The Gorge Bridges and the Nets Below

The bridges that carry you across the Cornell gorges are among the most beautiful and most sobering places in Ithaca. The campus sits between two deep chasms, Fall Creek and Cascadilla, and generations of students have crossed high above the rushing water on graceful spans. But that same dramatic beauty has a painful history, because the height that thrills also invites tragedy.

Between the fall of two thousand nine and the spring of two thousand ten, Cornell lost six students to suicide, and several of them jumped from the bridges over the gorges within a single terrible month. The community responded rather than looking away. The university and the city studied the evidence on what is called means restriction, the simple idea that making a method harder to reach saves lives.

After emergency fencing went up, the Ithaca Common Council voted in December of two thousand eleven to allow safety nets under the bridges, and around two thousand thirteen, nets were installed beneath seven spans. In the years since, gorge jumping incidents fell sharply, and researchers point to Ithaca as real world proof that means restriction works. So as you cross, take in the astonishing view, and know that the thin nets strung below are there because a community decided that no beautiful place should also be a fatal one.

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