A bearded man in a mud-brown peacoat and a top hat led the small, rapt group through the dark streets of Syracuse on Sunday night. Brandishing an old-fashioned lantern, Michael Heagerty weaved history and ghost stories together to tell a rich tale about the city they walked.

“Follow the lantern,” he said.

Heagerty is the founder of the tour company NOexcuses Tours, which brings visitors and locals on excursions around the city of Syracuse. With the tours, he said he hopes to spread knowledge and optimism about the city. On this particular Sunday, he was leading his first-ever “Haunted Pub Tour.”

“My version was never ‘Let’s give a tour,’” he said. “It was ‘Let’s change some minds.’”

For Heagerty , giving tours is a way to restore pride in locals and generate interest in new visitors. He said the people of Syracuse have been trained to think negatively about the city, which is what he hopes to reverse.

To achieve this, Heagerty combines the history of Syracuse with the often-unknown stories behind the facts. He focuses particularly on innovation and inventions in the area, he said, because the world has not given Syracuse enough credit for its contributions.

“It’s all about the story,” he said. “I’m the teller of the tales of the city.”

 

Heagerty first began telling stories about Syracuse when he was working at Kitty Hoynes, an Irish pub in Armory Square. The restaurant, a destination for many of the city’s visitors, is owned by his family. He said whenever a customer needed advice on where to go and what to do in the city, his coworkers would turn to him for the answer, which he could always provide.

Deciding to transform this knowledge of the city into something greater, Heagerty launched NOexcuses in the spring of 2014 after doing a test tour, for which he said he received only positive feedback, and has been working on making it his full-time job ever since.

Heagerty’s tours span across Syracuse in both location and content. Currently, he is offering weekly visits to Armory Square, the Hawley-Green neighborhood and Tipperary Hill.

He also does numerous custom tours for events, like the “Haunted Pub Tour” for the New York State Funders Conference. Heagerty, who is on the planning board for the Funders Conference, said he half-jokingly threw out the idea of doing the “Haunted Pub Tour,” but the committee ran with it and it quickly sold out.

When that happened, Heagerty said he had only a few days to make the tour a reality. During the planning period, he said it is easy to verify history and facts, but he always tries to tell a story.

On the “Haunted Pub Tour,” Heagerty told the tales of the darker side of Syracuse history and innovation. His voice was impassioned by his love for the city, but tempered by the somber topics.

One of those topics includes the Split Rock Quarry, the site where 53 men died from a TNT explosion a few miles outside Syracuse in July 1918. He told the story of Gustav, a German immigrant working at the Quarry, whose coat, timepiece and glasses all survived the fire.

As he told the tale, Heagerty gestured to his own coats and pockets, indicating where Gustav would have kept his belongings. He then pointed toward the horizon in the direction where he said Split Rock Quarry lay, silent and unused.

He also connected the story of the explosion to the invention of the time clock by a watchmaker in Auburn, New York. This was significant to the story because the time clocks of the workers killed in the accident are all preserved in the Onondaga Historical Association.

Heagerty said he wondered at first what he could possibly teach those who have been here for 45 years, but stories like Split Rock Quarry keep locals interested on the tours.

The underlying goal, he said, is to get people talking about the tours and spreading positive facts about Syracuse.

Now, Heagerty said he has a strong relationship with the local community. These relationships allow him to take tours places others cannot, like the basement of The Mission Restaurant, which was part of the Underground Railroad.

“Inch-by-inch, I’m becoming the unofficial spokesperson for Syracuse,” he said.

While Heagerty said he thinks locals can give Syracuse a bad reputation, he also believes most Syracuse University students do not try hard enough to get to know the city.

Part of this, he said, is that they are not exposed to it properly. He said Citrus in the City is poorly planned because it takes freshman to an area of the city surrounded by bars, which they won’t be able to get into for most of their time in Syracuse.

For Heagerty, students are very important to the growth of the city. He said he would love to give tours to freshmen and their parents, but any presence among the student body would help improve the reputation of Syracuse here and in student’s hometowns.

Said Heagerty: “There are no excuses for not getting to know your city.”

Published on October 26, 2015 at 10:07 pm

Contact Delaney: dovanwey@syr.edu