A Yuppie's Guide to Ithaca

Ez's great uncle Cyrus warned about it 50 years ago. He saw that rough beast slouching towards Ithaca , actually tooling comfortably down Rt 79 in a '57 Jag. Yep, that's a picture of the very same Jag in the upper right corner. It was not your average bopping down a country road car back then. Nope, driving a 'mobile like that was coolsville. A real cherry. That's a nice ride in 50's parlance. Of course, kids who went to Cornell didn't talk like that. At that point in cultural history, there was no compelling need to ape the counterculture or feign coolness so as to be more radioactive.

If you drove a car like that, you definitely had money or parents who were really into extreme wealth display. And, inasmuch as it's always been about status, college is the testing ground for young status seekers. You leave the nest, equipped with credit card, bank account, nice ride and a superiority complex that you need to take around the block and test out.

Ten years later in the early 60's, the look might have been called Preppie. You might have seen a car like the BMW below rolling down State Street. Preppie was all about penny loafers, polo shirts, khakis. Preppie was about summers in Europe. Preppie was about showing your date how good your table manners were when you took her out to a French restaurant. Well, let's do some research. Was there a French restaurant in Ithaca at the time? Ez tried to google French restaurant Ithaca 1960's but only came up with a travel site offering a low cost tour of Dubrovnik.

How little times change even if material culture has evolved from one generation to the next. Preppie has morphed into Yuppie. And our little I-town has been there all the time, doing what's necessary for the last 130 years or so, sucking up the crumbs from 40,000 college students with its vacuum cleaner economy. Ithaca is organized vertically , if you haven't noticed. The have's on the hills, the want to have's in the foothills and the havenot's downtown. It's all about trickle down. That's why we have gorges, after all.

And, what you ask, did Ez's great uncle Cyrus see on those darkling plains, the beast with bad posture Ez earlier referred to? The second coming of the Baby Boom, smeared with the afterbirth of postwar prosperity? Mannon, a 90 ft idol, decorated with a mosaic of credit card shards? Maybe he was just having those old demens tremens that day and was dancing the hallucinogenic mambo. Could he have seen a half billion Chinese consumers emerging from the mists of the future? Or might he have in his worse nightmares seen automobiles that resembled nothing more than fiber glass behemoths that block your view when you pull out of your spot at the Wegman's parking lot? Did the hand that made the SUV make Armageddon?

Ithaca is ready this year. ATM's everywhere you look, as ubiquitous as parking meters, a jazzy Garden Hilton for the parents with a downtown Starbucks so the designer coffee keeps flowing, lubricating the colony so to speak: a trendy ecovillage style home store on the Commons so you can buy furniture made of recycled Vanity Fair magaziness. Yes, and the old reliable Robbie Dein and the palace of knick knack there on the corner, creating ambiance for the newly arrivisti , and restaurants galore, yes so many restaurants including a French joint with the look of a Norman country inn out on 96, two Thai places, three taco dives, a Mongolian fire bar (only kidding) and countless, countless others. You show me a comparably sized city in upstate New York that has more than a few pizza joints, a Chinese takeout and a Dunkin Donuts.

Also this year the city mothers have widened Aurora St. to pool more of the runoff from the fabled hills around Ithaca. Ah, not to overlook that the facade of the Seneca Street garage has even been re soldered to give the bus shelters that Frank Gehry look.

Welcome back to our little Yuppie's Paradise nestled in the beautiful Finger Lakes. You're feel right at home here as long as you 've left home with an American Express card. There's some things money can't buy but, in Ithaca, we don't know what they are.

Ain't we glad to see ya.