In the midst of my winter sewing I checked on the state of property sales in the region — a macabre habit I’ve developed during the pandemic as a diagnostic beyond the news. There are a lot of beloved haunts that I haven’t been able to return to despite being home all this time, and occasionally one will turn up in the listings… I cant say why but there’s some salvaged feeling of reward for having found a place of significance even on the scrap heap— maybe a strange variety of a feeling of control given this train wreck present tense.
Rather than vacancies there’s been a lot of outside wealth entering the market here and prices are regularly hundreds of thousands of dollars above nearby towns. This has been the trend for twenty or more years, tracking with the ongoing de-industrialization of the northeast. The tide has been falling in most places not sustained by tech, healthcare or education for most of my lifetime, but you would never know it from within Ithaca, where each is very well represented. But what is good can rarely be stable and the rising cost of living now threatens much of the community that gives the place its good name.
Growing up, I never thought of Ithaca as being lovely for simply being well off or having its colleges. It’s true that the quality of life here is sustained by an economic mainstay with a lot of benefits though. The average American demographics don’t hold, and there are other interesting critical masses, like makers, cyclists, sailors, artisans, conservationists and many others.
As a child, some people seemed to have never left the seventies, and now there seems to be a similar attitude about the nineties in the places it’s managed to hang on. There’s this local intransigence steeped in both of those eras that also somehow forms a lot of common ground to celebrate together. There are dozens of festivals, markets, parades and gatherings held each year. Living in a place where the people come together to do all kinds of wonderful things I never imagined that our quality of life was uncommon. It was a long time before I learned of the different kinds of structural violence that stand opposed to cooperation and community.
I had always entertained the notion of returning here to a state of childlike leisure as a foil for whatever intensity I was facing in school or work or just city living. But returning after a nomadic 15 years I’ve been a bit shocked at how much the pulse has shifted here. The Ithaca I know and can attest to has moved on from the places it was once anchored and what remains is now collected at the margins of the valley. Local institutions have been razed to make way for condos and hotels. Cornell expands. The cost of living ever rises.
Considering that this trend was unlikely to change caused me to imagine that my slacker dream might make sense elsewhere. I was surprised to find a lot of the same conditions I valued in my hometown were present in nearby Geneva, at the north end of neighboring Seneca lake.
Ithaca and Geneva were apparently considered sister cities in their first century. The Erie Canal brought a lot of activity and development to the northern part of the region, where low lying swampland made the easiest passage and for a long time Geneva was the larger city. The canal was responsible for most of the behavior of the people in the finger lakes at that time and for the growth of its settlements. Things that were grown along the lakes were taken to shoreline ports and shipped to north end towns like Geneva where stevedores loaded barges to be taken to industrial areas like New England and New York City. Manufactured goods, textiles, imports and settlers flowed inland in exchange.
By the turn of the century rail lines had been built along the canal and routed down along the lakes to Pennsylvania and elsewhere. A freight yard and steamboat service mechanized the regional industry, but like most railroad economies it plateaued after world war two. Colleges and tourism to the cottages and wineries of the region have become the major industries since the rail spurs and factories were demolished.
On the south edge of town near some unlikely brick rowhouses are Hobart and William Smith colleges. I’m not exactly sure of what lasting significance this has, but in 2002 they were the first College in the United States to offer an undergraduate degree in LGBT/Queer studies! Although perfectly imposing and institutional their campus is much more self-contained than Ithaca’s sprawling educational borg. Speaking of: Cornell also operates an agricultural outpost near the hospital on the other edge of town.
A lot of the neighborhoods are similar in feeling to Ithaca, with a mixture of Victorian, revival and craftsman styles and the occasional brick block. In a dreamlike way the little antique streets of aging steamboat houses suddenly terminate against the great sloping brickwork downtown. In the core two main streets run parallel bridged at the center by Linden street (pictured). The buildings on this innermost lane are remarkably intact and being bounded on all sides feels like a little square. I had found a relative of the Ithaca commons, which has undergone major changes in recent years (and lacks the charm of a converted lane).
