Driving north through Syracuse in the 1970s on our way to fish the St. Lawrence River, we could smell Onondaga Lake before we saw it. Our family car filled up with a dizzying miasma of mothballs and raw sewage. We cranked the windows up at once.
It never once occurred to us to fish there. Ringed by factories and highways, scabbed over with dense mats of rotting algae, Onondaga Lake didn’t even seem capable of sustaining life.
But thanks to a half-billion-dollar cleanup over the past two decades, the toxic cesspool that for generations served as a punchline to bitter jokes about the city’s decline is now a bass fishing mecca…