Ithaca

The land at the head of Cayuga Lake belonged to the Cayuga, one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee, whose villages and stored crops were destroyed by the Sullivan Expedition in 1779 during the Revolutionary War. The state carved the region into the Military Tract for veterans, surveyed under the Surveyor General Simeon De Witt, who later moved to the settlement on the flats and renamed it Ithaca, after the Greek island home of Ulysses. It grew as a lake port, trading in salt and gypsum, and became an incorporated village in 1821.

The railway reached the lake in the 1830s, but what made the town was Ezra Cornell, who made a fortune in the telegraph and in 1865 founded, with Andrew Dickson White, a university on his farm on East Hill. Cornell University drew the city uphill and gave it a purpose beyond trade. Ithaca became a city in 1888. A conservatory of music founded in 1892 grew into Ithaca College, which moved to a new campus on South Hill in the 1960s. From 1915 to 1919 the town was also a centre of silent film-making, with the Wharton brothers' studio, on the site of today's Stewart Park, using the local scenery.

Industry — Ithaca Gun, the Morse Chain works — faded through the 20th century, leaving the two colleges as the economy. The Commons was built as a pedestrian mall in 1974–75 to revive downtown and rebuilt in 2015, and the waterfront has been opened up with parks and the Cayuga Waterfront Trail. Today the city's story is one of a liberal college town coping with its own popularity and the cost of living it brings.

The gorges set the tone. Ithaca sells itself on the slogan 'Ithaca is Gorges', and residents hike, swim and run in the ravines that cut through the city as a matter of routine. Cornell brings a large international population, lectures, concerts and museums, and its chimes ring over the city from McGraw Tower. Ithaca College adds music and theatre; the two give the city of 32,000 an unusual number of bookshops, cinemas, galleries and venues for its size.

Politics is reliably progressive. The city's voters are more liberal than the rest of the county; it was early to vegetarian restaurants, food co-operatives and community currencies, with Ithaca Hours one of the first in the country, and prides itself on environmentalism and tolerance. The Moosewood collective's cookbooks, written here from the 1970s, spread a whole way of eating across the country, and the annual Ithaca Festival celebrates the city's self-image, often turning a political statement into a festive event.

Music runs from Cornell's concert series to the folk and roots scene around the GrassRoots Festival in nearby Trumansburg, and the restored State Theatre stands downtown. Sport means Cornell's ice hockey at Lynah Rink, where some fans throw fish on the ice when Harvard visits, and college rowing from the boathouse on the inlet. Manners are informal and friendly, with a strong volunteering culture, a love of farmers' markets and a mild contempt for pretension; the town-and-gown divide exists but is softened by how many graduates never leave.

About 32,000 people live in the city and around 105,000 in Tompkins County, with Cornell's roughly 27,000 students and Ithaca College's few thousand making up a large share of both and emptying the place noticeably each summer. Cornell dominates the economy, with Ithaca College and the businesses that serve both behind it; there is little industry left.

The city's shape governs daily life. Downtown, Fall Creek and the Northside sit on the flats; Collegetown and the Cornell neighbourhoods are on East Hill; Ithaca College's slopes are South Hill; West Hill holds newer suburbs. Students rent in Collegetown and the lower hills, faculty and professionals in the big old houses of East Hill and Fall Creek, and many workers commute in from cheaper villages because housing in the city is scarce and expensive — the dominant local issue.

The rhythm is academic. Late August brings the return of students and the noise of Collegetown, May brings graduation and then a quiet, green summer that year-round residents treasure. Saturday means the farmers market at Steamboat Landing, winter means snow shovelling and ice on the gorge trails, and the TCAT bus and the bicycle are respectable ways to get about.

Ithaca's food reputation rests on vegetables. Moosewood Restaurant, founded as a collective in 1973, made the city a byword for vegetarian cooking through its cookbooks, and farm-to-table has long been the norm rather than a fashion: the Ithaca Farmers Market, a cooperative at Steamboat Landing on the inlet since 1973, is where the city buys its weekend breakfast, cheese, vegetables and bread from the farms of Tompkins County and the lake shores.

The town has a claim to the ice cream sundae. A local account holds that a fountain-shop owner, Chester Platt, created it for a local clergyman in 1892, and the Unitarian church holds a 'Sundae Sunday' every September. Apples matter in autumn, when the Apple Harvest Festival celebrates them, and the region's dairy farms supply the cheese, with Cornell's Dairy Bar on campus. Collegetown feeds students cheaply with pizza, noodles, Korean and Thai food and late-night sandwiches, and the Commons has a wide range of Asian, Mexican, Indian and Middle Eastern kitchens for a city this size.

Drink is the Finger Lakes' strength. The wineries along both shores of Cayuga Lake and across Seneca Lake are known for Riesling and other cool-climate grapes, the Cayuga Lake Wine Trail, founded in 1981, being New York State's first wine-tourism venture, and the area's orchards supply cider makers. Ithaca is also known for its microbreweries, and coffee houses are as much a part of student life as the bars.