The highway thing is mostly a side effect of unlimited funds being available to build highways 50-60 years ago. The engineers went mad.<p>But the reason Syracuse is a dump is that industry evaporated and went to Mexico and later China. If you want to look at a more depressing place than Syracuse that doesn&#x27;t have a highway cutting through it, check out Utica, about 45 minutes to the east. It&#x27;s like a neutron bomb hit in 1988.