JUH281664.vp

10.1177/0096144205281664 ARTICLE

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS

FRATERNITY ROW, THE STUDENT GHETTO,

AND THE FACULTY ENCLAVE

Characteristic Residential Districts

in the American College Town

BLAKE GUMPRECHT

University of New Hampshire

The unusual demographic characteristics of college towns, and the social differences that exist within stu

dent populations, have led to the emergence in college communities of several distinctive types of residential

districts. Using Ithaca, New York, as an example, this study examines the origins and evolution of three such

districts—the Greek-housing district sometimes called “fraternity row,” the student rental area often known

as the student ghetto, and the faculty enclave. Together such districts help to make the American college

town a unique type of urban place.

Keywords: college towns; neighborhoods; housing; residential segregation

The hundreds of college towns in the United States are, in essence, an aca-

demic archipelago.

Similar to one another, they often differ in several impor-

tant ways from other cities and the regions in which they are located. The most

fundamental difference is demographic and is a reflection of the fact that many

college towns are single-industry communities whose main business is educa-

tion. The annual migration of new students to campuses means college town

populations are forever young. The need for faculty and administrators, and

the presence of graduate students, mean that college town populations are

more highly educated than the general populace.

The lopsided demographics of college communities help explain their dis

tinctive personalities. College town commercial areas reflect the ever-chang

ing tastes of youth and the nonmainstream orientation of many professors.

Faculty and students tend to be more cosmopolitan than the population at

231

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author thanks Martha Armstrong, Leslie Chatterton, Scott Conroe, Jane

Dieckmann, William Fogle, Ken Growney, Margaret Hobbie, Carol Kammen, Chris Koza, John Marcham,

Howie Schaffer, John Schroeder, Carole Schiffman, Carol Sisler, and Mary Tomlan for their help with this

research; all Ithaca residents past and present I interviewed for this study; William Deverell, John Hudson,

Peirce Lewis, Paul Mattingly, and Rick Musser for their support; three anonymous reviewers for their com

ments and suggestions; and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, which provided

funding for this research.

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 32 No. 2, January 2006 231-273

DOI: 10.1177/0096144205281664

large, so college towns often act as regional centers of culture. Professors and

students have been shown to be more politically liberal than the general popu

lation, which has caused some college towns to develop reputations for social

activism and progressive politics.

But perhaps the most conspicuous influ

ence of youth and erudition is evident in the character of the college town resi

dential landscape. The presence of unusual concentrations of students and

highly educated adults, and the social differences that exist within college

communities, have led to the emergence in college towns of distinctive types

of residential neighborhoods.

College towns are highly segregated residentially. College faculty and other

permanent residents seldom want to live near undergraduates because of the

different lifestyles they often lead. For students, the college years represent

their first chance to live relatively free from adult interference, so they, too,

prefer to live among their own. Dissimilarities within the student body contrib

ute still further to residential differences within college towns. Although fac

ulty are less concentrated residentially than students, they too have shown a

tendency to cluster. This study will identify and describe three types of resi-

dential districts common to college towns that are a function of their unusual

age and education characteristics—the Greek-housing district sometimes

called “fraternity row,” the student rental district often known as the student

ghetto, and the faculty enclave. In order to better understand why such districts

develop and how they have changed over time, I will examine the origin and

evolution of examples of each in a single college town, Ithaca, New York.

Ithaca is home to two four-year colleges, Cornell University and Ithaca Col-

lege. This study will focus on residential districts near Cornell because its

impact has been more conspicuous than its younger and smaller neighbor.

Cornell was founded in 1868, its campus laid out atop a plateau that overlooks

the city and Cayuga Lake. Growing quickly to become one of the largest and

most prestigious private universities in the United States, Cornell has come to

exert a profound impact citywide. The influence of Ithaca College is more

localized and less pronounced. Founded in 1892 as the Ithaca Conservatory of

Music, it did not offer bachelor’s degrees until 1926. For most of its history, it

lacked a cohesive campus, its facilities scattered throughout downtown Ithaca.

It did not develop its current campus on what is known locally as South Hill

until the 1960s. Like other private, undergraduate-oriented, liberal arts col

leges, Ithaca College houses the majority of its students on campus and has no

off-campus fraternities, which limits its residential impact. Ithaca College fac

ulty, moreover, seem as likely to live near Cornell as Ithaca College, drawn by

the greater campus amenities of a research university.

Like other college towns in the longest-settled parts of the United States,

Ithaca has come to be more strongly influenced by its colleges over the years.

When Cornell was founded, Ithaca was a growing manufacturing town. By the

turn of the twentieth century, its factories made boats, glass, pianos, guns,

clocks, paper, and typewriters. In the early 1900s, factories were developed

232 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

that made adding machines, bicycle chains, airplanes, and later, automobile

parts.

After World War II, however, college enrollments grew rapidly and

manufacturing’s share of employment steadily declined, with most of the

city’s old-line industries eventually closing.

Students and faculty came to

make up an increasing share of Ithaca’s population. Today, education is over

whelming Ithaca’s biggest “industry.” Cornell and Ithaca College together

employ more than 11,500 people in the city and nearly half of the labor force in

2000 worked in education, compared to 3.5 percent in manufacturing. Since

1960, combined enrollment at Cornell and Ithaca College has doubled to

nearly 26,000, while the city’s population has remained about the same. In

2000, fifty-five percent of the city’s residents were college students. As

Ithaca’s colleges have grown, the housing needs of students and faculty have

increasingly shaped the city’s urban landscape.

FRATERNITY ROW

At noncommuter colleges, undergraduates are normally required or

strongly encouraged to live in university-owned residence halls for at least

their freshman year. After freshman year, students begin to sort themselves out

according to their interests and lifestyles. Away from home and perhaps lost in

a university many times larger than their high school, some choose to postpone

independence and formalize their social lives by joining a fraternity or sorority.

In most college towns, fraternity and sorority houses are concentrated in one or

two areas. Often, several line a single street, which is typically called “frater-

nity row.” Examples include Webster Avenue in Hanover, New Hampshire;

Dubuque Street in Iowa City; and Colorado Street in Pullman, Washington.

With their classical or Greek-revival mansions and the unusual traditions

and active social lives of the people who live in them, the fraternity district is a

landscape unique to college communities. Raucous parties pour from frater

nity houses most every weekend during the school year. Pledge week rituals,

formal dances, and the building of homecoming floats are local spectacles.

Fraternity houses can make bad neighbors, which helps explain why they are

often concentrated and located apart from other residential areas. Contrary to

popular perception, fraternity houses at most universities are privately owned

and located off campus.

While most Greek organizations voluntarily submit

to regulation by universities, college officials do not exert the same degree of

control over them that they do over on-campus residence halls.

Although membership in Greek letter societies is declining and some elite

private colleges, such as Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts,

have abolished their Greek systems altogether, fraternities and sororities

remain an integral part of student life in most college towns. At large state uni

versities, typically one-quarter to one-half of undergraduates pledge. At some

private colleges, such as DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, three-

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 233

quarters of undergraduates join.

While fraternities and sororities have long

been criticized for their elitist (and sometimes bigoted) selection processes,

dangerous hazing rituals, cliquish behavior, excessive drinking, and anti-intel

lectual attitudes—indeed, it is hard to find noncritical accounts of Greek life—

they can serve a useful purpose for students who require greater social interac

tion.

“For a certain kind of boy at a certain tender age, fraternity is simply a

given,” wrote the novelist Richard Ford, who pledged Sigma Chi at Michigan

State University. “A go-along guy, who wants friends. A guy with standards he

can’t understand. For this kind of boy conformity is a godsend. And I was that

kind of boy.”

Ithaca does not possess a single fraternity district or fraternity row, as do

some college towns. Most fraternities and sororities are located on the west

side of the Cornell campus or in one of two suburban areas north of campus,

Cornell Heights and Cayuga Heights (Figure 1). The Greek houses north of

campus are relatively spread out and interspersed with single-family homes.

This study will focus on the West Campus Greek housing district, since frater

nity houses are more concentrated and conspicuous here than elsewhere, and

because the area has been home to fraternities for the longest period. The West

Campus area is home to twenty-five fraternity houses and one sorority house

(Figure 2). Most of the houses were built in the late 1800s or early 1900s.

Many have been occupied by the same organization for a century or more. The

majority of Cornell’s most elite fraternities are located in this area. Most of

Cornell’s sororities are located north of campus, and thus outside the focus

area, because they developed later.

Fraternities were an outgrowth of the campus literary societies that emerged

on college campuses in the late 1700s in response to the conservative nature of

higher education at the time. Most colleges were religiously oriented and had

classical curricula that emphasized memorization and recitation. It was in the

literary societies that students found an environment that nurtured free intel

lectual inquiry. Literary societies sponsored debates on the issues of the day

and built libraries that often surpassed college book collections in size and

scope. The first fraternity established in the United States, Phi Beta Kappa in

1776, was also intellectual in its purpose, but from the beginning fraternities

also had a social component. As colleges liberalized their curricula and took

over some of the functions of literary societies, the purpose of fraternities

became chiefly social.

By the time Cornell University opened in 1868, fraternities had replaced the

literary societies in importance on most college campuses and had largely for

saken their intellectual roots. They had become gentleman’s clubs that sought

only the most urbane young men for membership. They provided fellowship

and institutionalized the long-standing college traditions of drinking, smok

ing, card playing, and singing. They grew, in the words of the historian Freder

ick Rudolph, because they “offered an escape from the monotony, dreariness,

234 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 235

Bryant

Park

Collegetown

Cayuga Heights

Ithaca

Commons

Cornell Heights

Downtown

Ithaca

Renwick

West

Campus

Greek Housing

District

Cayuga

Lake

Cornell

University

College A

Eddy St

East Buffalo St

North Cayuga St

Miles

0 0.25

BG04

Figure 1: Map of Ithaca, New York, and vicinity showing the Greek housing district, the

Collegetown student rental housing area, and the faculty enclaves, Cayuga

Heights and Bryant Park.

SOURCE: Map by the author.

and unpleasantness of the collegiate regimen.” Cornell welcomed fraternities

from the start. Its first president, Andrew Dickson White, had been a fraternity

man at Hobart and Yale, and he spoke publicly about the virtues of fraternities

on numerous occasions, arguing that they encouraged responsibility on the

236 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Alpha

Tau

Omega

Cornell

University

Alpha

Sigma Phi

Sigma

Alpha

Delta Phi

Phi

Gamma

Delta

Lambda

Upsilon

Lambda

Sigma Phi

Epsilon

Sigma

Sigma Alpha

Epsilon

Phi

Sigma

Kappa

Sigma

Omega

Tau

Sigma

Chi

Psi

West Campus

Dormitories

Delta

Phi

Psi

Upsilon

Sigma

Phi

Kappa

Psi

Delta

Tau

Delta

Alpha

Omicron

Delta

Upsilon

Kappa

Alpha

Theta

Kappa

Alpha

Chi

Phi

Lambda

Chi

Alpha

Delta

Kappa

Epsilon

Theta

Delta

Chi

Collegetown

Cornell Heights

reek

art

ven

nue

West Avenue

BG04

West Campus

Greek Housing District

Ithaca, New York

Fraternity or sorority

Cornell residential facility

Other Cornell buildings

Feet

0 100

Figure 2: Ithaca’s West Campus Greek housing district is home to twenty-five fraternities

and one sorority.

SOURCE: Map by the author.

part of their members and calling them “the best substitute possible for the

family relation.” In Cornell’s first year, seven fraternities were founded.

Fraternities have long served an important housing function at American

universities such as Cornell, which opposed the construction of dormitories

initially. White was adamant in his belief that students would be better housed

in private homes or fraternities, saying that dormitories were breeding grounds

for “carelessness, uproar, and destruction.” Still, the Cornell campus in its

early years was isolated from the main part of Ithaca, sitting atop a steep hill

that remains a difficult climb even in good weather. As a consequence, the uni

versity had little choice but to provide rooms for students and faculty at first.

As new classroom buildings were constructed, rooms were set aside for stu

dent residences, but as the demand for educational facilities grew, these were

gradually eliminated. The first dormitory for men was not built until 1914. As

a result, fraternities came to house an increasing portion of undergraduate

men.

