There are big gaps among the food stands on Restaurant Row. A series of three or four adjacent vendor booths in the The Eatery building stand vacant behind floor-to-ceiling decorated curtains.
There’s no bustling and crowded Gianelli / Dinosaur Bar-B-Que stand at the edge of Chevy Court. A once busy corner of the Horticulture Building is quiet.
“It just seems empty,” said fairgoer Nancy Hinman while walking with her family down the long stretch of the New York State Fairgrounds along State Fair Boulevard. Most of the space in that area that has traditionally been occupied by food stands and other vendors is vacant.
“I still love the fair, but where are all the things that used to be here?” said Hinman, who comes to the fair each year from her home in northern Oswego County.
There are exceptions: The Expo Center, the largest building at the fair, has seemed significantly busier than in recent years with the Dinosaur Expedition exhibit that features life-size animatronic dinosaurs that move and roar. And several of the concerts at Suburban Park (formerly Chevy Park) have drawn record crowds.
The issue of the fair “seeming” to be empty has been around since 2016, after officials tore down the old grandstand and racetrack that occupied almost a quarter of the fairgrounds.
That created a much more wide open feel to the fair, even in the years before the Covid pandemic changed things. The 2019 fair set the all-time record for attendance and still felt less crowded than usual.
The renovations did, however, create a whole new food vendor area called Broadway, along with the Expo Center, the fair’s biggest building, which opened in 2018.
Many people complaining to syracuse.com in recent years say they believe the renovations and changes “ruined” the fair.
Then the 2020 fair was cancelled due to Covid, and the fairs since then have featured fewer vendors and lower attendance than the pre-pandemic period.
In the years before the pandemic, the fair typically had…
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