Just around the corner from there, some five minutes walk, I found an interesting little property for sale on Colt street. This strange little infill cabin that had been converted into a 3-bedroom house (!?) before being gutted due to a leak was being offered for $20,000. Off hand I knew that it was overvalued but if there is one thing I’m perpetually charmed by it’s a bizarre Tokyo-sized lot. On the basis of size and siting it isn’t a wild comparison! And anyways, as they say, the pleasure of design is proportionate to the factors you must contend with…
I wanted to figure out just how bad the damage was that caused it to be gutted and to get a better idea of what an honest offer might be. The thing is, the combined yearly taxes on a property of this size even at full price are less than a months rent in Ithaca. Looking forward to a world of online work that prospect took on some significance. I looked up some property records which told me the ‘land’ itself was only valued at $1500, so I suppose I had a price floor in mind when I called a local realtor and arranged to drive up the following day.
I was a little disappointed that I could smell the place through a crack in the door when I arrived but seeing it first hand was illuminating. It was raining and I was pleased to find that once inside, everywhere was dry but a 1’x1’ column on one wall. The leak was at least quite contained, I wondered in abject horror if it had leaked for a long time in the ceiling and walls without being addressed, before finally being gutted. The majority of the building is built of late 19th century lumber, smaller than barn timbers but similarly over-dimensioned, and the foundation is a piled stone wall, so I felt confident that even if everything were further stripped ‘to the studs’, I could deal with the wall roof and floor assemblies and only interact with the structure in moments of reinforcement and repair.
I was feeling pretty confident right up until I asked to see the basement space. I was prepared and knew what to expect more or less but being faced with an actual like 5’ tall underground space the size of a one car garage was actually a little haunting— it got under my skin in a bad way. From this perspective I could see that the main floor was in worse shape than it had appeared and was being supported by a dense forest of adjustable support collumns, also tasked to support a canopy of unruly wiring routed to the breaker box on the far edge of this nightmare. If you had not appropriately recoiled at the earlier hint that this was rented as a three bedroom this scene should drive the feeling home.
A brief is a brief though, and that thing about pleasure and confines… right? Well anyways I did have fun using the measurements I took to generate a little design within this tiny box. I got my kicks, but reality seemed to stand a little too opposed to the thing I had imagined for my initial enthusiasm to persist. I lined up numbers for the zoning board to see what assurances would be made that I could rebuild on the foundation as a worst case contingency, but ultimately didn’t pursue the matter. The property still hasn’t sold though, so who knows…
My design kept the outer dimensions and roof line of the existing house unchanged. I divided the strange & modest lot with a fence on the oblique lot line to arrange a space for doing things outside with a little privacy, storing bins etc. By moving the main entry to the side and setting it back, the intent is to allow the original shape of the cabin to step forward with all its shrunken monumentality!
The Bedroom at the rear of the second level has an open closet under the low side of the roof, and is otherwise a modest sleeping room. It is lofted above an outdoor-accessible storage space, which also leads down to the basement. All the built-ins are made of veneer plywood.
In this design I intended to approach the issue of low ceilings without raising the roof, by removing portions of the original interior to create a double height space on the main floor. The majority of the second floor is reduced to a lofted alcove above the kitchen. At the rear corner of the first floor, past the laundry nook is the bathroom. I had already moved on from the project before detailing that room but the space is well portioned.
After checking the place out I was talking with the realtor while she locked up. She went through the standard lamentations, government shut downs, masks, the uncertainty. One thing she said was how hard it was to see stores that had been on the mainstreet since she was a child suddenly close during the last year, and just how worrying it was to see the loss of town institutions and what it will mean for the community. On my drive home, it made me ask myself how much I was ready to identify with that place as my own, long term, and also to wonder if I could really be seen and appreciated there.
Sometimes its fun to design around faulty conditions, even if only to keep yourself sharp. Its a certain kind of satisfaction that I can only get from wrestling a program into where it doesn’t quite belong. And that is, unfortunately sort of the story of my brush with Geneva, writ large. As much of a fit as it might someday be, at present its just hard to picture my remaining youth being spent in conquest of this admittedly sustainable future. Even the most graceful solution can’t help if you’ve selected the wrong problem.
With the wider discovery of online work during the pandemic I think the next 15 years will probably bring a lot of people leaving urban metroplexes to places like Geneva and then maybe I’ll look back on my younger self and wish I had seized this opportunity. I think theres some growing understanding there, as there is here in Ithaca that major shifts may be coming, whatever that may mean. With all that’s happening in the world theres no guarantee what element might one day be attracted to such a place, but I remain hopeful that in a generation or so, interesting rural places like Geneva could make comfortable, connected and safe homes for people of all identities. I want nothing more than to see that civic warmth spread.