Sororities developed later, but have never been as numerous as fraterni

ties because Cornell was an overwhelmingly male institution during the prime

period of Greek society development in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Female students were so outnumbered that fraternities regularly bused in

coeds from nearby women’s colleges for big party weekends until the 1960s.

Cornell’s first fraternities rented meeting rooms above businesses in down-

town Ithaca. The newly founded Psi Upsilon became the first fraternity to have

its own house and to locate near the Cornell campus when it rented a two-story

structure in 1876 at the corner of Buffalo and Quarry streets in a neighborhood

that became known as Collegetown (see Figure 1). The next year, Delta Kappa

Epsilon rented a house nearby. In 1878, Alpha Delta Phi became the first fra-

ternity to build its own chapter house in the area. One by one, fraternities

migrated from downtown up the steep hill, East Hill, which separates Ithaca’s

central business district from the Cornell campus. The steady migration

of Greeks reflected a general shift in student housing. In time, however, ani

mosity between the Greeks and independents, as non-Greeks were known,

prompted most fraternities to relocate.

The story of the Cornell chapter of Alpha Delta Phi is useful in helping to

understand why this geographic shift took place and how separate Greek hous

ing districts emerge in college towns. Alpha Delta Phi was the fourth fraternity

chartered at Cornell. Shortly after its founding in 1868, members rented rooms

in downtown Ithaca, near those of several other fraternities. Soon after Psi

Upsilon and Delta Kappa Epsilon rented houses near campus, alumni of Alpha

Delta Phi raised $12,000 to build a house and purchased a lot on Buffalo Street

about halfway up East Hill. The lot was ideally situated because at the time,

most Cornell students lived downtown and walked up Buffalo Street to cam

pus, passing by the Alpha Delta Phi house. The two-story, brick chapter house

was completed in 1878 and provided housing for sixteen brothers.

Three developments shifted the geographic focus of fraternity life and

spurred Alpha Delta Phi to seek a new home. In 1881, Cornell began the

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 237

practice of allowing fraternities to lease land on campus to build chapter

houses. Then, in 1888, a bridge was built at Stewart Avenue over Cascadilla

Creek, which separates the Collegetown neighborhood from Cornell, encour

aging the development of fraternity houses on the west side of campus. Within

a few years, three fraternity houses were built on the central campus (see Fig

ure 3) and several more were constructed on the west side, some on campus

lots, others on privately owned parcels. Finally, in 1893, a street railway was

built from downtown to campus along State Street, eliminating most of the

pedestrian traffic that had passed in front of the Alpha Delta Phi house on Buf

falo Street.

These changes served to isolate Alpha Delta Phi. “Buffalo

Street ...isnowquite deserted,” wrote the fraternity’s alumni secretary in

1900, “and for some years the chapter has labored under the disadvantage of

being out of the direct line and a considerable distance from the center of stu

dent life.”

The migration of independents to rooming houses in Collegetown,

meanwhile, spurred an exodus of Greeks from the neighborhood. In 1893,

Alpha Delta Phi had been one of thirteen fraternities in the area. By 1900, only

three remained.

Though Alpha Delta Phi was the first fraternity to build its own house, in the

intervening twenty years it had become run down and was smaller and less

238 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 3: Kappa Alpha chapter house, completed in 1887, one of several fraternity

houses built on the Cornell campus on land leased from the university.

SOURCE:Archive Photograph Collection, No.13-6-2497, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collec-

tions, Cornell University Library. Used with permission.

opulent than several newer fraternity houses. If Alpha Delta Phi was to com

pete for the most sought-after pledges and retain its prominence in campus life,

it needed a new house in a new location. In 1899, the fraternity’s alumni board

appointed a committee to consider its options.

By this time, Cornell was

under control of a new president, Jacob Gould Schurmann, who was critical of

the Greek system and discontinued the practice of granting fraternities leases

of campus land. Without the option of building on campus, Alpha Delta Phi

considered four sites for a new house, three in Collegetown and one on the

west side of campus. Indicative of the growing divide between Greeks and

independents, it rejected all the Collegetown sites, dismissing one because of

its proximity to “a number of cheap, unattractive buildings” and another,

located near several rooming houses on Heustis Street (now College Avenue),

because “it has a Heustis Street atmosphere as distinguished from a campus

atmosphere.”

Collegetown was becoming, in every sense of the term, Ithaca’s

student ghetto, and the status-minded fraternities wanted no part of it.

Alpha Delta Phi in 1900 chose a site on the west side of campus but away

from most of the fraternities in that area. By this time, there were seven frater-

nities located on the west side of campus just north of Cascadilla Creek.

Another stream, Fall Creek, formed the northern boundary of campus. Five

years before, the Chi Psi fraternity had purchased the famous McGraw-Fiske

mansion, which sat on thirty acres on the south edge of Fall Creek, opposite the

northwest corner of campus. Built in 1881 for Jennie McGraw, daughter of one

of Cornell’s founders, the McGraw-Fiske mansion was Ithaca’s most extrava-

gant residence (see Figure 4). Styled after a French chateau and designed by

William Henry Miller, who designed more than seventy buildings in Ithaca

and on the Cornell campus, including nine fraternity houses, it had sweeping

views of the campus, town, and Cayuga Lake, and cost a reported $300,000 to

build. After McGraw died, the land on which the mansion sat was subdivided

into smaller lots, and, over the next decade, many were sold to fraternities. This

became the next major fraternity-building area. In 1899, Phi Kappa Psi built a

house next door to Chi Psi. A year later, Alpha Delta Phi purchased a five-acre

lot just below the Chi Psi house.

The Chi Psi house set a standard of luxury that other Cornell fraternities

sought to emulate. In fact, Alpha Delta Phi alumni worried about choosing a

site nearby, fearing they would be forever “overshadowed.” They also worried

that the site was too far from the center of student life. Two factors enabled

them to overlook these disadvantages. The Ithaca street railway was extended

along Stewart Avenue in front of the site they were considering, making the

area more accessible and stimulating the building in the vicinity of several

“fine residences by professors and leading business men,” a class of people

more compatible with the fraternity’s own social aspirations than the inde

pendents in Collegetown. Moreover, the fraternity had learned “from reliable

sources” that Cornell planned to build several men’s residence halls across

from the site. Although the fraternity wanted no part of the “Heustis Street

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 239

atmosphere,” the dormitories would house freshmen, the source of future frater-

nity pledges.

What better place to showcase the attractions of fraternity life?

Rather than try to copy the gothic grandeur of the Chi Psi house, Alpha

Delta Phi hired Chicago architect George Dean, a student of Frank Lloyd

Wright, who designed the house in the prairie-school tradition of his mentor

(see Figure 5).

Seeking to distinguish it still further from Chi Psi, Alpha Delta

Phi built a separate initiation chamber—a windowless, nine-sided, star-shaped

structure designed for the fraternity’s secret initiation rituals. The chapter

house and initiation chamber were completed in 1903. About the same time,

two other fraternities purchased land on the former McGraw-Fiske estate and

began building houses. A third fraternity purchased a private home nearby.

Within a decade, there were ten fraternity houses in the vicinity (see Figure 6).

There were thirteen more located farther south, on the north edge of Cascadilla

Creek.

In 1914, as expected, Cornell built the first of fifteen men’s residence

halls in between the two Greek housing areas. They provided a steady stream

of new initiates to nearby fraternities and stimulated the building of other

chapter houses in the vicinity.

At Cornell and elsewhere, as Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has noted, Greeks

dominated the formal aspects of student life. They were disproportionately

represented in student government. They were the editors of the student news

paper and the yearbook. They were the cheerleaders and stars of athletic teams.

Their parties and dances were the most important events on local social calen

dars and were covered on the society pages of newspapers. Fraternity men

240 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 4: The Chi Psi fraternity purchased the famous McGraw-Fiske mansion in 1881.

SOURCE: Carol Sisler Papers, Collection 4925, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cor-

nell University Library. Used with permission.

were wealthier and more conservative than the student body as a whole, and

their chapter houses were sumptuous mansions designed to symbolize the sta-

tus of their residents, with great bay windows, wide verandas, grand staircases,

oak-lined dining rooms, and stone fireplaces. The Saturday Evening Post

called Cornell’s chapter houses “the very apex of sybaritic luxury.”

Cornell’s

early fraternities were also exclusively white and Christian, which stimulated

the development of minority Greek organizations. The first black fraternity in

the United States, Alpha Phi Alpha, was founded at Cornell in 1906, though it

does not appear to have had a chapter house, its members living together in a

rooming house on State Street. A Jewish fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau, was estab

lished on campus the following year. It established chapter houses first in

Collegetown and later in Cornell Heights.

Cornell’s Greek system, like those at other universities, grew with the insti

tution, eventually becoming one of the largest in the United States. By 1925,

there were eighty fraternities and sororities, and chapter houses had spread

north into the Cornell Heights neighborhood and the separately incorporated

village of Cayuga Heights. Several years before, Delta Gamma had become

the first sorority to own its own house and sorority membership increased as

female enrollment grew.

The lure of fraternity life and the contrasts between

the Greeks and their opposites, the studious but socially inept “grinds,” was

well illustrated in Charles Thompson’s novel, Halfway Down the Stairs, set in

Ithaca. The book’s protagonist, a self-described “grubby little jerk from Philip,

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 241

Figure 5: Alpha Delta Phi chapter house, built in 1903 on land subdivided from the

McGraw-Fiske estate.

SOURCE: Alpha Delta Phi at Cornell University. Used with permission.

Mass.,” arrives in Ithaca at one of the West Campus dorms, expecting ivy-cov

ered grandeur only to find a “dirt and tar-paper shack, which was crouched

with nine or ten like it under the shadow of two great brick fraternity houses.”

The houses belonged to Psi Upsilon and Sigma Phi, still today among

Cornell’s most elite fraternities.

“Well, I dropped my bags on the stoop of this hovel, and looked up at the fra

ternity houses,” recalled the novel’s central character. “They were huge, with

diamond panes and lattice windows and about fifteen chimneys apiece. Each

one had a cool flagstone terrace, and on one of these terraces a bunch of people

242 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 6: Fraternity houses built on land subdivided from the McGraw-Fiske estate in the

late 1800s and early 1900s. Alpha Delta Phi’s star-shaped initiation chamber is

to the right of the fraternity’s chapter house.

SOURCE: Alpha Delta Phi at Cornell University. Used with permission.

were having a party. They were tall brown boys and girls in skirts and cashmere

sweaters, in light flannels and white bucks, and they looked like something out

of the Philip Yacht Club. They were drinking what looked like orange juice;

they moved in and out of wide French doors on the terrace, and inside someone

was playing good cocktail piano. I stood there and watched them for a long

time, fascinated.” After a while, one of the fraternity men wandered over to a

wall, gazed out over the town, then looked down at the dorms. “There was a

funny mixture of reactions on his face. He saw my suit and my shoes and my

long hair and my beat-up cardboard suitcases, but it wouldn’t have bothered

him if he hadn’t caught the look on my face. I guess he saw pure envy there, and

a bitter kind of lust. ...Iwanted to be up on the Sigma Phi terrace with the

pretty boys and pretty girls.”

Fraternities have experienced alternating periods of expansion and contrac

tion, support and criticism. Many closed during World War II and struggled to

regain their previous stature in a postwar era during which veterans dominated

campus life. Fraternities boomed again during the 1950s, once the veterans

graduated—two-thirds of Cornell freshmen pledged in the mid-1950s—only

to come under attack in the nonconformist Sixties. Membership declined and

some two dozen fraternities and sororities at Cornell closed. Fraternities

nationwide were pressured to eliminate discriminatory clauses in their

charters and to actively recruit ethnic and religious minorities. In 1968, Cor-

nell’s Board of Trustees instituted a policy requiring all fraternities and sorori-

ties to comply with an antidiscrimination pledge. The conservatism of

fraternities stood in sharp contrast to the tenor of the times. When militant

blacks occupied the Cornell student union in 1969, for example, members of

the Delta Upsilon fraternity broke into the building to try to remove them.

Some faculty at Cornell and elsewhere called for the abolishment of the Greek

system, which one report called “an absurd anachronism.”

Few colleges ever

acted on such recommendations, perhaps because, as one Cornell report found

and observers elsewhere have noted, a disproportionate share of the most gen

erous alumni donors to colleges and universities are fraternity men.

