"A one meter segment of the Berlin Wall came to Syracuse around 1990 and has remained here since, nestled outside the southern wall of the Museum of Science and Technology. It's one of only four such segments in New York State and several hundred in the nation.
BettyAnn Kram, a founding member of the Museum of Science and Technology and current board member, helped secure the chunk of wall for the museum nearly 25 years ago.
At the time, Kram worked for a German-owned company called Inficon Leybold Heraeus. The wall came down right around the time she was working with several others to found the present-day MOST in the former Syracuse Armory.
"A colleague in Germany asked if I would be interested in some segments of the wall," Kram said. "They were built in three meter segments. That's an actual segment -- that's how it was constructed."
Kram ended up with three segments. Two of them were broken into pieces that were given to founding members of the MOST and even sold at the gift shop for a time. Some of those pieces are still on display in a small glass case inside the museum. A plaque above the case details the history of the wall.
The third segment was kept intact and placed behind the museum for the public to view. It sits there still, untouched for more than two decades.
The Syracuse piece of wall stands about 12 feet tall and is about three feet wide. It sits against the southern wall of the building. The visible side of the segment shows faded graffiti that came not from Syracuse vandals, but from Western Berliners. The opposite side -- that which faced communist East Berlin -- is bare.
"The visible side was originally very colorful. That was west side," Kram said. "The other side had nothing. What struck me most was the very dramatic visual illustration of one to the other. What you're seeing was actually what it looked like when we first got it."
Some of the graffiti is still visible, including a portion of what appears to be a phrase.
"...eep you co..." it reads.
Kram wasn't sure what it might have said, or even that the three original pieces she secured were contiguous.
Following the fall of the wall, hundreds of intact segments were shipped around the world. Millions of small pieces were toted off as souvenirs or relics of history.
Many of the surviving slabs can be found in cities throughout America as pieces of public art or museum displays. Rochester, for example, also has a segment of the wall found in the atrium of the Bausch & Lomb Building. Other pieces can be found in cities from New York to Seattle to Los Angeles.
"In other cities, some of them are outside, some in museums," Kram said. "At the time, we wanted to put it out where anyone could see it...We've got a piece of history here in Syracuse and calling attention to it would be excellent.""
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