Lansing at the Crossroads: A Partisan History of the Village of Lansing, New York

By Seymour Smidt

The construction of a new four-lane highway on the outskirts of Ithaca, NY created a rapidly growing commercial center in the previously rural Town of Lansing. The clash between the newcomers and the old-timers over the direction and pace of this change led to the formation of a new local government and the incorporation of the Village of Lansing. This is the story of that village, how and why it was formed, the problems it faced in its early years, and the victories its people won in gaining control of their own communal future. It is also a story that mirrors, on a small scale, significant national trends: urban sprawl, spreading sub urbanization, the popular reaction against the disappearance of America's open lands and the mounting costs of extending the urban infrastructure, and the turning away from centralization to local control as the preferred means of solving public problems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 20, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462092345

Seymour Smidt

Rita Smidt organized the Lansing Village Study Group, which brought about incorporation of the Village of Lansing in 1974. She served as campaign chair of the Community Party, through the administrations of the first two mayors, and remained active in village affairs until her last illness.

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© 2001 by Seymour Smidt

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Contents

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgements

Challenge 1

Winning the right to self-determination

Part I: Topography sets the stage

Part II: The physical barriers to growth break down

Part III: A burst of building—and public protest

Part IV: The pro-zoning forces organize

Part V: The cou nty sewer district focuses public controversy

Part VI: The movement to incorporate

Part VII: How much will it cost to have a village?

Part VIII: The town reacts

Challenge 2

Surviving a mailing

Part I: The Triphammer interchange

Part II: The approval and disapproval of the Pyramid Mall

Part III: Who will run the village?

Part IV: The Pyramid battle goes to court

Part V: The impact of the mall

Challenge 3

Balancing infrastructure and growth

Part I: The county sewer district

Part II: A court challenge to the county district

Part III: The village expands its sewer system

Part IV: More sewer is needed

Challenge 4

Personal Agendas and Political Ambitions

Part I: Another public emerges

Part II: An opportunist knocks

Part III: Symbolic gestures

Part IV: Demagogy has its day

Part V: Defections from the Community Party

Part VI: Shifting political forces

Part VII: Two ends against the middle

Part VIII: The end of the insurgency

Challenge 5

Passing on the torch

Part I: A proposal is presented

Part II: The Planning Board recommendations

Part III: The public speaks

Part IV: The environmental review begins

Part V: The election of 1988

Part VI: The Environmental Impact Statements

Part VII: The 1989 election

Part VIII: The sun sets on SunDowns

About the Author

Appendix

Participants in the history of the Village of Lansing

Government agencies, bodies and laws

Notes

Preface

Challenge 1: Winning the right to self determination

Challenge 2: Surviving a mailing

Challenge 3: Balancing infrastructure and growth

Challenge 4: Personal agendas and political ambitions

Challenge 5: Passing the torch

Dedication

To spare the general reader a confusing welter of names, most of the people who made this history are identified only as a neighbor, a resident or a member. Without their energy and commitment in creating and sustaining the Village of Lansing, this would not be the success story that it has so far been. It is to them that this story is dedicated.

List of Illustrations

Preface

The city of Ithaca sits at the head of Lake Cayuga, one of the larger Finger Lakes in upstate New York. The early surveyors of this region knew their classics, and Ithaca is among such place names as Troy, Rome, Syracuse, Homer, Virgil and Ovid, drawn from Greek and Roman antiquity and intermingled with Indian words and early American family names.

Dominating the city both physically and economically is Cornell University, which looks down from the bluffs to the east. At the northern edge of the campus, and still in the town of Ithaca (it being a common practice in this region for both townships and their incorporated centers to bear the same name), is Cayuga Heights. This was the only substantial suburb in Tompkins County in the 1960s, at the time our history begins, home to many of Cornell’s faculty as well as the more affluent among the business and professional community.