The campus protests of the 1960s led to the eventual elimination of many

university regulations governing student behavior, which, along with the rais

ing of the legal drinking age and the popularity of the fraternity movie Animal

House, spurred a revival of Greek life in the 1980s. As state after state raised its

drinking age to twenty-one, fraternities assured undergraduates continued

access to alcohol and made chapter houses once again the center of campus

life. Fraternities became, in the words of Simon Bronner, “underage drinking

clubs.” Nationwide, fraternity membership nearly doubled between 1980 and

1986. The number of fraternities and sororities at Cornell grew from fifty-two

to sixty-five in a decade.

Giant fraternity parties rocked the West Campus

Greek housing district every weekend. One fraternity alumnus described the

1980s as Cornell’s “Lord of the Flies period,” an era when fraternity parties

advertising 125 kegs and drawing 3,000 people were common.

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 243

Growing concern in recent years over student drinking, the sexual conduct

of fraternity members, and injuries caused by hazing, and continued criticism

that fraternity membership practices are elitist and even discriminatory, have

prompted colleges to again try to reign in the Greeks.

Some institutions have

banned alcoholic beverages from chapter houses. Cornell has imposed many

new restrictions on Greek social activities. Open parties are now prohibited:

All events must be by invitation only and sponsors are required to have a guest

list at the door. Chapters must hire a licensed caterer for all events where alco

hol is served. Rush and pledge functions must be dry. Conversations with fra

ternity members indicate that the regulations are more a nuisance than a

deterrent and are routinely ignored or circumvented. Drinking is still a central

component of Greek life and student cultures in general (see Figure 7). Large

parties are still common, with the fraternities on West Campus taking turns

holding the biggest events. Underage drinking is still widespread. Hazing is

still practiced, though truly dangerous rituals are rare.

Cornell’s fraternities

and sororities, like Greek organizations nationwide, also remain overwhelm

ingly white. While all have eliminated discriminatory membership policies in

their bylaws and now have minority members, they are still less diverse than

the student body and society as a whole.

Changing attitudes toward fraternities are having an impact. Nationwide,

fraternity membership declined 30 percent between 1990 and 2000. At the

dawn of the twenty-first century, “Greek life is ...atough sell,” according to

Richard McKaig, director of the Center for the Study of the College Fraternity

at Indiana University.

At Cornell, membership fell 11.2 percent between

1996 and 2001. Three chapter houses closed. Cornell fraternity members refer

to the time before the new social rules were implemented as “the good old

days.”

Nevertheless, Greek life remains an integral part of student life at Cor-

nell, which had forty-four fraternities and twenty-one sororities in 2001.

Roughly one-quarter of undergraduates were members. The continued impor

tance of fraternities and sororities, and the prominence of their chapter houses

in the built environment (see Figure 8), suggest that the fraternity district will

remain a distinctive attribute of college towns well into the future.

THE STUDENT GHETTO

For as long as there have been fraternities and sororities, there have been

undergraduates who have reviled them, resented their importance, and lived

their college years outside their sphere of influence. Many prefer to rent large

houses near campus with friends or live in apartments. Campus-adjacent

neighborhoods are often dominated by such rentals. Most college towns of a

certain size have at least one neighborhood near campus that is home almost

exclusively to undergraduates. Informally, it is often called the “student

ghetto” and is characterized by dilapidated houses, beat-up couches sitting on

244 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

porches, cars parked on lawns, and bicycles chained to anything that will not

move (see Figure 9). It is the result of what happened to many campus-adjacent

neighborhoods when enrollments mushroomed following World War II: Col-

leges became less able to house their students, landlords saw an opportunity,

and homeowners sought refuge from the influx of young people. Such neigh-

borhoods often filtered down from faculty and other more well-to-do perma

nent residents as the housing stock deteriorated.

Neighborhoods such as University Hill in Boulder, Colorado; College Park

in Gainesville, Florida; and the Collegetown district in Ithaca are locally noto

rious and the frequent subject of proposals by government officials seeking to

control their spread and improve their appearance (see Figure 10).

Many col

lege towns have sought to slow the expansion of such neighborhoods by

imposing regulations intended to discourage the conversion of single-family

homes into rental properties. In a decision that could prove significant for col

lege towns, the Indiana Court of Appeals in 2002 struck down as unconstitu

tional a zoning ordinance in the college town of Bloomington, Indiana, that

said no more than three unrelated adults could live in any dwelling. Many col

lege towns have similar ordinances. Couches on porches are so central to the

image of the student ghetto that an entrepreneur in Ithaca created a poster that

is a parody of tourist posters such as “The Doors of Dublin.” It features thirty-

three photos of couches and other indoor furniture on Ithaca porches above the

banner, “Couches of Collegetown” (see Figure 11). Some see the proliferation

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 245

Figure 7: Students use a funnel while drinking at a Cornell University fraternity party.

SOURCE: Photograph by the author.

of couches on porches as less benign, however. The City Council in Boulder

recently implemented an ordinance prohibiting upholstered furniture outdoors

in response to several riots on University Hill in which couches were burned.

The origin and evolution of Ithaca’s Collegetown neighborhood (see Figure

1) is in many ways representative of student-rental districts in college towns

nationwide. Collegetown did not exist when Cornell opened its doors in 1868.

Most residents of Ithaca lived on the “flats” that extended southward from

Cayuga Lake. Ithaca’s central business district developed along State Street

and most homes were located north of it. There were but a scattering of private

homes on East Hill, adjacent to the Cornell campus. Most of the area was occu

pied by small farms and woods. The first significant building on East Hill was a

cotton mill built in 1827 by Otis Eddy, for whom one of the major streets in

246 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 8: Delta Kappa Epsilon,one of 25 fraternity houses in Ithaca’s West Campus Greek

housing district.

SOURCE: Photograph by the author.

Collegetown is named. The mill was torn down in 1866 and replaced by a five-

story stone building, Cascadilla Place, a hospital based on the water cure,

which also failed.

Cornell leased Cascadilla Place, converting it into a dormi

tory for students and faculty. It became the nucleus around which the neigh

borhood grew. Collegetown developed organically in response to

undergraduate demand for housing, the student-dominated district expanding

outward as Cornell’s enrollment increased.

When Cornell opened, students had three choices of where to live.

Cascadilla Place provided room and board for 104 students, plus twelve fac

ulty members and their families. It was abhorred by professors and students

alike. It had outdoor privies and gas lighting. The manager of the dining room

kept a pigsty out back. Cornell’s first president, Andrew Dickson White, who

lived in Cascadilla while his home was being built, called it “an ill-ventilated,

ill-smelling, uncomfortable, ill-looking alms house.”

Another seventy-five

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 247

Figure 9: Typical student-ghetto rental house in the Collegetown neighborhood, Ithaca.

SOURCE: Photograph by the author.

students lived in the university’s first academic building, Morrill Hall. Every-

one else had to live down the hill in central Ithaca and walk a mile to campus,

climbing the steep, four-hundred-foot hill upon which the university stands.

The walk to campus was so exhausting that an early professor placed a stone

bench about halfway up Buffalo Street to provide weary climbers a place to

rest.

White opposed the building of dormitories, insisting undergraduates would

be better off rooming in private homes. “Large bodies of students collected in

dormitories often arrive at a degree of turbulence,” he said, “which small par

ties, gathered in the houses of citizens, seldom if ever reach.”

By necessity,

some space was set aside in the first university buildings to house students, but

as enrollment grew, student rooms were converted to academic uses. The

building of rental housing near campus lagged behind demand. For the first

five years, the majority of students lived in central Ithaca, many forming clubs

so they could reduce expenses by leasing an entire house. Cornell’s first stu

dent newspaper, the Era, urged Ithaca residents to “wake up” and “furnish

accommodations—at reasonable prices and within reasonable distance of the

University halls.” So desperate were students for housing near campus that a

group of twenty students was granted permission to build a cottage on the uni

versity grounds. Later, David Starr Jordan, who became the first president of

Stanford University, joined with several classmates to build a wood “hut” on

campus, near the president’s house.

248 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 10: Sights such as this one have prompted governments in college towns to try to

improve the appearance of student rental districts and control their spread.

SOURCE: Photograph by the author.

Finally, in the late 1870s, several large, frame rooming houses were built on

Eddy Street and Heustis Street, now College Avenue (see Figure 12). By 1889,

there were fifty-nine residences in Collegetown. Enrollment at Cornell had

topped 1,000, making it one of the largest universities in the country. That year,

the Era appealed to the city to extend its streetcar line to campus, claiming that

the lack of transportation served to “isolate the university” and caused rents in

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 249

Figure 11: Couches on porches are so central to the image of the student ghetto that an

Ithaca entrepreneur created this parody of tourist posters such as “The Doors

of Dublin.”

SOURCE: Carole Schiffman. Used with permission.

Collegetown to become “abnormally high,” a common complaint in student

rental districts up to the present day.

The streetcar line was extended to cam-

pus in 1893. The largest rooming houses were located along Heustis Street,

most of them, in the words of Cornell’s historian, “cheap, ugly, and hazard-

ous.”

In time, businesses began to spring up in Collegetown to serve students

living in the rooming houses. In 1903, a private dormitory, Sheldon Court, was

built opposite the main entrance to Cornell. It housed 135 students, the Triangle

Book Store, a doctor’s office, and a restaurant known as Mother’s Kitchen.

The student-housing district grew and grew. Year by year, new houses were

built on the north-south streets leading to campus. Between 1904 and 1910,

twenty new houses were built along Heustis Street. Eventually, new east-west

streets were developed and one by one houses were built along them. The

Cook family, Ithaca’s leading florists at the turn of the century, owned a large

tract between Heustis and Eddy streets, upon which they had an orchard and

several greenhouses. Catherine Street and Cook Street were built through this

tract. Over the next twenty years, two dozen houses were built on the two one-

block streets and the last of the greenhouses was removed. By 1930, most of

present-day Collegetown was built up. Houses farthest from campus were ini

tially occupied by families, who may have rented an extra room to students, but

over time these too were converted to rooming houses and later apartments.

The Collegetown commercial district also expanded. The parts of Heustis

Street, Dryden Road, and Eddy Street closest to campus came to be lined with

restaurants, bookstores, grocers, barbers, and other businesses catering to

students.

250 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 12: Rooming houses built in the 1870s along Heustis Street,now College Avenue,in

Ithaca’s Collegetown neighborhood.

SOURCE:Archive Photograph Collection, No.13-6-2497, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collec

tions, Cornell University Library. Used with permission.

As Cornell students began to sort themselves out residentially according to

lifestyle differences, Collegetown developed a decidedly different character

than the Greek-housing district between Fall and Cascadilla creeks. Where the

fraternity houses were expensive and palatial, the rooming houses were, in the

words of Morris Bishop, a Cornell student and later a faculty member, “light,

flimsy structures of wood or of loathsome chocolate-colored Ithaca mud.”

Bishop mapped the geography of the rooming houses in a 1912 article in the

Cornell Era. The most desirable—and expensive—were located on the hill

leading to Collegetown. “The dweller here need never be ashamed of his

address,” Bishop wrote. The quality of housing quickly deteriorated east of

Eddy Street, an area he referred to as “The Great Rooming-House Belt.”

“Rooms here are cheaper,” he wrote, “but as ever you must pay for cheapness.

Many . . . are small, bare, and insecure against the invasion of our famous Feb

ruary weather.” In 1913, a committee composed of students reported that most

of the Heustis Street and Dryden Road rooming houses were “crowded” and

many were “fire traps,” and recommended that the university begin regular

inspection of the rooming houses. The following year, Cornell’s Board of

Trustees implemented a plan to inspect the rooming houses annually and sup-

ply to freshman a list of inspected houses.

Where the best of the fraternity houses were home to the undergraduate

elite, Collegetown housed those students who were at the bottom of the Cor-

nell “caste system,” according to Bishop. They were, he wrote fifty years later,

“a vast plebian mass, the independents, the outsiders, the pills, the poops, the

drips.” Where the fraternity district was Cornell’s country club, Collegetown

was its tenement district. It also became Ithaca’s Left Bank, particularly after

World War II, when living in the “sweet little slum of rooming houses” became

an affectation of the wannabe proletariat. “The Collegetown crowd—well,

they’re the bohemians,” wrote Charles Thompson in Halfway Down the Stairs.

