Off the Beaten Interstate

The Sidewalk Psychotherapist: Off the Beaten Interstate

David B. Schwartz

The best description of the location of Ithaca was coined by then Cornell President Frank Rhodes. “Ithaca,” he said, ‘is centrally isolated.” To understand the factors that support Ithaca’s unusual culture, you have to start with the fact that we are in middle of beautiful rural lands and communities that are far from any interstate. If Ithaca is ten square miles surrounded by reality, that reality is not that of our rural neighbor communities. (Fair disclosure: when the rush and bustle of Fall Creek gets just too intense for me, I repair to my home in the quiet woods in Lodi, or in adjoining Hector where my family has lived since 1804. That is reality, surely, but the good kind.) The Reality that Ithaca distinguishes itself from is the world of interstates and all the corporate chain enterprises that spring like toadstools around the exits. Because we are far from that Reality, we don’t have a lot of those toadstools here. Neither does Watkins Glen.

Francis Perkins, key architect of the New Deal and the first woman cabinet member, arrived at the Industrial and Labor Relations School in the fifties, and said the same thing. “Ithaca,” she wrote, “is the most isolated place on the Eastern Seaboard.” Sixty years later, The Daily Show’s Jon Stuart was driven up from New York to give a speech. When they got off the interstate at Whitney Point and drove the rest of the way on a two-lane, Stuart was amazed. What city in New York can one not reach on an interstate? Where you drive down a state two-lane through farms and fields and little villages? Only Ithaca. You can’t take a four-lane from Reality to here. You have to go through a two-lane Reality filter.

In the 1800s, businessmen and civic leaders had big ideas of making Ithaca a hub for commerce. That it failed is no disappointment for those of us who live here now. For in the remoteness of our valley there sprung the kind of place that can exist only if there are boundaries separating inside from outside. If national policy is to jail immigrant babies, we have Ithaca Welcomes Refugees, who work to extend the hospitality to strangers that is part of the teachings of the world’s great religions. If America is proclaimed by some to be a Christian country, recognizing that all men are brothers (and sisters) tells you what to do when you see a stranger at your door: invite them in and give them something to eat. It’s not that Ithacans are especially religious. Maybe it comes, as Kurt Vonnegut advised, from believing that the most important thing in living is “to just to be kind to each other, damnit!”

Tolerance is an Ithaca civic virtue. We didn’t invent this. The Statue of Liberty proclaimed this as an American virtue. Other towns in our country remember this, too. When I was a kid, this lesson in civics was part of every public school curriculum. I am full of admiration for Schuyler County for stopping the gas storage facility. Whatever names they (and I) might be called for being against progress, they have shown leadership as truly American citizens, like we were told we were supposed to become, someday.

Most of my cousins don’t even like to drive into Ithaca: It’s too big a city. “It’s got too many damn Volvos,” my relative “The Bear” used to growl. He died before anybody could explain to him that it was Priuses, now.

The creation of the interstate system, my teacher Seymour Sarason pointed out, was the single greatest cause of the destruction of community in the United States. Before the interstates there was no fast-food, no national chains except Howard Johnsons. The state routes, like Rt 96, Rt 79, and Rt 89, went through the center of busy downtowns. On the west end of town they gathered in a knot probably dating back to the Mohawk trails. It was popularly called the octopus. You could get caught in its grip.

In 1972 both Ithaca city leaders and New York State agreed that Ithaca needed a new four-lane highway. It was to be only 3 1/2 miles long, untangle the octopus, and end at the hospital. In most places such a road would have been put right in. But in cranky, progress-opposing Ithaca, citizen’s opposition to this road sprung up and sustained the fight for 15 years, long enough for the state to finally give up and go away. Back in those days I was once in the city planner’s office. On the wall there was a cartoon of two-lane Rt 13 going up to Lansing, with a mammoth New York State road-building machine poised threateningly at the top of the hill.

Ithaca was keeping it at bay.

Eventually the West end was re-figured with Rt 13 expanded to four lanes. The octopus was finally untangled and replaced with what local wags called ‘the giant squid.” I must confess that after many years threading the squid, I still find myself leaving town on 79 rather than 96, and have to take the connector on Vinegar Hill to get back right. Maybe it’s just me that’s still confused.

Ithaca is still a place that you have to reach by state routes: those early numbered highways that led from one city to another. At the time that the state routes were established, you travelled to and from Ithaca by train. Roads were rutted dirt and mud. State routes were the interstates of their day. I still remember old farmers in Hector who gave you directions by telling you to “get up on the state route.” It was like getting on Rt. 81 today. Up on the state route you could really make time.

State routes are now the old, red lines on a highway map. You are not going to take the state route through Binghamton, as I did as a child. But if you want to come to Ithaca for its unique mix of education, arts, civic sense and hospitality to strangers of all backgrounds and languages, you have to get here the same way that you did on the 1930s if you didn’t take the train. You have to take a state highway.

This is why we aren’t ringed by interstates with their Burger Kings, chain motels, and shopping malls. We just have one major one of the latter, which spurred the creation of the Commons to try to protect the economic life of the downtown from being sucked out from the exterior like a starfish wrapped around a clam. When people argue about the Commons, they often do not consider what would have happened to downtown if Major Conley and city leaders hadn’t done it.

If Ithaca is in a little bit of a Twilight-Zone-like time warp, it is to a time when the state routes were the only place to get anywhere. You stayed home and made your own entertainment then. In Ithaca, this is still true. Just this one factor makes all of the difference.

There is considerable controversy about a building boom going on downtown and Collegetown. Will this raise rental prices to drive out locals to the cheaper periphery? I lived on Sanibel Island, Florida, where this took place at lightning speed after the bridge to the mainland went in. People who had lived and worked on the island for generations were all driven “off island.” I sure hope my neighbors and I don’t find ourselves squeezed off island. I worry also if all those prosperous new residents may want an improved road to get here, someday.

If so, I hope that their exposure to Ithacaculture will show them something. Maybe they will see that being able to get to Ithaca only on two-lane roads is our greatest protection (seconded by the winter weather) against a massive, antibiotic-resistant infection of Interstate Reality. People here seem inclined to think that rather than building more roads, it might be simpler to ride a Lime Bike. Just don’t try to ride them up the steep hills you have to go up to get out of here for anyplace else. Hook your bike to the front rack of a TCAT bus, and ride up until it's more flat. Then it’s easy: by bike or by car, get up on the State Route and you’re good to go. Just watch out for the speed trap in Greene.

David B. Schwartz, Ph.D., lives and practices psychotherapy in Fall Creek. His website is: www.sidewalkpsychotherapist.com