Cross-Cultural  | ITHACA IS GORGES--BUT CORNELL IS BRIDGES

bECAUSE OF THE CAMPUS'S geography--a hilltop with gorges slashed into either side--the earliest Cornell students had a whopper of a commute. As Kermit Parsons, MRP '53, wrote in his 1968 book, The Cornell Campus: "To reach class in the first years on the campus, students left Cascadilla [Hall], climbed part way down the Cascadilla Creek Gorge bank, crossed a weak-looking lower-level wooden bridge, climbed up through the pine woods on the north bank, walked through an apple orchard, slid down and climbed up the banks of a small ravine, and either skittered across the open icy crest of the hill, or slogged through its bogs in fall and spring."

Luckily for them, small wooden bridges were soon built over the gorges, making the walk to campus much easier. Cornell has relied on its bridges ever since, to serve as gateways for expansion and connections to the surrounding community. "The bridges acted as tools for the development and population of the area," says local historian Mary Raddant Tomlan, MA '71. "We rather take them for granted today--we tend to see them as just extensions of the street or the sidewalk."

Over the past year and a half, the Cornell community has had a small taste of those early days, as the City of Ithaca rehabilitated the Thurston Avenue Bridge. Spanning Fall Creek Gorge near Alumni House, the bridge has been closed almost constantly since March 2006, requiring cars to make long loops to Stewart Avenue or Forest Home and pedestrians to hike to the footbridge at the end of Beebe Lake. Briefly reopened in August to accommodate the student move-in, the bridge is expected to be completed at the end of October.

Commissioned by the Cornell Heights Land Company, the original Thurston Avenue Bridge opened in 1897 and was replaced by the modern structure in 1960. (Some locals still refer to it by its original name--Triphammer Bridge, also the title of a poem by the late Cornell professor A. R. Ammons. Tomlan thinks the city's Department of Public Works changed the name sometime around 1960.) Before the recent shutdown, it carried an average of 8,500 vehicles a day; the $10 million rehabilitation project will widen it by twelve feet to accommodate bicycle lanes and broader sidewalks, and add a series of plaques describing its history. Like all of Cornell's bridges, it offers a great view. "Previously, the gorges were mainly appreciated from down below," Tomlan says, "but these bridges gave us a whole new perspective to enjoy the scenery."

Cornell's most famous span, of course, is its Suspension Bridge--originally built to connect the campus to the suburb of Cayuga Heights, and still a popular spot for students to bring skittish parents (especially during high winds). The bridge has gone through three incarnations, the first a wooden structure built in the 1880s. It was replaced with another in 1913, which in turn was declared unsafe in 1960. At that time, Professors William McGuire, MCE '47, and S. C. Hollister (namesake of Hollister Hall) designed the current bridge, which spans Fall Creek just north of the Johnson Museum. It boasts two forty-one-foot towers, protective "suicide guards," and its share of captivating lore: it's said that a midnight kiss shared on the swaying span destines a couple for marriage, while a coed's refusal to pucker up will cause the bridge to collapse into the gorge.

-- Julia Langer '08