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Ithaca By Nancy and Richard Woodworth "Ithaca Is Gorges," say the ubiquitous bumper stickers hereabouts. The play on words is apt. Gorges slice through and around the biggest city in the Finger Lakes region, creating waterfalls that cascade almost into downtown. And the scenery is gorgeous, thanks to all the gorges, the surrounding hills and Cayuga Lake. The Cornell University campus, which straddles some of the most gorgeous of the gorges, is to our minds the most scenic in America. Hills rise sharply all around this city cradled at the southern end of Cayuga Lake. Only the downtown and west side are flat. Everything else in Ithaca is on hillsides, some as steep as any in San Francisco. The views from parts of the Cornell campus and the posh Cayuga Heights residential section are as dramatic as those in Berkeley. Ithaca is also called "The Little Apple," a reference to its big-city status as a cultural and arts center. Ithaca is home to both Cornell (an Ivy Leaguer with 12,500 undergrads and 5,600 graduate students) and Ithaca College (the largest private residential college in New York State with 6,400 students). The ivied Cornell and the modern Ithaca campuses sprawl across hilltops on opposite sides of town, though Cornell is much the larger presence. Together their student bodies nearly equal the year-round population of the city (29,500). The students and their top-notch faculties make for a lively academic and arts community. Ithaca remains a small town at heart, however. One of our visits coincided with a flying trip by then Vice President Dan Quayle to visit his son at a summer soccer camp and to take in the panoramic view of Ithaca, as everyone does, from the fifth-floor gallery of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. The Ithaca Journal ho-hummed the story the next day under a one-column inside headline, "Quayle Drops In." Where there is such scenery and sophistication, good restaurants, shops and inns are sure to follow. Ithaca harbors more than its share. One block of North Aurora Street in downtown has five restaurants in a row for starters. Downtown, with its main street turned into a pleasant pedestrian mall, bustles at all hours, thanks to good shops, galleries and eateries. The area has the only four-diamond, four-star country inn in New York State as well as more than 30 bed and breakfasts at last count. Ithaca has the largest farmers' market on the East Coast for a city its size. It also has a new winery inside the city limits, and is the starting point of the Cayuga Wine Trail. Three large state parks with waterfalls and gorges have Ithaca addresses, as do the spectacular Cornell Plantations gardens and the Sapsucker Woods wildlife sanctuary. All these assets add up to a quality of life that ranked Ithaca first in the East in a book, "Rating Guide to Life in America's Small Cities." Little wonder that the Ithaca area is one of the fastest-growing in New York State. Material excerpted from Inn Spots & Special Places in the Mid-Atlantic, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2003. Wood Pond Press E-mail feedback to: Home
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