Sharon Schoonmaker knows what it’s like to have college students as neighbors. She and her husband Michael Schoonmaker, a television, radio and film laboratory manager at Syracuse University, used to live with their family in a house on Euclid Avenue.

Long nights full of loud, drunken parties were not rarities in the Schoonmakers’ neighborhood. Neither were apologies and gifts from student neighbors the morning after.

‘I’ve never met rowdier kids, but we thoroughly enjoyed living next to them,’ Schoonmaker said.

But some of the residents in the Schoonmakers’ new neighborhood, known as Berkeley Park, aren’t so fond of student rental properties encroaching on their neighborhood. Today, they will present their case to the Syracuse planning commission to have the neighborhood named a local historic district, a move the residents hope will keep landlords out and maintain the neighborhood’s aesthetic qualities.

If passed, the measure would place 137 homes within an area bounded by Stratford Street, Ackerman Avenue, Broad Street, Berkeley Drive, Acorn Path and Comstock Avenue under the protection of the Syracuse Landmark Preservation Board, said Mike Stanton, a Berkeley Drive resident and one of the movement’s leaders. In order to remodel their house or make changes to the property, residents would have to submit a five-page application to the Preservation Board.

The Berkeley Park neighborhood is a mixture of large colonial and Tudor homes, which Schoonmaker says could be worth anywhere between $80,000 and $300,000. Stanton said 92 percent of the homes were built before World War II, but several do not qualify for the designation because they have been extensively remodeled.

Although the neighborhood is already on the National Register of Historic Places, Stanton hopes the new local designation will help keep homes from being converted to student apartments. Landlords have already bought houses on Stratford Street and Comstock Avenue.

‘We’ve noticed that neighborhood is not quite what it used to be,’ Stanton said.

While the designation does not prohibit landlords from buying property in the neighborhood, Stanton believes the increase in property values will be enough to discourage them. The distinction would also prohibit landlords from modifying the houses to accommodate more tenants by bulldozing garages or enclosing porches. Either way, residents won’t have to deal with loud parties beginning on Thursday and stretching into Sunday, Stanton said.

‘It’s not a matter of whether students live in the community or not; it’s how they do,’ Stanton said.

He and the other proponents of the proposal have held two meetings with community members in the past year. The preservation board has already approved the designation, which, if passed in the planning commission today, will be submitted to the Common Council for approval. After circulating a petition supporting the designation through the neighborhood, Stanton said 72 percent of Berkeley Park residents are in support of the proposal. Schoonmaker challenged the petition, claiming it was flawed and included the names of residents who did not support the proposal.

In addition to arguing that students should not be kept out of the neighborhood, those against the proposal criticize it for the restrictions it would place on other potential residents. Michael Konieczny of Dorset Road said under the new rules, homeowners would not be allowed to make changes that would alter their houses’ historic appearance, including the installation of energy-efficient vinyl windows.

‘Who wants to move into a neighborhood where you can’t replace the windows?’ he said.

Schoonmaker, who will attend today’s meeting to speak out against the proposal, said while the historic designation is supposed to preserve the aesthetics of the neighborhood, it effectively walls off Berkeley Park from the rest of the university area.

‘To change the dynamics of the area and build a wall like a fortress around it, I don’t understand why anybody would want to do it,’ she said.

If the proposal passes and the dynamics of Berkeley Park do change, Schoonmaker and her family may not be around to see it.

‘If this goes through, we’ll probably move back to Euclid,’ she said.

Published on October 26, 2003 at 12:00 pm