“They dress a la Greenwich Village and they’re actors and writers and musi

cians and that sort of thing. I always thought they were a ratty bunch.”

As Cornell’s enrollment grew following World War II, the student housing

district expanded. Enrollment nearly doubled between 1940 and 1965, as vet

erans flooded campuses and baby boomers began to enter college. The propor

tion of high school graduates attending college tripled in the first three decades

after the war.

Like most American universities, Cornell devoted increasing

resources to dormitory construction, building in the 1950s alone seven resi

dence halls capable of housing 1,200 students, but the number of students liv

ing off campus grew even faster. The nature of student accommodations also

changed, as the postwar student sought more room and greater freedom. Stu

dents came to prefer apartments and gradually most of Collegetown’s rooming

houses were converted.

As demand for off-campus housing increased, many

single-family homes in Collegetown were also turned into apartments. Typical

of college towns nationwide, landlords could outbid families as houses came

on the market. The lifestyle differences between students and older adults also

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 251

pushed families out. Block by block, Collegetown turned from a mixed neigh

borhood into a student-dominated district. At the time, it was also a predomi

nantly male neighborhood, as female students were required to live on campus

or in sororities, as they were at many American colleges.

Collegetown became the center of Ithaca’s countercultural scene during the

1960s, a period one writer later called the neighborhood’s “Golden Age.” As

enrollments grew and the contrasts between undergraduates and the rest of the

population intensified, student-dominated districts near college campuses

developed a culture all their own. They were, in the words of the sociologist

John Lofland, “cities of youth.” The anthropologist William Partridge called

one such neighborhood in Gainesville, Florida, “the hippie ghetto.” It was in

Ithaca’s Collegetown that Richard Fariña, confidante of Bob Dylan and

brother-in-law of Joan Baez, set his quintessentially Sixties novel, Been Down

So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. There were poetry readings at the Cabbagetown

Café. Gays and bikers hung out at Morrie’s bar. “Eight Miles High” drifted out

of apartment windows. A paved parcel at the corner of Eddy Street and Dryden

Road was set aside as “People’s Park.”

“Collegetown,” wrote a contemporary

observer, “is, and always has been, the fertile soil in this area for writing, party-

ing, rioting, speech-making, and messing up and getting off.”

In the early seventies, however, a “wave of heroin” arrived in Collegetown

and the mood began to sour. In 1971, a reputed drug dealer was murdered in a

Collegetown parking lot. Junkies ruled the streets, according to one writer. The

grassy slope behind Cascadilla Place became the favored spot to smoke mari-

juana. Drug deals “were going on all the time” on Eddy Street. LSD was com-

monplace, with hangers-on “‘laying hits’ on anyone who walked by.”

In May

1972, following an anti–Vietnam War rally on campus, a crowd tried to set fire

to the Collegetown branch of the First National Bank, but it would not burn.

Two days later, police seeking to break up a block party on College Avenue

triggered a four-hour melee during which partygoers threw bottles, cans, and

rocks at police. Twenty-nine people were arrested and twenty others were

injured, including ten policemen (see Figure 13). Police in riot gear used tear

gas to disperse the crowd.

By this time, the housing stock in Collegetown had deteriorated. Little new

housing had been built in a half-century and existing housing was poorly

maintained (see Figure 14). The most run-down buildings were fire and health

hazards. “It was dirty, cockroach infested,” said Sean Killeen, who represented

the neighborhood on the Ithaca Common Council.

As enrollments increased,

a housing shortage developed on campus, which heightened demand for hous

ing off-campus. The greatest growth was in the female student population,

which doubled between 1965 and 1975 while male enrollment stayed about

the same. In response to protests against differential regulations for coeds,

which grew out of the nationwide student power movement, Cornell’s admin

istration gradually eliminated rules requiring female students to live on campus,

which escalated demand for rental properties in Collegetown. Demand

252 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

exceeded supply in the areas closest to campus, so rents rose. Because students

were a captive market, landlords often did little to improve their properties (see

Figure 15). The situation grew so bad that in 1965 students put up tents on

campus to protest poor housing conditions in Ithaca. Cornell implemented a

detailed code for student rental housing and, in 1966, began requiring students

to live in university-approved housing. In 1969, the Ithaca Tenants Union was

formed; it called on Cornell to build more residential facilities on campus and

pressured the city to strengthen its building codes and increase enforcement.

Rent strikes became widespread.

A columnist in the Cornell student newspaper in 1975 lampooned the poor

conditions of Collegetown housing, retelling the story of his search for a place

to live. He visited one apartment on Eddy Street, which he described as “a

street of singular charm and ugliness, punctuated by garbage cans and parking

meters. . . . The landlord, an unfriendly and unshaven man with an apron,

showed me into the flat which had a bedroom, kitchen and water closet and all

slanting ten degrees off the horizontal. The table was nailed to the floor and the

landlord told me the only problem with the flat was when Sally upstairs

washed her twelve blue jeans and washing machine B overflowed, but there

was plastic in the closet to catch the drippings.” He visited another apartment

on Buffalo Street. “The landlord led me up the stairs [which] creaked with the

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 253

Figure 13: Handcuffed student arrested in May 1972 Collegetown riot.

SOURCE: Photograph by Dan Brothers, published in

A Century at Cornell

, by Daniel Margulis and

poverty that makes a great writer and my heart beat faster and my pencil

weighed heavy in my pocket. The door to the flat led to the kitchen which led to

the bathroom which led to the bedroom where the light from the gabled win

dow lit all three rooms because they were in a straight line . . . The window had

a crack in it where I could stuff my socks. Bad apartments make good writers

so I signed the lease and I was happy.”

Collegetown has undergone profound changes over the last quarter century.

City officials began to press for the redevelopment of the neighborhood in

1968. The following year, a city-sponsored urban renewal plan called for the

heart of Collegetown to be demolished and replaced with a massive, multipur

pose development. It recommended construction of a large building on Col

lege Avenue that would include 375 apartments, 600 parking spaces, retail on

the first and second floors, two movie theaters, a restaurant, and nine floors

of office space. It also called for the construction of six to eight high-rise apart

ment towers, the tallest eighteen to twenty-one stories. The plan went nowhere

254 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 14: Rooming house at 209 College Avenue, Ithaca.

SOURCE: Photograph by Carin Ashjian, published in

A Century at Cornell

, by Daniel Margulis and

because, as Ithaca planning director H. Matthys Van Court said, “it was too

big” and “unfinancable.”

Countless proposals were debated over the subse-

quent decade, but little real change took place until the 1980s. In 1981, Cornell

decided to build a new $16.5-million performing arts center in Collegetown,

and to renovate Cascadilla Place and a once-private dormitory nearby to

provide additional student housing.

Cornell spent $40 million on various Collegetown projects and, in the pro

cess, stimulated the transformation of the neighborhood. Today, large apartment

buildings, the tallest of which is nine stories, line both sides of Dryden Road

(see Figure 16). Several other apartment buildings were built on College Avenue

and Eddy Street. “It’s like a mini-Manhattan,” observed one local business

man.

The city encouraged development by temporarily suspending building-

height limits and parking requirements. Over a ten-year period, more than a

dozen apartment buildings, capable of housing 1,700 people, were built. The

building boom is representative of changes that are taking place in student-

housing districts in college towns nationwide. A prolonged period of eco

nomic prosperity meant students were arriving at college with new cars and

more money for housing. Landlords in Ithaca and elsewhere discovered that

student tastes had changed. Where undergraduates in earlier periods would

snap up cramped and dingy apartments in beat-up old houses, a new breed of

students preferred modern buildings with greater amenities, while still want

ing to live close to campus. Developers such as Houston-based Sterling

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 255

Figure 15: Cramped interior of a typical Collegetown apartment, 1971.

SOURCE: Photograph by Richard A. Shulman, published in

A Century at Cornell

, by Daniel

University Housing have recognized this market niche. Sterling has built ame

nity-rich student housing—intended as a cross between dormitories and apart

ments—in thirty college communities. Its properties typically include fitness

centers, volleyball courts, hot tubs, game rooms, and high-speed Internet

access.

Jason Fane, Ithaca’s biggest landlord, built three of the apartment buildings

on Dryden Road. All are fully furnished, air conditioned, with dishwashers,

microwave ovens, and Ethernet connections. One even has a doorman. Fane

also owns a number of older Collegetown houses. He has watched student

housing tastes change over the last quarter century. In 1975, he remarked that

students “aren’t interested in aesthetics.”

A quarter century later, Fane

observed that students “are looking for quality.” They want apartments that are

“clean, fresh, new,” “close to campus,” with “the latest technology,” “superb

256 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 16: Large, modern apartment buildings now line Dryden Road in Collegetown, in

dicative of the changing nature of college town student rental districts.

SOURCE: Photograph by the author.

services,” and “views.” “Basically,” he concluded, “students want pretty much

the same thing as the tenant in a new high-rise tower in a big city.”

Rental rates

have skyrocketed as a result of the new development. A one-bedroom apart

ment in Fane’s newest building, Collegetown Center, is $1,300–$1,400 a

month. Parking costs another $175 a month. Studio apartments in the 312 Col

lege Avenue building, which has a mini-theater that residents can reserve,

study rooms, and a concierge, are $1,020–$1,255 a month.

The expensive new buildings have increased the population density, stimu

lated new retail development, and created, in effect, two Collegetowns. There

were nearly 2,000 more people living in the neighborhood in 2000 than there

were in 1980, an increase of 125 percent. Population density is now compara

ble to Brooklyn or San Francisco. Not surprisingly, the population is young,

most are students, and nearly all are renters. Anyone over age thirty stands out.

Collegetown is also increasingly Asian, reflecting a rise in the enrollment of

Asian students at Cornell since 1980. Asians made up 30 percent of the neigh

borhood’s population in 2000, a proportion three times higher than twenty

years before.

Many of the new apartment buildings include retail on the first

floor, and the character of businesses has changed dramatically in recent years.

Collegetown is now filled with restaurants, bars, coffee houses, and other busi-

nesses catering to the wealthier students who live in the new buildings. There

are seventeen different restaurants, including six different varieties of Asian

cuisine.

Farther from campus, however, Collegetown remains much as it has for fifty

years. The lower ends of Eddy Street, College Avenue, and nearby streets are

still lined with large, frame houses full of student apartments, many of them

approaching one hundred years old. Rents are cheaper than they are in the new

buildings. Since the 1960s, the student-housing district has expanded down

East Hill and east into the Bryant Park neighborhood, as rising enrollments

increased demand for rentals. Collegetown remains Ithaca’s student ghetto

and still meets the definition of a ghetto as a neighborhood where a particular

group lives in relative isolation from the rest of the population, but parts of the

area no longer fit the aesthetic characteristics that such a designation suggests.

Collegetown, like student housing districts in university communities

nationwide, is changing.

THE FACULTY ENCLAVE

Although professors are less concentrated residentially than they once were

and are scattered throughout university communities like Ithaca, most college

towns have at least one older neighborhood near campus that has resisted the

invasion of undergraduates and is home to large numbers of professors and

college staff. The faculty enclave is a neighborhood of classic homes and tree-

lined streets, where residents vigilantly seek to preserve the area’s character

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 257

and prevent incursions by students (see Figure 17). John Jakle, in a study of

Urbana, Illinois, found that University of Illinois faculty were concentrated in

that city’s Carle Park neighborhood and observed that professors were more

likely to own houses that were architecturally distinctive as a way to set them-

selves apart as an “educated gentry class.” Gorman Beauchamp, in a portrait of

Burns Park, a faculty enclave in Ann Arbor, Michigan, noted that residents of

such neighborhoods are more likely than inhabitants of other areas to own a

passport, subscribe to the New York Review of Books, and espouse liberal

causes, and less likely to go to church or fly the U.S. flag. “Ah yes, Burns

Park,” Beauchamp wrote, quoting a faculty colleague at the University of

Michigan, “where they vote left and live right.”

Ithaca has at least two faculty-oriented neighborhoods, Cayuga Heights and

Bryant Park (see Figure 1). Cayuga Heights, a separately incorporated village

located north of the Cornell campus, is the more elite of the two, its lots larger,

its homes more expensive, and, as a result, is home to high percentages of ten

ured and emeritus faculty. Nearly two-thirds of adult residents in Cayuga

Heights in 2000 held graduate degrees.

