What began as a relatively modest 800,000-square-foot expansion of Carousel Center quickly mutated into a 100-million-square-foot Frankenmall that would cost $20 billion to build, making it one of the largest building projects in US history, according to Architectural Record. And it wasn’t going to save just Syracuse, but the entire world. In the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Congel crowed that DestiNY USA would “produce more benefit for humanity than any one thing that private enterprise has ever done.”

Below is a partial list of DestiNY USA’s humanitarian benefits:

• 5-star restaurants, including Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville
• 25,000-square-foot off-Broadway theater designed to host premier acts such as David Blaine Magic and Blue Man Group
• Onondaga Dunes, an 18-hole golf course to be built over the Solvay wastebeds
• Swim-with-the-Fish Experience, with dolphins, tropical fish, and stingrays
• Torch-lined historical re-creation of the Erie Canal
• 4 miles of jogging and biking trails
• Butterfly sanctuary
• Rainforest habitat, with real tropical plants and animatronics
• 5-acre extreme sports complex

Onondaga Lake has been so thoroughly despoiled for so long that much of the waterfront is undeveloped and now exists in a postnatural state of sylvan tranquillity

“My daughter lives in Wisconsin and that place is just — everybody raves about that place,” the woman said. Other members of the tour started whispering to each other and shrugging. Melting Pot? What’s a Melting Pot?

“It’s a fondue restaurant,” said a man in a suit who’d been sitting quietly in the corner. Strang introduced him as the mall’s manager. “See, it’s set up with these individual kind of cubbies, and they do seatings of seven and nine,” the manager said, then realized that this level of detail probably wasn’t necessary. He crossed his arms, raised his eyebrows, and said, “It’s an experience.”

“We have them in a number of our properties,” Strang said. “If anybody’s driven by Buffalo in the last few years, we just did a renovation there. And they have a Melting Pot, a P. F. Chang’s, a Cheesecake Factory — ” The woman in pink clapped her hands. “Oh see, that too, a Cheesecake Factory!”

I stared at the notebook on the table in front of me. In it I’d written a list of Destiny USA amenities that had gone by the wayside over the years. My plan was to ask questions as if I’d just stepped out of a time machine from 2002. How much did it cost to play the back nine on Onondaga Dunes? Stuff like that. But I didn’t have the courage to do it. For some reason, I figured that a mall tour scheduled for the middle of a weekday would coax other unemployed cranks like me from their caves for the rare opportunity to harangue Destiny USA executives in person. But my compatriots were nice people, the kind who came to the mall on a summer afternoon to buy presents for their grandchildren. My bitterness dissolved inside a steaming pot of gooey cheese.

Destiny USA, and Carousel Center before it, could not have “happened” anywhere else but here. And not just here, in Syracuse, but on the frothy, stinking shores of Onondaga Lake. If it wasn’t the most polluted lake in the country, if it didn’t sit smack in the middle of a Rust Belt city verging on bankruptcy, Congel would have neither abandoned land to grab nor the political leverage to exploit it. Had he hawked his megamall to any community located on any of the other Finger Lakes — the affluent resort town of Skaneateles, say, where the Congel clan owns multimillion-dollar mansions — they would’ve told him to take a hike.