Beyond the Heights, stretching for some fifteen miles northward on the hills along the east shore of the lake, is the Town of Lansing. It was already a bedroom community in 1960 even though most of its land area was still devoted to farming. A majority of its residents had moved there from elsewhere and worked in Ithaca, especially at Cornell. Unlike some of the other towns, however, Lansing had no center but offered only a few scattered hamlets and strip residential developments along its major roads. Its government was dominated by the farming interests and peopled by men who had grown up in the town.

Spurred largely by the growth of the university, the county’s population grew by 13 percent to over 77,000 between 1960 and 1970, by the same percentage to 87,000 in 1980, and by about 7.7 percent to 93,810 in the 1990 census¹. As the population grew it also spread out from the city, bringing urban newcomers to live among the agrarian earlier settlers.

Nowhere is this growth more evident than at the town’s southern edge, on the border between Ithaca and Lansing and between the city and the farm. In 1960, although the Village of Lansing had not yet been incorporated, the border area was already distinct from the rest of the town. While most village land was still in large farm holdings, there were houses widely spaced on all its through roads and more densely grouped along its side roads. By 1990, with a few large farms remaining, many more residential developments had been added. A few stores and businesses could still be found at the junction of two highways in the middle of the town, but in this thirty years the village had acquired a larger commercial district than downtown Ithaca.

The villagers’ occupations range from those found in the neighboring Heights to salesmen, public school teachers, and managers and owners of small businesses; the housing covers the gamut from small trailer parks and decaying farmhouses to new luxury homes. Between 1963 and 1975 several large apartment complexes were built that house about two thirds of the village residents. Many of the renters are graduate students or young faculty who, even if they remain in the county, usually spend only a few years in the village, while about a sixth of the population are senior citizens for whom these apartments will be their last home.

Each small settlement in the rest of the town feels separate yet still nurtures a fierce loyalty to Lansing, but village residents focus on Ithaca. That is where they work and shop, where they go to movies and athletic events and visit friends. Their post office address and telephone exchange are from Ithaca and, except for half of one road where the parents chose to send their children to Lansing schools, Ithaca is also their school district. In the eyes of their fellow townsfolk the village residents are newcomers and transients, welcomed for the additions they provide to the tax rolls but regarded as not entitled to a voice in the town’s affairs.

By 1990 much more of the town resembled its southern portion in its land uses and the composition of its population. Some of the newcomers had begun to move into positions of public influence, particularly on the school board. Indeed, the refrain sounded against the impatience of the village residents throughout this thirty years has been, The town is changing.

Those who fostered the formation of the village responded, Not fast enough to help us.

The clash between the newcomers and the oldtimers over the direction and pace of this change led to the formation of a new local government and the incorporation of the Village of Lansing. This is the story of that village, how and why it was formed, the problems it faced in its early years, and the victories its people won in gaining control of their own communal future. It is also a story that mirrors, on a small scale, significant national trends: spreading suburbanization, the popular reaction against the disappearance of America’s open lands and the mounting costs of extending the urban infrastructure, and the turning away from centralization to local control as the preferred means of solving public problems.

Because the Village of Lansing is small (about three square miles, with a population of 3,269 in 1990)², its public figures are one’s neighbors. Its power structure is not remote, but rather easy to approach, understand and participate in. Its public disputes are about policy matters and have nothing to do with graft, corruption or political ambition.

Even on this small and simple scale, however, citizens who attempt to manage the rapid changes in their community face some formidable problems, not least of which is the lack of communal memory. Activists in Lansing have won popular support because they have been willing and able to gather factual information that supports their arguments and explains what is happening and why. But that information must be brought into public view with each new challenge. The high turnover in village population—echoing the mobility of Americans in general—ensures that most of the residents know nothing about why the village was incorporated or what its policies and accomplishments are. Existing conditions are taken as given, rather than as the result of wise or unwise decisions made in the past. Those who have lived in the village all along forget what the newcomers never knew; their careers and other interests are demanding and absorbing, and they pay attention to local affairs only when some crisis occurs. The writing of Lansing’s history was undertaken because of the oft-renewed need to educate and re-educate its people, and especially its leaders, about the issues at stake.