Bryant Park, adjacent to the south

side of the Cornell campus and convenient as well to Ithaca College, was

developed about the same time, but its lots are smaller, its homes less grandi

ose, and its location less desirable. Where Cayuga Heights looks out on pictur

esque Cayuga Lake, Bryant Park abuts the student-dominated Collegetown

district. While Cayuga Heights has traditionally been home to large numbers

of senior faculty, Bryant Park is more affordable and, as a result, has been

258 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 17: Entrance to Cayuga Heights, one of two major faculty enclaves in Ithaca.

SOURCE: Photograph by the author.

popular with younger faculty buying their first homes. One longtime resident

of Bryant Park, a Cornell economics professor, said, “I always tell my students

that the proletariat professors live in [Bryant Park] and the affluent ones live in

Cayuga Heights.”

In the early years after Cornell was founded, most faculty lived on campus—

first in Cascadilla Place alongside students and later in houses built on the uni

versity grounds. Because the campus was isolated from the rest of Ithaca, Cor

nell’s trustees permitted faculty to build houses on land leased from the

university, a practice not uncommon in college towns.

The first two faculty

cottages were built in 1871 and eventually thirty-four faculty homes were built

on campus. Cornell President White supported the program because he

believed “commodious, convenient, and attractive” homes would make pro

fessors less likely to leave Cornell. “Even the presence of an attractive little

veranda or bay-window,” he said, “may hold a wife against advanced salary for

her husband elsewhere.”

After the turn of the century, as Cornell’s enrollment

began to rise, there came to be increasing pressure for the land upon which the

houses were built. One by one the faculty houses were purchased, demolished,

and replaced by academic buildings, and faculty moved off campus. This

change stimulated residential development nearby. In fact, the only subdivi-

sions developed in Ithaca between 1888 (when it was incorporated as a city)

and World War I were built on East Hill in areas convenient to the Cornell

campus.

Ithaca’s first faculty enclave was Cornell Heights, located between the Cor-

nell campus and Cayuga Heights, on the north edge of the Fall Creek gorge. An

unnamed writer in the Cornell student newspaper first recognized the residen-

tial potential of the area one year after the university’s founding. In an article

calling for the construction of housing for students near campus, the writer

appealed to the owner of the land north of Fall Creek to “at once throw a bridge

across that stream as near as possible to the University edifices, cut up his

property into building lots, and forthwith erect as many inexpensive but sub

stantial residences as can be built.”

A few years later, Franklin Cornell, son of

university founder Ezra Cornell, likewise recognized the attractions of the

area, observing, “the land across the gorge is the grandest and best in this coun

try for residences.” He had a different clientele in mind than the student writer,

however, predicting that one day “the campus people will burst across the

gorge . . . and make those lands the choicest in Ithaca.”

The lack of a bridge across the deep gorge inhibited development of the area

for a quarter century. Finally, in 1896, a group led by Edward G. Wyckoff, son

of a wealthy Ithaca businessman, announced plans for the development of

Cornell Heights. Wyckoff purchased a controlling interest in the Ithaca Street

Railway so the streetcar line could be extended to the area. Two bridges were

built across the gorge just before the turn of the century, enabling the street rail

way to be built through the Cornell campus to Cornell Heights and back. From

the outset, Wyckoff envisioned Cornell Heights as an elite residential area

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 259

catering to faculty and businessmen, “without the encroachment of commercial

interests or students.”

Several streets were named for early Cornell profes

sors. Most original residents were Cornell faculty, who walked to campus or

rode the streetcar.

An unwelcome development in 1906, typical of the forces that trigger

neighborhood change in college towns, squelched Cornell Heights’ emer

gence as Ithaca’s premier faculty enclave. That year, Sherman Peer donated his

Cornell Heights house to the Alpha Zeta fraternity. The move enraged

Wyckoff, who threatened legal action against Peer for violating the terms of

his deed. “You are aware as to the efforts we have always made to the end of

keeping fraternities from occupying houses on Cornell Heights,” Wyckoff

wrote his lawyer. “These young men are causing considerable annoyance in

the neighborhood.”

Cornell Heights’ proximity to campus made it increas

ingly difficult to keep out students and gradually faculty began to relocate. In

1912, Cornell built the first of several women’s dormitories in the area. Two

years later, Wyckoff himself gave up, selling his Cornell Heights estate to the

Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. Many faculty who sought to escape the invasion of

students looked north.

Cayuga Heights held many of the attractions of Cornell Heights without its

major disadvantages. Sitting atop the same plateau as the Cornell campus, it is

at the same elevation as the university grounds, a desirable characteristic in

hilly and snowy Ithaca. It overlooks Cayuga Lake, while its gently rolling

topography meant many home sites would have lake views. While it was con-

venient to the Cornell campus, it was not so close that it faced the same pres-

sure from student housing (though fraternities were later built on its southern

edge). Because it never became part of the city of Ithaca, it has also been better

able to control what goes on within its borders. The nucleus around which

Cayuga Heights developed, two parcels totaling 616 acres north of Cornell

Heights, just beyond the Ithaca village limits, were purchased in about 1901 by

Jared Newman, Edward Wyckoff’s attorney, and Charles Hazen Blood,

Newman’s law partner. Newman and Blood hired Boston landscape architect

Warren Manning to design the subdivision. Influenced by the picturesque resi

dential designs of Frederick Law Olmsted, Manning laid out Cayuga Heights

with irregular-sized home lots and curving streets that followed the contours of

the landscape. White pines and other trees were planted according to formal

plan.

Development of Cayuga Heights was slow at first. Newman built a summer

home there in 1903. In 1909, he built a year-round residence. Two years later,

Sherman Peer built a Gustav Stickley–designed house next door to the

Newman home (see Figure 18). By the end of that year, there were twenty-one

houses in the tract. In 1913, Newman began to more actively promote Cayuga

Heights. He named the first area that was subdivided White Park, after Cor

nell’s first president. He advertised home sites in the Cornell Alumni News,

which circulated on campus. He envisioned Cayuga Heights as a village of

260 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

“cultured families” and predicted it would become “the finest residential sec-

tion in Ithaca.” To keep out “undesirable elements” he refused to allow real

estate agents to sell home lots on his behalf. Deeds prohibited fraternities and

commercial enterprises. House designs had to be approved by the developers.

Newman saw Cornell faculty as his preferred clientele (see Figure 19). In a

letter to a Chicago real estate broker in 1920, he noted that Cornell professors

were to receive large salary increases that year. Many of them, he observed,

“are on the lookout for homes and a goodly portion of them turn their attention

in this direction.” To distinguish Cayuga Heights from Cornell Heights, he

noted that there “isn’t a single boarding house in the entire village” and “the

lots are larger and the outlook finer.” By February 1921, there were fifty-six

houses in Cayuga Heights. “Three-fourths of the residents,” he wrote, “are in

some way connected with the University.” Newman’s correspondence is filled

with sales pitches to professors. In one, he encourages Professor John Parson,

bothered by fraternities near his Ithaca home, to look to Cayuga Heights for

relief. In trying to interest Professor W. W. Fisk in a large parcel, Newman

wrote, “it seemed to me it was just what a University man might want.”

From the beginning, Cornell faculty exerted a disproportionate influence on

civic affairs in Cayuga Heights. All but two mayors since 1923 have been Cor

nell professors. Frederick Marcham, a professor of history, was mayor for

thirty-two years. Faculty and their spouses have occupied a majority of seats

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 261

Figure 18: These three grand residences marked the entrance to Cayuga Heights in 1916.

SOURCE: The History Center of Tompkins County. Used with permission.

NOTE:At the center is the house of Cayuga Heights developer Jared Newman.At left is the Gustav

Stickley–designed house of Sherman Peer, a close friend of Newman. At right is the house of John

Tanner, Newman’s brother-in-law.

262 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

Figure 19: Cornell professor Paul R. Pope built this Cayuga Heights house, shown under

construction and after it was completed,in about 1912. Cayuga Lake is visible in

the background of the top photo.

SOURCE: The History Center of Tompkins County. Used with permission.

on the village governing board over the years and their attitudes, particularly

the desire to prevent developments that would attract students, have shaped

policy. Marcham led a successful 1954 campaign against annexation by the

city of Ithaca, which he feared would bring Cayuga Heights the student-

related problems that plagued campus-adjacent neighborhoods in the city. The

village rejected proposals for the building of a restaurant with a tavern because

of the worry that the tavern would draw students. In the 1970s, it thwarted an

attempt by Cornell to build a dormitory in the village.

Cornell professors

have also shaped life in Cayuga Heights in other ways. One longtime resident

observed that the influence of faculty families on the operation of the Cayuga

Heights School was so great that it “was practically a branch of Cornell ...a

kind of private school adjunct to the Cornell faculty.”

The Cayuga Heights School went through only eighth grade, so older stu

dents had to attend Ithaca High School. When village teenagers went down the

hill to attend high school, they sometimes found their new classmates had pre

conceived notions about people from Cayuga Heights. Residents from other

parts of Ithaca were less highly educated, more blue collar. Cayuga Heights

inhabitants were perceived as bookish, cultured, and aloof. “With unfamiliar-

ity grew contempt,” said John Marcham, son of Cayuga Heights’ longtime

mayor. “One day when I had to leave a school activity early to catch a bus to the

Heights, a friend was incredulous. ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’ was just

the way he put it.” Indicative of the lighthearted tension that existed between

hill dwellers and those who lived on the “flats,” intramural teams at Ithaca

High School composed mostly of Cayuga Heights residents were sometimes

known as the Cayuga Heights Sophisticates.

Bryant Park was developed at about the same time as Cayuga Heights by the

same developer. Its emergence as a faculty enclave followed a similar path.

The land upon which the neighborhood developed had been a wheat farm and

fruit orchard owned by Solomon Bryant. Following his death, three of his chil

dren in partnership with Jared Newman subdivided forty-five acres of the

property into 161 building lots. The Bryant tract began immediately east of the

rooming houses in Collegetown. The growth of the neighborhood was stimu

lated by the development of the New York State College of Agriculture. In

1904, the state Legislature created the college and placed it under the control

of Cornell. Within a few years, it became the largest college on campus. The

sale of lots in Bryant Park began in 1908. Lots sold more quickly than they did

in Cayuga Heights, in part because parcels were less expensive, but also

because Bryant Park was less isolated. By 1914, one-third of the lots in Bryant

Park had been sold, many of them to professors. Most of the lots in Bryant Park

were built upon by World War II and development began to spread east to the

city limits. A 1941 report said that 477 Cornell employees lived in the area,

nearly half of them staff members in the College of Agriculture.

The design of the subdivision, the nature of promotional materials, and the

characteristics of deeds make clear that developers sought to establish Bryant

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 263

Park as a faculty enclave. The initial announcement of the sale of lots noted

that the tract was “within three minutes walk of the campus bridge.” Bryant

Avenue was cut diagonally across the slope of the tract to create a nearly level

road, “so that it would not be necessary to go up hill to reach the University

campus.” To distinguish the subdivision from Cornell Heights, the announce

ment pointed out that Bryant Park “is much nearer to both town and campus.”

With the College Avenue rooming houses so close, developers imposed deed

restrictions designed to prevent student housing from expanding into Bryant

Park. Deeds prohibited commercial enterprises and the sale of liquor. They

forbade more than one house from being built on any lot, to prevent homeown

ers from erecting separate rental properties. Some deeds also included a state

ment that any house built “shall be planned and erected for use as a home, and

not for the purpose of keeping roomers.”

Like their counterparts in Cayuga Heights, faculty in Bryant Park have been

unusually active in civic affairs. When the Bryant Park Civic Association was

formed in 1923 to mount a campaign for the building of a school in the neigh

borhood, thirty-five of forty-seven persons who signed their names in support

of the organization were Cornell employees or their spouses. Ten of its first

fourteen presidents were faculty. Although neighborhood organizations are

common today, the Bryant Park group was the only such organization in Ithaca

at the time. The nature of its activities, moreover, showed a strong imprint of

academic culture. The group regularly formed committees—on schools,

streets, zoning, parking, parks, bus service, and other issues of the day. It pro-

duced detailed and remarkably sophisticated studies on matters of neighbor-

hood concern, in order to better present the group’s views to city officials. One

such report in 1946 was actually written on Cornell University stationary.

