill, the population was largely Irish-American and largely uninterested in seeing British red placed above Irish green on a public street.
1925 to 1928
The historical record, as documented by the Onondaga Historical Association and the Tipperary Hill Heritage Memorial commission, runs in two acts. The first signals went up in 1925 in the standard red-over-green configuration. They did not stay intact. Local youths repeatedly broke the red lens with stones; the city repeatedly replaced it; the youths broke it again.
The published roster of the so-called Stone Throwers, ages 11 to 17, includes John “Jacko” Behan, Richard “Richie” Britt, James M. “Duke” Coffey, Kenneth “Kenny” Davis, George Dorsey, Gerald “Mikis” Murphy, Francis “Stubbs” Shortt, and Eugene Thompson. By the spring of 1928, with replacement bulbs costing the city more than the neighborhood was costing it in good will, the city’s traffic commissioner met with Tipp Hill residents.
The decision date was March 17, 1928, St. Patrick’s Day. The city flipped the light. Green on top, red on bottom, and a tradition that has now run for 98 years.
The 1997 memorial
In 1997, a neighborhood group, the Tipperary Hill Memorial Park Association, persuaded the city to dedicate Tipperary Hill Memorial Park on the southwest corner of the intersection and to commission a sculpture. The Tipperary Hill Heritage Memorial, also called the Stone Throwers, depicts a 1930s Irish-immigrant family of four. The father is pointing at the light. The mother stands with the daughter. The boy carries a slingshot in his back pocket. The bronze figures are life-size.
The sculptor was Dexter Benedict of Penn Yan, New York. The Heritage Memorial commission and the Onondaga Historical Association both list Benedict as the artist of record. The granite base carries the names of the Stone Throwers and the year of the city’s decision.
How the bulb gets replaced
The signal at Tompkins and Milton is maintained by the City of Syracuse Department of Public Works under the same traffic-signal contract that covers every other signal in the city. The city has not published a separate maintenance agreement for the Tipp Hill light, although the legal protection of the green-on-top orientation has been the subject of repeated common council discussion.
What is documented: the signal has been damaged in modern times by motor-vehicle accidents on multiple occasions, with a neighborhood fundraising effort and the city DPW restoring the light to its green-on-top orientation each time within days.
Coleman’s, the leprechaun door, and the surrounding blocks
One block south at 100 South Lowell Avenue stands Coleman’s Authentic Irish Pub. The Coleman family converted a grocery store into a bar in 1933 at the end of Prohibition and has operated the pub on the same corner ever since. Coleman’s installed a 15-inch-high working leprechaun door on its front facade, identified by the pub as the only one in existence; the family has filed to trademark the leprechaun-door design. The pub is registered as a historical marker on the Tipperary Hill walk.
St. Patrick’s Day on the hill draws a parade and a crowd of pub-walking visitors that pushes attendance into the thousands at peak. The Tipperary Hill Neighborhood Association coordinates with city public works on street closures.
The 100-year mark
March 17, 2028, will be the centennial of the city’s decision to invert the bulbs permanently. The Tipperary Hill Memorial Park Association and the Onondaga Historical Association are likely to publish a centennial program; for now the village’s St. Patrick’s Day committee is the early organizing point.
For now the bulb is on top, the boy on the corner has the slingshot in his pocket, and the city continues to replace the head when a driver clips the mast arm. Ninety-eight years after a city engineer gave up arguing with a neighborhood, the only known green-on-top traffic light in the world keeps cycling.
Sources: Wikipedia entries “Tipperary Hill Heritage Memorial” and “Tipperary Hill”; Atlas Obscura, “Upside-Down Traffic Signal in Syracuse”; Clio entry on the Tipperary Hill Heritage Monument; IrishCentral, “How the Irish changed the traffic laws in Tipperary Hill, Syracuse”; Daily Orange, “Green over red: Tipp Hill’s upside-down traffic light glows with Irish pride”; Coleman’s Authentic Irish Pub history page (colemansirishpub.com); HMdb.org Coleman’s Irish Pub Historical Marker; Onondaga Historical Association (cnyhistory.org); City of Syracuse Department of Public Works. Hero photo: Doug Kerr, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