Today the newspapers often carry stories of communities who have discerned the financial as well as physical costs of over-development, and who are trying to achieve better control of their growth. This process began in Lansing some thirty years ago. It is with the thought that our adventures may prove instructive to them that this story is offered to other readers, by one who is a participant and a partisan in the history of the Village of Lansing.

Acknowledgements

Figures 1, 2, 6 and 7 are used with the permission of JON REIS/PHOTOLINK. Figures 8 and 9 are used with the permission of the Ithaca Journal. Elaine Goldberg provided helpful editorial assistance.

Challenge 1

Winning the right to self-determination

Part I: Topography sets the stage

Glaciers advanced along existing streambeds in western New York State at the end of the Ice Age, carving deep, narrow valleys and leaving behind the Finger Lakes. The landscape around Ithaca is typical of the region, with steep escarpments rising abruptly from the east and west shores of the lake and a somewhat more gradual slope to the south. This topography places strict limits on the feasible location of access roads to the city, and forces most of the highways that serve Ithaca to follow dangerously precipitous courses once they reach the city limits. The occasional runaway truck, with attendant property damage, injury and even fatality, is an especially acute problem on the approaches from the east and south hills.

While there is strong local demand for the state to improve these access roads, there is also much controversy about location and design. This public argumentativeness was as evident in the 1950s, when the relocation of Route 13 on the east was under discussion, as in the 1980s, when the improvement of Route 96 on the west looked as though it would be interminably delayed by wrangling. Although everyone wants to be able to get around town more easily and safely, the agreement breaks down as soon as each neighborhood begins to consider the impact of a new or improved road on its own future.

Ithaca’s relative inaccessibility also discourages industry from locating there and ensures that the university remains the dominant employer. Higher education has been a growth industry since World War II, and Cornell’s eminence as a research university has spurred its own growth and attracted private businesses that want to make use of its research capabilities. The region has thus grown and prospered despite a relative lack of public planning, intermunicipal cooperation or visionary risk-taking by local private investors. In his Master’s thesis on the Route l3/Triphammer Road development process, John Kirkpatrick concluded that

…Because economic conditions have always gotten slowly better, there has been almost no necessity to take large risks in order to make a successful investment. This combination of beneficial economic conditions and conservative thinking has produced…a noticeable lack of progress in large-scale government ventures…}

The growth of the university and thus of the area’s population, combined until the 1960s with a lack of speculative construction, resulted in a chronic shortage of housing for Cornell faculty and students and of hotel space for visiting alumni, parents and business visitors to the university. Development did not occur evenly throughout the area: in the 1950s the City of Ithaca and the county’s rural areas lost some population, while that of the Town of Ithaca and especially the Village of Cayuga Heights increased significantly.⁴

The region was growing, there was a shortage of housing, and the population was shifting to the northeast of the city. The relatively moderate slope of the land in Lansing adjacent to Cayuga Heights made it a logical place for growth but it could be reached only by three two-lane country roads. Thus, the state’s decision to build the new Route 13 across the southern edge of Lansing made that area more accessible just when development pressures were building up there.

It might seem at first glance that this siting was more than fortuitous, but Kirkpatrick finds otherwise. The highway was not built closer in to the city because of vocal opposition by the residents who might have been in its path and because the state discovered that city slopes were too steep. Thwarted in its first choice of route, the state chose the next nearest feasible path, northward along the course of the lake valley and up the eastern escarpment until the road reached a grade where it could be turned due east. That turning point happened to be in Lansing, and the highway cut across the three arterial north-south roads that pass through the southern end of the town, Cayuga Heights, Triphammer and Warren Roads. (A fourth road, East Shore Dr., drops quickly down the escarpment from a point at the northwestern corner of what became the Village of Lansing and offers an alternate but somewhat less convenient route to the City of Ithaca.)