Ithaca was essentially fully developed residentially by 1950 and has seen

little single-family housing construction since then. The city’s population

actually fell by 3,000 people between 1950 and 1970, though it has rebounded

since that time because of the tremendous growth of Collegetown and rising

on-campus student populations at both Cornell and Ithaca College. Most sin

gle-family housing development since 1950 has taken place outside the city

limits, in suburban towns such as Lansing, where a shopping mall was built in

1974, and Dryden.

Cayuga Heights has also grown. It annexed an area north

of the original village in 1953, quadrupling its size and more than doubling its

population in the process. Most of the homes in the newer part of the village

were developed after World War II and are smaller and more typically subur

ban in character than those farther south. In 1994, a retirement community

catering to Cornell faculty and alumni was developed in this area.

As the

Ithaca area has suburbanized, faculty have become more residentially dis

persed. Nevertheless, Cayuga Heights and Bryant Park have maintained their

status as faculty enclaves to varying degrees.

Bryant Park today is a mixed neighborhood, about half owner-occupied

houses and half rentals (see Figure 20). Some blocks are inhabited mostly by

264 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

faculty families; others are dotted with student houses. As Cornell’s enroll-

ment grew in the 1960s and 1970s, the student-housing district spilled east into

Bryant Park. Those streets closest to Collegetown have significant student

populations. Most of the neighborhood is zoned for single-family homes, but

some houses have apartments, or were rentals before current zoning classifica-

tions were implemented. The threat that Collegetown will further encroach on

Bryant Park is an ever-present fear of nonstudent residents. “You always have

to be vigilant,” said one resident, the wife of a Cornell professor, echoing the

sentiments of homeowners in campus-adjacent neighborhoods nationwide.

“You don’t want to live next door to an undergraduate student house. One

property, one bad apple, can cause a whole flight.”

Bryant Park has been able to retain its character as a faculty enclave in the

face of such threats because its current residents, like the original homebuyers

in the area, have been politically adept, a trait that reflects the presence of so

many highly educated people in the neighborhood. Homeowners pay particu

lar attention to real estate activity. If a house comes on the market, the Ithaca

Common Council representative for the neighborhood will telephone the real

estate agent to make sure they know the zoning for the area and to encourage

them to seek family buyers. If someone applies for a zoning variance, a poten

tial precursor to conversion of a single-family house to a rental property,

homeowners will quickly organize to oppose the application.

“When a situa

tion that makes the neighborhood potentially vulnerable come[s] up ...the

word spreads very quickly and before you know it, the phones are buzzing,”

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 265

Figure 20: Typical street in the faculty enclave of Bryant Park.

SOURCE: Photograph by the author.

said a longtime resident. “There will be a meeting at somebody’s house, and, if

necessary, a small army will march down the hill to the city council chambers.

We come in large numbers and we’re pretty savvy about how to play the politi

cal game. There’s a level of sophistication that I think academics are able to

bring to bear on these things that allows them to fight these kinds of fights.”

Why do professors seem more likely to live close to their places of employ

ment than other workers? Numerous residents of Bryant Park and Cayuga

Heights spoke of a desire to be able to walk to work. Indeed, residents of fifty-

nine college towns that are the focus of a larger project upon which this study is

based were four times more likely to walk to work and seven times more likely

to commute by bicycle in 2000 than the U.S. population in general. Academics

tend to work more irregular hours than workers in other industries, and are

more likely to go to their offices at night and on weekends, which makes con

venience desirable. Faculty (and others) are also drawn to college campuses

because they possess amenities—concert halls, museums, recreational facili

ties, park-like green spaces—that other workplaces do not. Joel Savishinksy,

who teaches at Ithaca College but chooses to live near Cornell, is a case in

point. “I don’t work [at Cornell], I don’t teach here, but I subscribe to the the-

ater series,” he said. “I can walk to the performing arts center. I love the fact

that I can walk out my front door and in five minutes be up at the graduate

library at Cornell. I love having Cornell next door.”

CONCLUSION

Alison Lurie, in her novel The War Between the Tates, set in a thinly dis-

guised Ithaca in the turbulent 1960s, captures the peculiar flavor of college

towns and the fractured nature of their social environments. She writes about

the book’s protagonist, a political science professor: “Brian had known for

some time that he and his colleagues were not living in the America they had

grown up in. It was only recently though that he had realized they were also not

living in present-day America, but in another country or city-state with some

what different characteristics. The important fact about this state ...isthat the

greater majority of its population is aged eighteen to twenty-two. Naturally,

the physical appearances, interests, activities, preferences and prejudices of

this majority are the norm. . . . Cultural and political life is geared to their stan

dards, and any deviation from them is a social handicap.” In college towns, fac

ulty like Brian may govern the classroom, but their influence is less significant

off campus. “Like a Chinaman in New York, [Brian] looks different; he speaks

differently....Helikesdifferent foods and wears different clothes and has dif

ferent recreations,” writes Lurie. “Naturally he is regarded with suspicion by

the natives.”

It is those differences that also shape the residential mosaic of college towns

like Ithaca. Young people are dominant, but they are not distributed evenly

266 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

across the city. Undergraduates live apart from permanent residents, both by

choice and because year-round residents do all they can to keep them out of

their neighborhoods. Some students live in fraternity and sorority houses.

Some live in the beat-up old rentals of the student ghetto. Still others prefer the

expensive new apartment buildings that are indicative of the changing face of

college communities. Faculty and undergraduates work and play in close

proximity, but they rarely live near one another, “by silent consent from both

sides,” as one longtime Cayuga Heights resident observed.

The distinctive

character of college town residential districts is one aspect of life in the Ameri

can college town that helps give it its unusual personality and contributes to

making it a unique type of urban place.

1. This study considers as a college town any city where a college or university, and the cultures it cre

ates, exerts a dominant influence over the character of the place. I have described in greater detail elsewhere

the distinguishing characteristics of college towns. See Blake Gumprecht, “The American College Town,”

Geographical Review 93:1 (January 2003), 51–80.

2. In 2000, one-third of residents in fifty-nine college towns that are the focus of a larger research pro-

ject were eighteen to twenty-four years old. Nationwide, just one in ten were in that age group. Adult resi-

dents in the study towns were twice as likely as the overall U.S. population to possess a college degree. One-

third possessed a graduate degree, three times the U.S. average. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Census 2000,”

http://factfinder.census.gov/ (accessed January 22, 2004).

3. Carll Everett Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset, The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics (New

York, 1975); Richard F. Hamilton and Lowell L. Hargens, “The Politics of the Professors: Self-Identifica-

tions, 1969–1984,” Social Forces 71:3 (1993), 603–627.

4. Ithaca’s population characteristics are typical of college towns nationwide. In 2000, the median age

was twenty-two years old and more than half of residents were aged eighteen to twenty-four. Six in ten adult

residents possessed a college degree, one-third held a graduate degree, and nearly one in ten had a doctorate.

U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Census 2000.”

5. Dan Snodderly, “Downtown,” in Carol U. Sisler, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane Marsh Dieckmann, eds.,

Ithaca’s Neighborhoods: The Rhine, the Hill, and The Goose Pasture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 36–37; Clayton

W. Smith, “South Hill,” in Carol U. Sisler, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane Marsh Dieckmann, eds., Ithaca’s

Neighborhoods: The Rhine, the Hill, and The Goose Pasture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 85–87; Ithaca College,

“Former Presidents,” http://www.ithaca.edu/president/former_presidents.php (accessed April 13, 2004);

Ithaca College, “Common Data Set, 2003–2004,” http://www.ithaca.edu/ir/cdsindex.html (accessed April

13, 2004).

6. Gretchen Sachse, “Ithaca: An Overview,” in Carol U. Sisler, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane Marsh

Dieckmann, eds., Ithaca’s Neighborhoods: The Rhine, the Hill, and The Goose Pasture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988),

9, 14; Smith, “South Hill,” 83–84; Amy Humber, “Fall Creek,” in Carol U. Sisler, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane

Marsh Dieckmann, eds., Ithaca’s Neighborhoods: The Rhine, the Hill, and The Goose Pasture (Ithaca, N.Y.,

1988), 41–46.

7. Manufacturing’s share of total employment in Tompkins County, where Ithaca is located, declined

from 45.7 percent in 1948 to 9.4 percent in 2001. From 1972 to 1992, Tompkins County experienced a net

loss of 1,500 jobs as three major factories employing 3,300 people closed. See Tompkins County Area

Development, Economic Development Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 7; Tompkins County Area Develop

ment and Tompkins County Planning Department, “Tompkins County Economic Development Strategy:

Phase One, The Database and Comparisons” (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 23; U.S. Bureau of the Census, County

Business Patterns, Tompkins County, New York, 2001, http://censtats.census.gov/cbpnaic/cbpnaic.shtml

(accessed April 20, 2004).

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 267

8. TCAD/TCPD, “Tompkins County Economic Development Strategy,” 1992, 8; Cornell University,

Institutional Research and Planning, “Total Cornell Workforce, 1993–1994 to 2003–2004,” http://dpb.cor

nell.edu/irp/pdf/FactBook/HR/workforce.pdf (accessed April 15, 2004); Ithaca College, Institutional

Research, “Facts in Brief,” http://www.ithaca.edu/ir/factsfigs.html (accessed April 15, 2004); U.S. Bureau

of the Census, “Industry by Sex—Percent Distribution: 2000” (Table QT-P30), Ithaca city, New York, http://

factfinder.census.gov (accessed April 15, 2004); Cornell University, Institutional Research and Planning,

“Cornell University Enrollment, Total Registration, Ithaca Campus, Fall 1868—Current,” unpublished table.

9. Jack L. Anson and Robert F. Marchesani Jr., eds., Baird’s Manual of American College Fraternities,

20th ed. (Indianapolis, 1991).

10. Leo Reisberg, “Fraternities in Decline,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2000, A59–A62.

Estimates on the proportion of students who belong to fraternities and sororities are based on data obtained

from a variety of sources about the fifty-nine college towns that are the focus of a larger research project.

11. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures From the End of the Eighteenth

Century to the Present (Chicago, 1987), 274. For a sympathetic but objective history of Greek letter societ

ies, see Kent Christopher Owen, “Reflections on the College Fraternity and Its Changing Nature,” in Jack L.

Anson and Robert F. Marchesani Jr., eds., Baird’s Manual of American College Fraternities, 20th ed. (India

napolis, 1991), I1–I24.

12. Richard Ford, “Rules of the House,” Esquire, June 1986, 231.

13. Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York, 1968), 138–141;

Owen, “Reflections on the College Fraternity,” I2, I14.

14. Rudolph, American College and University, 146; Andrew Dickson White, “College Fraternities,”

Fo ru m , May 1887, 251; Waterman Thomas Hewett, Cornell University: A History, Vol. 3 (New York, 1905), 13.

15. Horowitz, Campus Life, 111–112; James H. Goodsell, “The College Homesteads of Greek Letter

Men,” in Greek Letter Men of Central New York, South, comp. Will J. Maxwell (New York, 1901), 39–48;

Scott Meacham, “Halls, Toms and Houses: Student Society Architecture at Dartmouth,” http://

www.dartmo.com/halls/index.html (accessed January 22, 2004); White, “College Fraternities,” 246; Morris

Bishop, A History of Cornell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), 81–82, 95, 138; Kermit Carlyle Parsons, The Cornell

Campus: A History of Its Planning and Development (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), 91, 101, 219.

16. Female students made up 20 percent of Cornell’s enrollment in 1950. In that year, Cornell had fifty-

five fraternities, but only fifteen sororities. After that, female share of enrollment steadily climbed. By 2000,

46 percent of Cornell students were women. The number of Cornell sororities has grown, but not as fast as

enrollment, increasing to nineteen by 2000. Cornell, “Cornell University Enrollment, Fall 1868–Current”;

Cornell University, Directory of Students, 1950–1951 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950); Cornell University, Fraternity &

Sorority Advisory Council, 2001–2002 Annual Report (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002), 30.

