Ithaca College and the Sound of a City
Near Ithaca, New York
Cornell is not the only college that shaped this town. On South Hill, across the valley, sits Ithaca College, and it began not with a fortune but with a fiddle. In September of eighteen ninety-two, a local violin teacher named William Grant Egbert opened the Ithaca Conservatory of Music in a few rented rooms downtown on East Seneca Street.
His first classes met on September nineteenth of that year. For decades the conservatory grew into a full college, chartered under the name Ithaca College in nineteen thirty-one, and it kept its roots in music while adding theater, communications, and much more. In the nineteen sixties the whole school pulled up stakes downtown and moved to a modern campus here on South Hill, a relocation finished in nineteen sixty-eight.
Today Ithaca College is best known for its schools of music, of theater, and of communications, including the Roy H. Park School. One of its most famous teachers was Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, who taught in the communications program in his final years until his death in nineteen seventy-five.
So when you hear that Ithaca is a college town, remember it holds two very different institutions, one born on a hilltop from a telegraph fortune, and one born downtown from a single violin lesson.