Route 13 was built as a limited access highway, and its only outlets to the Town of Lansing and the Village of Cayuga Heights are at the three arterial roads. These roads carry the main streams of traffic in that part of the county, to the university and to the highway leading to downtown Ithaca. Many years after its construction, a professional road consultant would point out that, because of its limited access, the highway is like a river that can be crossed only at the three arterials. As a result, no matter how many new roads and road connections might be built in Lansing or farther north, all north-south traffic eventually has to pass through one of the three junctions, thus turning them into bottlenecks.

The problem was compounded by an unforeseen concentration of growth at the highway’s junction with Triphammer Road. The slope at the Cayuga Heights interchange was too steep to attract intensive development, while at the Warren Road intersection the university owned three of the four corners and was not ready to sell or develop them, and there was a deed restriction on commercial development on the fourth corner.⁵

Figure 2, an aerial view taken in May of 1990 shows some of the salient features of the topography. In the foreground is the Cayuga Heights Road overpass. The extensive commercial development in the center identifies the Triphammer business district and the Triphammer Road overpass.

Tompkins County Airport, which lies East of Warren Road and North of Route 13, is visible in the distance. The grade crossing at Warren Road and Route 13 is can be seen near the upper third of the photo at its right hand edge.

Image324.JPG

Figure 2 Aerial View of Route 13 looking towards the North East from West of Cayuga Heights Road showing development as of May 1990. Used by permission of JON REIS/PHOTOLINK.

All the pent-up impetus to growth was thus aimed at the Triphammer intersection. But the state

…not only did not perceive that Triphammer Road would be much more heavily traveled…and would create a very high value and very high volume intersection, but it did not acknowledge the interrelationship of land use adjacent to Route 13 and future traffic volumes on it.⁶

The junction was originally built as a grade crossing, without a stoplight but with a Yield sign on Triphammer. Sufficient land was reserved for an eventual overpass on Triphammer connected to the highway by a diamond-shaped system of access roads, but not for a cloverleaf, and thus

the foundation was laid for a permanent traffic problem. To this day traffic is frequently stacked up along the entire length of the eastbound ramp from the highway, waiting to make a left-hand turn onto Triphammer, and all the signalization and road improvements devised by the Village cannot overcome the inadequacy of the original design.

The state planners were not alone in their shortsightedness. The Greater Ithaca Regional Planning Board, created in 1958 with representatives from the City and Town of Ithaca, the Village of Cayuga Heights, and the Town of Lansing, commissioned a professional planning study that tried to assess the impact of the proposed new state highway on their respective communities. The plan, unveiled in October, 1959, predicted a substantial increase in residential settlement around the Ithaca-Lansing border once Route 13 opened this area to easier access, but not even the professional planners foresaw that the intersection of the highway with Triphammer Road would become a magnet for commercial development.

Private landowners and developers proved much quicker to perceive the opportunities presented by the new access to Triphammer. The highway was opened in 1963, and by 1964 three of the four corners at the Triphammer junction were occupied by the first large apartment complex, the first shopping mall and the first motel. A seven-year option on the fourth corner had been obtained by the first mall developers, so it stood vacant for that period, after which it was bought by another developer who put up a second shopping mall. Commercial development spread rapidly northward along Triphammer, while apartment complexes fanned out from that road to the east on both sides of the highway.

Part II: The physical barriers to growth break down

Although access to the area had been opened up by the new highway there was still an impediment that slowed growth on Triphammer and confined it largely to the properties adjacent to that road, and that was the

absence of public water and sewer. Water came from private wells but it was in short supply in some neighborhoods and sulphurous or full of minerals that stained the laundry at certain times and places. The natural soil is a heavy clay that forms just a thin layer on top of the rock bed so home lots had to be large in order to