17. Willard Austin, “Fraternities at Cornell University,” College Fraternity, April 1893, 14; G. H.

Hooker, “Cornell Fraternities: A Sketch,” Cornell Era, April 1901, 315; Hjalmar H. Boyesen, “Chi Chap

ter,” in Peter A. Babauer, ed., The Annals of Psi Upsilon, 1833–1941 (New York, 1941), 232–233; H. Wil

liam Fogle, Jr., The Cornell Deke House: A History of the 1893 Lodge (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 1; Knight

Kiplinger, “The History of the Chapter [Alpha Delta Phi, Cornell University],” unpublished manuscript, no

date.

18. Kiplinger, “The History of the Chapter”; A. L. Reed, ed., Alpha Delta Phi: The History, Function &

Structure of the Fraternity, Cornell Chapter, Founded 1869 (Ithaca, N.Y., n.d.), 27.

19. Cornell University, Proceedings of the Board of Trustees of Cornell University, April 1965–July

1885 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1940), 223; Hewett, Cornell University, 20; Carol U. Sisler, “East Hill,” in Carol U.

Sisler, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane Marsh Dieckmann, eds., Ithaca’s Neighborhoods: The Rhine, the Hill,

and The Goose Pasture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 59, 66.

20. Minutes, Cornell chapter, Alpha Delta Phi, April 20, 1900, Alpha Delta Phi chapter records,

#37\4\2101, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cornell University.

21. Sanborn Map. Co., fire insurance maps for Ithaca, N.Y., 1893, 1898, 1904.

22. Kiplinger, “The History of the Chapter”; Edward R. Alexander, Alpha Delta Phi Home, Cornell Uni

versity (Ithaca, N.Y., 1902), 6; Cornell University, Sixth Annual Report of President Schurman, 1897–98

(Ithaca, N.Y., 1898), 59–60.

23. Minutes, Cornell chapter, Alpha Delta Phi, April 20, 1900.

24. Kiplinger, “History of the Chapter”; Hewett, Cornell University, 20; “Psi. U. Chapter House,” Ithaca

Daily Journal, June 23, 1884, 3; Ithaca Democrat, June 18, 1891, 5; “Fraternity Houses,” Ithaca Daily Jour

nal, January 2, 1892, 3; Fogle, Cornell Deke House, 6; “Sigma Chi House,” Ithaca Daily Journal, December

15, 1900, 3; Sanborn Map Co., fire insurance maps for Ithaca, N.Y., 1893, 1898; Parsons, Cornell Campus,

268 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

119, 122; “Receptions: Fraternities Give Delightful House Parties,” Ithaca Daily Journal, February 1, 1899,

6; Jane Marsh Dieckmann, A Short History of Tompkins County (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), 47; Geoffrey M.

Gyrisco, “A Guide to the Works of William Henry Miller, Ithaca’s Architect,” typescript, December 1978,

Fine Arts Library, Cornell University.

25. Minutes, Cornell chapter, Alpha Delta Phi, April 20, 1900.

26. “Alpha Delta Phi: Fraternity to Build Fine Home on University Hill,” Ithaca Daily Journal, April 10,

1902, 8. Both the Chi Psi and Alpha Delta Phi chapter houses were destroyed by fire, but were rebuilt,

although in different styles. See “Fire in Chi Psi Fraternity House Results in the Loss of Seven Lives,” Ithaca

Daily Journal, December 7, 1906, 3; “Chi Psi House Plans Completed,” Ithaca Daily Journal, August 3,

1907; Reed, Alpha Delta Phi, 62.

27. “Alpha Delta Phi’s Unique Building,” Ithaca Daily Journal, July 14, 1908, 7; Kiplinger, “History of

the Chapter”; “Three New Fraternity Houses,” Cornell Daily Sun, October 2, 1903, 1; “Fraternity House

Changes: Two New Lodges Building and Four Others Altered,” Cornell Daily Sun, September 26, 1902, 3;

Sanborn Map Co., fire insurance maps for Ithaca, N.Y., 1910.

28. Horowitz, Campus Life, 131, 138–140, 144; Owen, “Reflections on the College Fraternity,” I3; O.D.

von Engeln, Concerning Cornell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1917), 299; Bishop, History of Cornell, 293, 304–305, 403,

420; Hewett, Cornell University, 20–21; “New Buildings Being Erected: Homes for the Law School and for

Fraternities,” Cornell Era, October 24, 1891, 37–39; “Chi Psi Reception,” Ithaca Daily Journal, November

21, 1896; “Receptions”; Kenneth L. Roberts, “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters,” Saturday Evening Post,

February 2, 1929, 57.

29. M.G. Lord, “The Greek Rites of Exclusion,” The Nation, July 4, 1987, 12; Lawrence Bancroft (Cor

nell chapter, Alphi Phi Alpha), e-mail message to the author, April 27, 2004; Bishop, History of Cornell, 404;

Cornell University, 1911 Cornellian (Ithaca, N.Y., n.d.), 180; Cornell University, Directory of the Univer

sity, First Term, 1925–26 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1925), 109.

30. Cornell, Directory, 1925–26, 109; Bishop, History of Cornell, 448.

31. Charles Thompson, Halfway Down the Stairs (New York, 1957), 99–101.

32. Cornell University, Office of the Dean of Students, “A Report on Some Aspects of Fraternity Life at

Cornell University,” September 1960, 10; Owen, “Reflections on the College Fraternity,” I22–I23;

Horowitz, Campus Life, 239, 244; Cornell University, Student Directory (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960), 2; Cornell

University, Student Directory, 1975–1976 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 6–7; Deborah Huffman, “Trustees Imple-

ment Anti-Bias Legislation for All Living Units,” Cornell Daily Sun, February 23, 1968, 1; Richard M.

Warshauer, “White Attempt to Break In Sparks Dispute Over Cops,” Cornell Daily Sun, April 20, 1969,

extra edition, 1.

33. Cornell University, University Faculty Committee on Student Affairs, “Fraternities at Cornell (The

Muller Report),” March 1, 1961, 6, Fraternity and Sorority Affairs Records, #37/4/3027, Box 2, Division of

Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

34. Cornell Dean of Students, “Fraternity Life,” 5. G. Armour Craig, former president of Amherst Col

lege, commented that the reason many small colleges do not abolish their Greek systems is because of a fear

that such reforms will reduce alumni giving. See Lord, “Greek Rites of Exclusion,” 12.

35. Ernest L. Boyer, College: The Undergraduate Experience in America (New York, 1987), 208; Simon

J. Bronner, Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student Life (Little Rock, Ark., 1995), 127; Owen,

“Reflections on the College Fraternity,” I23; Cornell University, Student Directory, 1975–1976

(Ithaca,

N.Y., 1975), 6–7; Cornell University, Student Directory, 1985–1986 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 8.

36. Dan Meyer (member, board of directors, Cornell chapter of Phi Kappa Psi), telephone conversation

with the author, October 25, 2002.

37. William A. Bryan, “Contemporary Fraternity and Sorority Issues,” in R. B. Winston, Jr., W. R. Net

tles III, and J. H. Opper, eds., Fraternities and Sororities on the Contemporary College Campus (San Fran

cisco, 1987), 37–56; George D. Kuh and James C. Arnold, “Liquid Bonding: A Cultural Analysis of the Role

of Alcohol in Fraternity Pledgeship,” Journal of College Student Development 34 (September 1993), 327–

334; Valerie Nicolette, “Can Greeks Withstand Negative Attention?,” Cornell Daily Sun, December 4, 1989,

23–24; Peggy Reeves Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus (New

York, 1990); Hank Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage: Fraternities, Sororities, Hazing, and Binge Drinking

(Bloomington, 1999).

38. Cornell University, Fraternity and Sorority Affairs, “Social Responsibility Policy,” http://

www.dos.cornell.edu/dos/fsa/socialpol/SocialPolicy.html (accessed January 22, 2004); Scott Conroe, “Fra

ternities Forever,” Cornell Magazine, May/June 1999, 30–37; Chris Koza (president, Cornell University

Interfraternity Council, member, Chi Psi fraternity), interview by the author, Ithaca, N.Y., April 28, 2000.

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 269

39. In Fall 2003, eight-two percent of members in fraternities and sororities that were part of the

Interfraternity Council or the Panhellenic Association (which include all but fourteen organizations that are

members of the Multicultural Greek Letter Council) were white, compared to 59.4 percent of all undergradu

ates. Less than two percent of IFC and PA society members were black, compared to 4.7 percent of all under

graduates, and six percent were Asian, compared to 16.4 percent of undergraduates. Cornell University,

Fraternity and Sorority Affairs, “Membership Demographics,” Fall 2003, unpublished table; Cornell Uni

versity, Institutional Research and Planning, “Common Data Set, 2003–2004,” http://dpb.cornell.edu/irp/

pdf/CDS/cds_2003-04.pdf (accessed April 29, 2004).

40. Reisberg, “Fraternities in Decline,” A59; Conroe, “Fraternities Forever,” 34.

41. Cornell University, Fraternity & Sorority Advisory Council, 2001–2002 Annual Report (Ithaca,

N.Y., 2002), 29–30; comment from unidentified fraternity member, Chi Psi fraternity, Cornell University,

Ithaca, N.Y., April 28, 2000.

42. Horowitz, Campus Life, 250; Avikam Wygodski, “Neighborhood Analysis of the Student Ghetto”

(master’s thesis, University of Florida, 1979), 3.

43. Lynn A. Staeheli and Albert Thompson, “Citizenship, Community, and Struggles for Public Space,”

Professional Geographer 49:1 (February 1997), 28–38; Jason Kobylarek et al., “Past, Present, and Future

Relationships Between the University of Kansas and Adjacent Neighborhoods,” student research paper,

UBPL 502/802, University of Kansas, July 2001, http://www.users.muohio.edu/karrowrs/College/

sTU_rESEARCH_ku.pdf (accessed January 22, 2004); William L. Partridge, The Hippie Ghetto: The Natu

ral History of a Subculture (New York, 1973); Beth Kassab, “Mayor Envisions Improved ‘Student Ghettos’

Near U. Florida,” Independent Florida Alligator [University of Florida], January 14, 1999; Brian D. Vargo,

“Slumming in Newark,” Delaware Today, September 1999, 68–74.

44. Christopher C. Paine, “Court Rules Against City in Landlord Case,” Herald-Times [Bloomington,

Indiana], May 20, 2002, A1; Nick Madigan, “Peace Plan in Boulder Bans Sofas on Porches,” New York

Times, May 30, 2002, A14.

45. Dieckmann, Short History of Tompkins County, 43; Jane Marsh Dieckmann, “The University and

Collegetown,” in Carol U. Sisler, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane Marsh Dieckmann, eds., Ithaca’s Neighbor-

hoods: The Rhine, the Hill, and The Goose Pasture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 157–158.

46. Bishop, History of Cornell, 92.

47. Parsons, Cornell Campus, 91, 102.

48. Bishop, History of Cornell, 80.

49. “A Word to Wise Ithacans,” Cornell Era, March 13, 1869, 5; Parsons, Cornell Campus, 105; Bishop,

History of Cornell, 98.

50. Parsons, Cornell Campus, 104; Dieckmann, “University and Collegetown,” 164; “Editorial,” Cor

nell Era, April 26, 1889, 1.

51. Bishop, History of Cornell, 359.

52. Dieckmann, “University and Collegetown,” 169.

53. “Where the Students Live: Growth of the Various Rooming Sections on East Hill,” Cornell Alumni

News, February 7, 1912, 207; Sanborn Map Co., fire insurance maps for Ithaca, N.Y., 1904, 1910; H. A.

Manning, comp., Manning’s Ithaca (New York) Directory for Year Beginning January, 1930 (Schenectady,

N.Y., 1930).

54. Morris Bishop, “On Boarding-Houses and Landladies,” Cornell Era, October 1912, 38–41; “Report

of the Freshman Advisory Committee,” Cornell Alumni News, December 18, 1913, 155–156; “Tackling

Rooming House Problems,” Cornell Alumni News, May 21, 1914, 406.

55. Bishop, History of Cornell, 403; Thompson, Halfway Down the Stairs, 128.

56. Roger Geiger, “The Ten Generations of American Higher Education,” in American Higher Educa

tion in the Twenty-first Century, Philip G. Altbach, Robert O. Berdahl, and Patricia Gumport, eds. (Balti

more, 1999), 61.

