Green Over Red
Photographer John McCarthy tells us about an unusual traffic light in Syracuse, New York, that gives the green light pride of place.
View Transcript
**This transcript comes from an early broadcast of this episode. There may be changes.**
ED: Picture a traffic light. You know, three round lenses, red on top, yellow in the middle, and green on the bottom, unless you live on Tipperary Hill in Syracuse, New York.
JOHN MCCARTHY: It’s a very unique traffic signal. It’s the only one in the United States that features the green lens over the red.
ED: This is John McCarthy, a photographer who grew up on Tipperary Hill. He’s looking at this traffic signal with the green light on top and the red on the bottom.
JOHN MCCARTHY: In the old days, when we were kids we used to–
ED: McCarthy remembers hanging out on the corner as a teenager and watching drivers pull up to the light. Some of them were colorblind, and they would stop at a green light.
JOHN MCCARTHY: And we’d all start yelling at them, saying go, go, go. And they’d say, no, no, we’re not. And they’d wave us off. And then the next thing you know, they pull out. It’s a red light, they pull out against the light, and you hear tires squealing. And we all start laughing, and say, yeah, we told you. We told you.
ED: So if having this green light on top has been such a safety hazard, why is it still there?
JOHN MCCARTHY: Now I don’t know this for a fact. All I know is that a myth was created around this light.
ED: To understand the myth, you need to know that Tipperary Hill in Syracuse has been an Irish neighborhood since the mid 1800s, when Irish immigrants settled in the area after working on the Erie Canal. In the 1920s, traffic signals started going up in cities across the country. But when Tipperary Hill got its light, the locals were not impressed.
JOHN MCCARTHY: There were a bunch of young guys around in their teens. And the first thing they decided to do when they saw the red lens above the green was to destroy it.
ED: The local legend has it that the guys in the neighborhood were outraged that red, which was associated with the English, had dominant placement above green, the Irish color. So they threw rocks at the light.
JOHN MCCARTHY: And so they kept breaking the light, and the city would have to come up the next day and fix the light, because it’s a busy intersection.
ED: A few weeks would go by. The kids break the light. The city fixes it. The kids break the light.
JOHN MCCARTHY: And finally, the alderman went to the city fathers and said, you know what? They’re not going to stop this unless you put that green lens over the red.
ED: The alderman was successful. The neighborhood got its upside down traffic light. Now John McCarthy doesn’t put much stock in this story about throwing stones, but a lot of other people do. In the 1990s, a local pub owner succeeded in getting a statue to the stone-throwers erected right next to the intersection. Whatever the details of the story, it’s clear that to people who see the light it’s a potent symbol of Irish immigrants turning traditional power dynamics on their head.
JOHN MCCARTHY: They left oppression. And when they ran up against that here in Syracuse and in America, they knew about the game. They knew. And they knew that there was strength in numbers, and they knew that they could change things if they stuck together.
ED: And all that history is encompassed up to this very day in a suspended little circle that’s colored green.
JOHN MCCARTHY: It’s not bright green. It’s not like a primary green. It’s kind of a terrible cyan color, if you really look at it.
ED: I’m Ed Ayers, and I’m here with fellow history gents Peter Onuf–
PETER: Hey, Ed.
ED: –and Brian Balogh.
BRIAN: Hey there, Ed.
ED: And today on the show, we’re doing something a little bit different. Most weeks we rip a topic from the headlines and spend an hour tracing its history over three centuries.
PETER: But today we’re mixing things up. And instead, we’ll be bringing you a sort of grab bag of stories with absolutely nothing in common except for the fact that they all have something to do with the color green.
BRIAN: That’s right, Peter. In honor of St. paddy’s Day, we’re dying our show green. We’ve got stories about an iconic green statue, an iconic green book, and an iconic green superhero. Plus we’re going to hear Peter recount his favorite deployment of the color green in the American Revolution. So sit back, put on your green eyeshades, get out your green stamps, and maybe put on your “Greensleeves” and journey with us down a historical river of green.