Cortland County Courthouse: Built from Ashes in Indiana Limestone
Near Ithaca, New York
The Cortland County Courthouse rising in the center of Cortland, New York, is a Beaux-Arts building completed in nineteen twenty-four and designed by James Riely Gordon, one of the most prolific courthouse architects in American history. Gordon specialized in public buildings that combined authority with grandeur, and the Cortland courthouse delivers both: three stories of Indiana limestone laid out in the shape of a Latin cross, with a cupola atop a rotunda ringed by twenty-four Corinthian columns. It replaced the county's older courthouse. The building joined the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-four.