57. John Harp and Philip Taietz, “The Cornell Student, 1950 and 1962: A Comparative Report” (Ithaca,

N.Y., 1964), 25. Between 1950 and 1962, the percentage of Cornell students living in rooming houses

declined from twenty-three to eight percent, while the percentage living in apartments increased from seven

to twenty-nine percent.

58. Jim Myers, “Collegetown,” Ithaca Journal, August 22, 1975, Welcome Students issue, 6–8, 13; John

Lofland, “The Youth Ghetto: A Perspective on the ‘Cities of Youth’ Around Our Large Universities,” Jour

nal of Higher Education 39:3 (March 1968), 121–143; Partridge, Hippie Ghetto; Richard Fariña, Been

Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me (New York, 1966); John Marcham, “A Question of Turf,” Cornell

Alumni News, July 1972, 25.

270 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

59. Myers, “Collegetown,” 5.

60. Myers, “Collegetown,” 8–11.

61. Joseph Masci and Robert A. Molofsky, “Police Gas C-Town Crowd: Disagreement Over Block Party

Causes Skirmish in Streets,” Cornell Daily Sun, May 14, 1972, Extra edition, 1; Dick Brass, “Town vs.

Gown: Two Nights in Ithaca,” Cornell Alumni News, July 1972, 16–23.

62. Jan Mireles, “Is Collegetown Development a Boon or Bust,” Ithaca Journal, May 21, 1990, 9A.

63. Cornell, “Cornell University Enrollment, Fall 1868–Current”; Sol L. Erdman, “FCSA Allows Coeds

to Live Off Campus,” Cornell Daily Sun, February 9, 1965, 1; “Residence Rules are Suspended,” Ithaca

Journal, June 5, 1969; David F. Maisel, “Housing Shortage Plagues University: Enrollment Increase Over

taxes Supply,” Cornell Daily Sun, September 20, 1965, 1; Patricia Nordheimer, “University Ready to

Enforce Housing-Approval Ruling,” Ithaca Journal, January 17, 1966, 9; Sue Strandberg, “Tenants Union

Becoming Active,” Ithaca Journal, February 6, 1969; Ithaca Tenants Union, Tenants Arising: A Case Study

of Dynamic Management of Existing Buildings (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974); Allison Walzer, “Fane Tenants To

Strike,” Cornell Daily Sun, March 24, 1974, 1.

64. Rob Simon, “A Moveable Lease,” Cornell Daily Sun, October 6, 1975, 5.

65. Carol Irene Chock, “Collegetown Redevelopment: An Analysis of a Public/Private Partnership in

Ithaca, New York” (master’s thesis, Cornell University, 1985); H. Matthys Van Court (director of planning

and development, city of Ithaca), interview by the author, Ithaca, N.Y., May 4, 2000.

66. Mireles, “Collegetown Development,” 9A; Alex Leary, “Second City: Landlords Watch Warily as

Collegetown Continues to Take on a Life of Its Own,” Ithaca Times, May 22, 1997, 27–29.

67. “New Student Housing Helps Ease Local Rental Market,” clipping of unknown origin, September

1989; Diane Heath, “From Homes to High Rises: C-Town Reflects New Trends,” Cornell Daily Sun, Febru

ary 11, 1988, 1, 7; Nina Fox, “New Housing Complex Gains Interest Among Iowa State U. Students,” Iowa

State Daily [Iowa State University], January 12, 2000; Jeff Johncox, “Apartments Offer Students a Better

Life,” Oklahoma Daily [University of Oklahoma], June 4, 2003. See also Sterling University Housing’s Web

site: http://www.sterlinghousing.com/ (accessed January 22, 2004).

68. Myers, “Collegetown,” 6.

69. Eli Lehrer, “New Era Dawns in Collegetown: Business Mix is Shifting Toward Entertainment, Away

From Retail,” Ithaca Journal, July 30, 1997, 2A; Jason Fane, comments prepared for conference on student

housing, Cornell University, April 18, 2000; Jason Fane (real estate developer, Ithaca Renting Company),

interview by the author, Ithaca, N.Y., May 1, 2000.

70. Ithaca Renting Company, “Current Prices, 2003–2004,” February 11, 2003, http://

www.ithacarenting.com/current_prices.htm (accessed February 14, 2003); Ithaca Rentals and Renovations,

“Eddygate Park Apartments Current Availabilities for 2003,” http://www.ithaca-rentals.com/egp.htm

(accessed February 14, 2003); 312 College Avenue Web site, http://www.312collegeave.com/ (accessed

February 14, 2003).

71. In 2000, population density for Census Tract 2, Tompkins County, the boundaries of which roughly

approximate those of Collegetown, was 36,135 people per square mile, the median age was 21.7 years old,

ninety percent of residents were college students, and ninety-seven percent of housing units were rentals.

U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Census 2000.” Comparisons for 1980 and 2000 are based on U.S. Bureau of the

Census, 1980 Census of Population and Housing, Neighborhood Statistics Program: New York (Ithaca)

(Washington, 1983); City of Ithaca, Department of Planning and Development, “Neighborhood Statistics

Program, Census 2000, SF1 & SF3 Releases, April 2004, http://www.ithacamaps.org/download/census/

2000NeighborhoodStatistics.pdf (accessed May 14, 2004). Asians made up 14.1 percent of Cornell’s stu

dent body in 2000, compared to 3.6 percent in 1980. See Cornell University, Institutional Research and Plan

ning, “Total Enrollment by Race/Ethnic Status, Fall 1980 Through Fall 1983,” http://dpb.cornell.edu/irp/

pdf/FactBook/Enrollment/Total/ithaca_re.pdf (accessed April 27, 2004).

72. John A. Jakle, “Twentieth Century Revival Architecture and the Gentry,” Journal of Cultural Geog

raphy 4:1 (Fall/Winter 1983), 37; Gorman Beauchamp. “Dissing the Middle Class: The View From Burns

Park.” American Scholar 64:3 (1995), 337.

73. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Census 2000.”

74. Margaret Hobbie (real estate agent, Ithaca), interview by the author, Ithaca, N.Y., April 29, 2000;

George J. Staller (professor, Department of Economics, Cornell University), telephone interview by the

author, July 25, 2002.

75. Alfred M. Brooks, “Houses for College Professors,” School and Society 18:448 (July 28, 1923), 116–

118; Deborah Lynn Balliew, College Station, Texas: 1938/1988 (College Station, 1987), 18; Durham Plan

ning Board, Town of Durham Master Plan 2000 (Durham, N.H., 2000), 10.3.

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 271

76. Parsons, Cornell Campus, 113–115.

77. John Roger Ahlfeld, “The First Century of the Physical Development of Ithaca, New York” (master’s

thesis, Cornell University, 1966), 150.

78. “A Word to Wise Ithacans.”

79. “Cornell Heights: Ithaca’s Sightly Residence Park Rapidly Improving,” Ithaca Daily Journal, May

10, 1899, 8.

80. Carol U. Sisler, Enterprising Families, Ithaca, New York: Their Houses and Businesses (Ithaca, N.Y.,

1986), 87, 90; Carol U. Sisler, “Cornell Heights,” in Carol U. Sisler, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane Marsh

Dieckmann, eds., Ithaca’s Neighborhoods: The Rhine, the Hill, and The Goose Pasture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988),

178; Historic Ithaca, Cornell Heights Historic District: An Architectural Walking and Driving Tour (Ithaca,

N.Y., 1998), 8.

81. Sisler, “Cornell Heights,” 180–181, 186; Sisler, Enterprising Families, 94–95.

82. Parsons, Cornell Campus, 217; Sisler, “Cornell Heights,” 186.

83. “White Park,” undated brochure, Jared Treman Newman papers, #2157, Box 38, Division of Rare

and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; Sisler, Enterprising Families, 105–106; A. Robert

Jaeger, “Cayuga Heights and the American Suburb,” unpublished manuscript, History 333, Cornell Univer

sity, May 1983, 15, 21; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States

(New York, 1985), 79–81.

84. Jared T. Newman, “To Alumni Intending Sometime to Locate in Ithaca; and Others Seeking Home

Sites Near the Cornell Campus,” Cornell Alumni News, October 21, 1915, 47; “White Park”; Agreement

between Jared T. Newman and Charles H. Blood and Karl McKay Wiegand, September 29, 1914, Jared

Treman Newman papers, #2157, Box 9, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University

Library.

85. Jared T. Newman to Charles P. Gray Co., December 15, 1920; Letter from Jared T. Newman for

which first page is missing, February 23, 1921; Jared T. Newman to John T. Parson, July 17, 1928; Jared T.

Newman to W. W. Fisk, May 31, 1922. All letters from Cayuga Heights Collection, DeWitt Historical Soci-

ety of Tompkins County, Ithaca, N.Y.

86. Minutes, Board of Trustees, Cayuga Heights, 1923–2002, Marcham Hall [Village Hall], Cayuga

Heights; F. G. Marcham, “Cayuga Heights Memories,” prepared by John Marcham, unpublished manu-

script, 26, 29, 37, 92; “Annexation Rejected By Heights,” Ithaca Journal, December 30, 1954, 3.

87. M. H. Abrams (professor of English emeritus, Cornell University), interview by the author, Cayuga

Heights, N.Y., April 30, 2000.

88. Marcham, “Question of Turf,” p. 24; Ronald Anderson (former Cornell faculty member and mayor,

village of Cayuga Heights), interview by the author, Cayuga Heights, N.Y., April 28, 2000.

89. Margaret Hobbie, “Belle Sherman,” in Carol U. Sisler, Margaret Hobbie, and Jane Marsh

Dieckmann, eds., Ithaca’s Neighborhoods: The Rhine, the Hill, and The Goose Pasture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988),

193; “New Residence Tract: A Place for Homes,” Ithaca Daily Journal, September 19, 1908, 2; Rebecca

Bernstein, “A History of the Bryant Park Neighborhood, Ithaca, New York: An Architectural and Social

Study of Household Use” (master’s thesis, Cornell University, 1988), 21–25, 30; Bryant Park Civic Associa

tion records, 1941–1951, #3627, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cornell University

Library.

90. “New Residence Tract: A Place for Homes,” Ithaca Daily Journal, September 19, 1908, 2; Deed, Lot

168, Bryant Park, agreement between Harold E. Ross and Bryant Park Land Co., June 15, 1910, Jared

Treman Newman papers, #2157, Box 9, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University

Library.

91. Bryant Park Civic Association records, 1941–1951.

92. Between 1950 and 2000, population in the city of Ithaca increased by only thirty people, or 0.1 per

cent, while population in Tompkins County increased by 37,379 people, or 63.2 percent. U.S. Bureau of the

Census, Census of Population: 1950, Volume 1: Number of Inhabitants (Washington, 1952); U.S. Bureau of

the Census, 1970 Census of Population, Characteristics of the Population, Number of Inhabitants (Washing

ton, 1972); U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Census 2000,” http://factfinder.census.gov/ (accessed January 22,

2004); New York State Department of Economic Development, State Data Center, “Population of New York

State By County, 1790–1990,” July 2000, http://www.nylovesbiz.com/nysdc/StateCountyPopests/

CountyPopHistory.PDF (accessed May 4, 2004).

93. John Munschauer, “Village of Cayuga Heights, 1940 to Present,” in Jane Marsh Dieckmann, ed., The

Towns of Tompkins County (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), 37, 42.

272 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2006

94. Ellen McCollister (resident, Bryant Park neighborhood), interview by the author, Ithaca, N.Y.,

August 11, 2002.

95. Susan Blumenthal (former alderperson, Ithaca Common Council), interview by the author, Ithaca,

N.Y., August 5, 2002.

96. Joel Savishinsky (professor of social sciences, Ithaca College, resident, Bryant Park neighborhood),

interview by the author, Ithaca, N.Y., 9 August 2002.

97. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Census 2000”; Savishinsky, interview.

98. Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates (New York, 1974), 36–37.

99. Abrams, interview.

Blake Gumprecht is an assistant professor of geography and American studies at the

University of New Hampshire. He has published three other studies about college

towns and is completing a book on the subject that will be published by Routledge. He

is also the author of The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth

(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), winner of the Association of American Ge

ographers’J. B. Jackson Prize, as well as articles about urban tree planting on the Great

Plains, the role of place in the music of West Texas, and the development of an

Oklahoma town as an international grain center.

Gumprecht / RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN COLLEGE TOWNS 273