Syracuse is a city in the central part of New York State, about 250 miles northwest of Manhattan.  It’s home to about 150,000 people, and another 600,000 live in the metro area.  The city is the hub of education in central New York, with its top employers being part of the state’s higher education system.  Syracuse was named after the original Syracuse, a city in Italy, that also was once a major hub for salt production.

The first Europeans to the area were French missionaries who set up camp in the 1600s, but the mission was short lived after they got a chilly reception from the Native Onondaga and Mohawk tribes.  Shortly after the Revolutionary War, salt was discovered in the area, which prompted more settlers to move into the area and give the area the nickname “Salt City.”

It went through a few name changes initially, but Syracuse was settled on an incorporated in 1825.  Five years later the Erie Canal was finished, which drove the city’s economic growth.  While salt production declined during the Civil War, Syracuse University was founded in the aftermath, and today it’s a major research university and the city’s largest employers, providing more than 7,000 people with jobs.

Along with Syracuse University, the State University of New York’s Medical University located here tops the area’s list of largest employers.  Wegmans Food Markets, the highly touted grocer, keeps it’s headquarters here.  Wegmans is consistently at or near the top of lists of the best companies to work for in the United States.  Lockheed Martin, Verizon Communications, and National Grid are just a few of the other big companies in the area.

A quarter of the city is covered by trees, giving the area a wooded feel and providing incredible arrays of color in the fall.  Land north of the city is typically flat, but south gets hilly.  If you’re moving to Syracuse, you’ll want to remember to get a shovel, because it gets more snow on average than any other large city in the United States.  You can count on around 115 inches every winter, and the record is 192 inches (that’s 16 feet of snow).  Typically that snow is just a few inches at a time, but in 1993 the city got walloped with 42 inches in 48 hours.