Fall Creek

Every September upwards of 50 or 60 bands and individual musicians perform for free on the front porches, stoops, and yards of Fall Creek, Ithaca, New York, on a single afternoon. Residents and visitors walk and bicycle around the neighborhood with maps listening to the music and performances — which also include juggling and dance. Often the crowds spill on to the streets. The all-volunteer event takes place without any official funding and with as little management as possible1.

Porchfest highlights the enterprising nature and strong community spirit of Fall Creek — one of the most appealing neighborhoods in this small Upstate city, home of Cornell University and Ithaca College.

Geography

Fall Creek is a mostly residential area that borders on downtown Ithaca to the south, Cascadilla Creek to the west, East Hill, where Cornell is located, to the east, and Fall Creek (the waterway) to the north.

Fall Creek consists of about 40 urban blocks. The grid is mostly rectangular, with many blocks measuring about 290 by 500 feet. The grid shifts at Auburn Street due to Cascadilla Creek, giving the neighborhood the shape of a wedge. The density is 8-9 units per acre — consisting of mostly houses built as single-family detached units. About 40 percent of the houses have been carved into multiple units for rental apartments. A large number of faculty and staff members and students, especially from Cornell, live in the neighborhood.

In addition to the houses, there are a handful of restaurants, laundromats, a pharmacy, and a various other businesses. Fall Creek residents walk to businesses, theaters, churches, the public library, and other civic facilities downtown. Fall Creek has one public school, an elementary school, part of which dates to 1879.

Fall Creek has only two small parks. The most impressive public space is a natural area — the Fall Creek Gorge, which includes Ithaca Falls. The falls can be viewed on the bridge where Lake Street crosses Fall Creek. A short walk into the natural area takes you to the falls.

The neighborhood dates to the first half of the 19th Century. One of the early residents was Cornell University founder and telegraph pioneer Ezra Cornell. The houses were predominantly built from 1875 to 1925. Most are undistinguished architecturally. The neighborhood has working-class roots. Many mills, including the former Ithaca Gun factory, thrived adjacent to the falls.

Walkability

Fall Creek neighborhood is highly walkable. Many households in Fall Creek get by without a car or with just one car. The City of Ithaca has the highest percentage of the population that walks to work (43 percent) of any city in the US with more than 20,000 population. Many Fall Creek residents walk or take the bus up the hill to Cornell, or walk downtown.

The physical environment helps. Blocks are human-scale with 5-foot-wide sidewalks and a 12-foot-wide boulevard strip between between the sidewalk and the street. This strip allows large trees to shade the sidewalk and street in the spring, summer, and fall. In winter, it is a good place to store snow. On-street parking is plentiful, and streets vary in width from about 26 feet to 35 feet — with two way traffic. One flaw in the urban pattern is a lack of rear lanes in the City of Ithaca, which means that driveways interrupt the streetscape at every house.

There are plenty of nearby destinations, including Ithaca Falls, The Commons — a pedestrian mall that forms the heart of downtown — and Cornell University (for those willing to brave the 500-foot rise in elevation up East Hill).

Fall Creek is noted for quirky, community-organized events such as Porchfest described above, the Garden Tour, and Halloween. The free Garden Tour is in June and usually includes about a dozen houses. Fall Creek is probably the most popular Halloween neighborhood in Tompkins County. Residents who choose to participate have to stock up on candy — they may get a few hundred trick or treaters. The city's unabashedly goofy Ithaca Festival Parade, which takes place in early June, starts in Fall Creek and ends downtown.

• 1. Porchfest is organized by Leslie Greene and Gretchen Hildreth, two residents of Fall Creek.