Ithaca Commons

The Ithaca Commons is a three-block pedestrian mall in downtown Ithaca, New York that serves as the city's cultural and economic center. The Commons is a popular regional destination, and is filled with upscale restaurants and shops, public art, and frequent community festivals.

The Commons is shaped like an inverted T. It consists of a two-block segment of State Street between Cayuga and Aurora Streets lined with shops, galleries, restaurants, and bars, and a smaller one-block segment, "Bank Alley," extending north up Tioga Street to Seneca Street, that is home to several banks and financial institutions. Many of the buildings are mixed-use, with apartments or offices on the upper floors. Tompkins Cortland Community College has a small satellite campus on the Commons.

During the summer, local musicians and other entertainers put on free concerts and performances, including at the Bernie Milton Pavilion. The Commons is also used for many politically protests, rallies, and speeches.

The Commons hosts several festivals throughout the year, including Ithaca's main annual festival, the Ithaca Festival in early June.

A scale model of the solar system, the Sagan Planet Walk, begins in the Commons. The Planet Walk is named after famed Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan, and stretches 3/4 mile from to the Sciencenter. The inner ring planets all fit on a short section of Bank Alley.

The two main hubs of Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit (TCAT)'s bus network are located adjacent to the Commons.

By the 1960s, the rise of car culture, suburbs, and urban renewal had severely hurt downtown Ithaca. Many storefronts were empty, and many historic buildings had been torn down and replaced with vacant lots. In 1971, newly elected Mayor Ed Conley, "pulling on a 1950s-era suggestion from a Cornell city planning student", proposed converting several blocks of State Street into a pedestrian mall. At the time, many small towns in the United States were experimenting with using pedestrian malls to revive downtowns. Formal design began in 1972, under the direction of local architect Anton J. Egner. Construction began in 1974, and the Commons opened in 1975. It cost $1.13 million The name "The Commons" was the winning entry in a community-wide "name the mall" contest, and a prize of $1,000 in cash and gift certificates went to Ithaca High School senior Bill Ryan who had entered the name after a visit to the Boston Common.

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