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3 fraternity฀row,฀฀ the฀student฀ghetto,฀฀ and฀the฀faculty฀฀ enclave One college town. Three neighborhoods. Three very different images. South of the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York, dilapidated old frame houses split into student apartments hug the street. Couches sit on porches, which are permanently affixed with “Now Renting” signs. Empty beer bottles line railings. A few newer high-rise apartments, equipped with game rooms, high-speed Internet access, and other amenities desired by today’s college students, tower above sidewalks crowded with young people day and night. West of campus, the landscape is more spacious and the buildings more pretentious. Gothic, Tudor, and Italianate mansions occupy large lots. Greek letters mark their entrances. Spires rise toward the sky. The windows of one have been covered with paper to hide secret rituals inside. Red plastic cups from a fraternity keg party litter the lawn of another. North of campus, single-family homes predominate. Stone pillars mark the entrance to the separately incorporated village of Cayuga Heights. Architect-designed houses, dignified and understated, sit far back in landscaped yards, shrouded in foliage. Few people are visible, and the quiet is broken only by the occasional sound of lawn machinery. Rolled-up copies of the New York Times lie on flagstone walkways. The college town residential mosaic is one of its most striking features and reflects the unusual demographics and social differences of college communities. College towns are highly segregated residentially. Faculty and other long-term 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, particularly between members of Greek-letter societies and so-called independents, further fragment the residential landscape. Although faculty are less concentrated residentially than students, they have shown a tendency to cluster in architecturally distinctive neighborhoods near campus. These preferences have led to the emergence in college towns of three distinct types of residential districts—the Greek-housing area sometimes called fraternity row, the student rental district often known as the student ghetto, and the faculty enclave. In order to establish why such districts developed and how they have changed, I will examine the origin and evolution of examples of each in Ithaca. Ithaca (fig. 3.1) is home to two four-year colleges, Cornell University and Ithaca College. I will focus on residential districts near Cornell because its impact has been more pronounced 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, one of the Finger Lakes. 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. Ithaca College’s influence is more localized and less conspicuous. 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 colleges, Ithaca College houses the majority of its students on campus and has no off-campus fraternities, which limits its residential impact. Ithaca College faculty, moreover, seem as likely to live near Cornell as Ithaca College, drawn by the greater campus amenities of a research university.1 Like other college towns, 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 that made adding machines, bicycle chains, airplanes, and later automobile parts.2 After World War II, however, college enrollments grew rapidly and manufacturing’s share of employment declined, with most of the city’s old-line industries eventually closing.3 Students and faculty came to make up an increasing share of Ithaca’s population. Today, education is overwhelmingly Ithaca’s biggest “industry.” Cornell and Ithaca College together employ more than 11,500 people in the city, and nearly half the labor force in 2000 worked in education , compared to 3.5 percent in manufacturing. Since 1960, combined enrollment at Cornell and...

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