Historic gym inside Syracuse STEM School at Blodgett
Syracuse, N.Y. — Two school workers, one on a rising scaffold and one supervising from below, were installing bolts to ceiling vents to prevent them from falling on a future middle school gym class.
The downstairs gym at the 107-year-old Syracuse STEM at Blodgett Middle School on Oswego Street is in serious need of repair.
The ceiling tiles surrounding the vents have signs of water damage and are coming apart — if they aren’t missing altogether. The floor is various shades of brown from the patches, resurfacing and fading. Heating ducts line the walls. The space is not well lit and needs new windows.
This isn’t just any other gym in need of an upgrade.
This gym, hidden on Syracuse’s Westside, is where the National Basketball Association was put on a course to become a global sports behemoth.
It’s where the shot clock, an innovation that drastically changed basketball, came to life.
Before the Boston Celtics had claimed any of their 17 NBA titles, Red Auerbach was among a contingency of basketball big shots who sat in the gym, then known as the Blodgett Vocational High School, watching an exhibition between the Syracuse Nationals and local basketball players on Aug. 10, 1954.
The NBA, less than a decade old at this point, was holding its league meeting in Syracuse. The owners assembled to see how this idea of timed possessions would work in a real basketball setting.
The late Danny Biasone, an innovator of the 24-second shot clock for professional basketball, is shown in this March 8, 1992 photograph at a gym at Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y. Behind him is a modern shot clock. Biasone and other National Basketball Association owners met in Syracuse in 1954 and tested the 24-second clock at a basketball game in a local school.Associated Press
Nationals president Danny Biasone and GM Leo Ferris had grown tired of teams holding the ball against their Nats squad. Biasone and Ferris wanted the Nationals to go at a frantic pace.
Ferris even did the math to determine the shot clock’s countdown. Take the number of seconds in a 48-minute game (2,880), divide that by the average number of shots in a game (120), and you get 24 seconds.
Biasone had two prototypes made up for the 24-second clock, one at a cost of $1,200 and another for $400.
The scrimmage was originally going to be held at Nottingham High School but Biasone moved it at the last minute to Blodgett, his alma mater.
The whistle blew constantly as owners paused the action to question the clock’s effect on the game.
Nationals star Dolph Schayes, then in the sixth year of a career that would lead to induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, banged the ball off the backboard as the seconds ran down, passing it off to teammate Billy Gabor.
Schayes saw it as a trick to return the clock to a full count. The owners shook it off as a tactic that wouldn’t work.
Would this wacky idea work? Some doubts were cast.
“News out of the recent (NBA) meeting held in Syracuse was less than sensational, " wrote Herald-Journal columnist Jack Slattery on August 11, 1954.
A story in the August 11, 1954 edition of the Syracuse Herald-Journal details the NBA meetings in Syracuse, including an exhibition game to try out the idea of a 24-second shot clock.
Despite some early hiccups, including the more expensive $1,200 shot clock simply not turning on when plugged in (the $400 model worked like a charm), the NBA owners liked what they saw in the Blodgett gym that August afternoon and approved use of the 24-second clock for the upcoming 1954-55 NBA season.
Basketball was never the same.
Scoring went up by 13.6 points a game that next season. Former NBA commissioner Maurice Podoloff said the 24-second clock saved pro basketball.
The gym at STEM at Blodgett School on the west side of Syracuse was once used to test the 24-second shot clock that changed the NBA and pro basketball as we know it. The gym is now in disrepair and needs an upgrade.
Nearly 68 years after that game in the Blodgett gym, a game of kickball commences between the same four walls.
A group of middle school students laugh, talk trash and bop to the sounds of Notorious B.I.G. and other hip hop stars keeping the afternoon moving on a boom box.
It doesn’t take long to be reminded of the gym’s fragile status.
A pop fly takes out yet another ceiling tile, leaving it dangling for dear life from above as the game continues.
Once a gym that Danny Biasone used to experiment with his 24 second clock at was formerly the Vocational School, the old gym is in need of updating. The school is now called STEM at Blodgett School. This shows one of the drop ceiling panel hit by a kickball.
At least the ball came back down this time.
Naraea Medley, a seventh-grader, looks up and imagines the treasure trove of lost sporting equipment that looms above her head, gobbled up by the ceiling monster.
“When they take these down, like a hundred volleyballs are going to fall down,” Medley said.
Medley is an active student who plays soccer, volleyball, basketball and softball. She has seen other gyms in the area and wonders when the gym at her school will have some of the same basic amenities.
Ryan Brown, an eighth-grader who plays football and is a rising star on the wrestling team (he’ll travel to Fargo, North Dakota, this summer for a wrestling showcase), says it’s hard not to notice how visitors to the gym react when seeing it for the first time.
“You can hear them talking about it because it’s different than their gym,” Brown said. “To us, it isn’t as bad because we’re used to it, but to new faces, they are going to think it’s dangerous because those tiles fall and everything.”
Other students soon notice Brown and Medley are talking to a reporter and shout out their requests to bring the gym up to 2022 standards.
“We want those glass backboards!”
“We got to got them heaters off the wall!”
“That ceiling has to be replaced!”
This story may have a happy ending.
Phase three of a planned renovation of all the buildings in the Syracuse City School District has allotted $34 million to Syracuse STEM at Blodgett. School officials say a more detailed plan is expected to be drawn up this summer but will include the gymnasium.
This welcome news comes just three years after New York State nearly turned over Syracuse STEM at Blodgett to an independent receiver for underperformance and just five years after a syracuse.com reporter toured the school with a photographer to document decrepit conditions at the 107-year-old school.
Syracuse STEM at Blodgett has a long list of needs that $34 million will resuscitate but not bring back to full strength.
To this day, there is no monument, plaque, sign or acknowledgment that educates a visitor about the important sports history made in its gymnasium. To steal a current popular phrase, “if you know, you know.”
That’s simply not good enough.
That gym helped set the stage for a 1955 NBA finals between Syracuse and Fort Wayne (won by the Nationals in the final seconds) that surged professional basketball forward from an era of low scores and declining attendance.
A gym that gave a dying sport the platform for Wilt Chamberlain to score 100 points in a single game, Auerbach’s Celtics to forge a dynasty playing at a faster pace, and all the NBA highlights that resulted.
An exhibition played in its gym on August 10, 1954, could be the link to the future for Syracuse STEM at Blodgett.
The kids just want to play in a gym without dodging falling ceiling tiles and being envious of the modern facilities they see their friends in the suburbs take for granted.
The gym, given its important place in sports history, deserves better.
The NBA, celebrating an alleged 75th anniversary it may have never reached without what happened in that gym in August of 1954, has a chance to step up and revive hallowed ground where its billion-dollar-plus empire once was saved.
“It will definitely be a cool story to tell future kids if the gym gets renovated,” Medley said.
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