Kaneenda Hiawatha Boulevard, Syracuse SURVEYS: July 17 Kaneenda was the last village of Onondaga Indians on the shore of Onondaga Lake. Archaeologists reported this small fishing village sat on a low hill inside the last westward meander of Onondaga Creek before it entered the Lake. This was a convenient location to land canoes off the lake, with easy access to the ridge trail on the east. The 1788 Salt Treaty—the first treaty between New York State and Onondaga Nation—refers to this area four times as "the place of beginning"—a surveyor's term to mark the initial point for measuring land.
Kaneenda was abandoned by the Onondagas after the land was yielded to New York State in 1790. Salt springs just east of this village attracted the first settlers, who began mining the salt. Within a century, extracting this "white gold" was the main industry of Syracuse, the Salt City.
Kaneenda has a horrible history since the land was shared with New York State. Onondaga Creek was diverted and slurry from salt extraction was piped into the shallow basin, eventually forming a 20 foot thick layer. In 1880, a railroad was built across the south end of the Lake, and many railcars of hard rock were dumped to form a firm roadbed for the tracks. By the 20th Century, the site was a settling pond for local industries until World War 2, when it was filled in to become the city dump. Two decades later, the dump was covered with an industrial scrap metal yard. In the 1970s, Interstate 81 was built on pilings past the site and across the swamps to the east, at a cost of several men's lives.
In 1987, Pyramid Companies senior partner Robert Congel announced his plan to build the Carousel Center shopping mall on this site as a key strategy to remove oil tank farms in adjacent Oil City, and regenerate the area into a waterfront community. My dowsing convinced me that not only was Kaneenda directly under his proposed mall, but large canisters of hazardous chemicals were also buried under the site. Pyramid's Environmental Impact Statement study found no evidence of the fishing village, and no significant contamination.
But my dowsing also suggested this was a very extra-ordinary piece of landscape—a focal point for flows of a very busy earth energy matrix. And that the "low hill" reported by archaeologists was another man-made earth mound—another relic from a time beyond conscious collective memory. Here I entered the coils of the dragon.
I decided to challenge Pyramid and force investigation of chemical contamination, but I said nothing publicly about Kaneenda, buried under 35 feet of fill and wastes dumped in 200 years of industrial history. After a year, I was vindicated when studies directed by a hazardous site geologist from the NYS DEC found chlorinated hydrocarbons. Pyramid spent $15 million to clean up two toxic acres of the 36-acre site, but the mall was built anyway and opened in September 1990.
My early dowsing in 1988 detected an unusual, large and complex geometry of water veins under this extra-ordinary corner of the lake, but legal circumstances and the hazardous physical environment prevented me from conducting a careful survey on the ground. But my encounters with the site were always marked by extra-ordinary experiences luminous with transcendent meanings that continually said this was a unique place of intense significance. I began to search for ways to measure and describe this phenomenon embedded in the earth energy grid.
Similarly, I have never walked the site and mapped the seven ley lines that cross the property. On a topographic map, some of these ley aligments are obvious by roadways and topography. Othes are more surprising, such as one to the southeast that aligns with Summit Avenue and the modest mound in Onondaga Park.
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David Yarrow
The Green Dragon
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