Читать книгу Good Cop/Bad Cop - Rebecca Cofer - Dartt - Страница 15
ОглавлениеNews that the Harris family had been murdered descended on Ellis Hollow that December morning like a snowball going downhill—slowly at first, gathering momentum, and then out of control as rumors passed from house to house. It was two days before Christmas, a Saturday, when folks woke up to thoughts of last-minute shopping or cutting down a Christmas tree.
Suddenly the people of Ithaca were confronted with their worst nightmare: their neighbors, a family of four, had been murdered sometime Friday evening inside their home on Ellis Hollow Road and their house had been set on fire.
The freezing air of that Saturday—the temperature dropped to fifteen degrees below zero before dawn and rose to ten degrees during the day—only intensified the bone-chilling terror and disbelief. How could this vicious crime happen here in this safe haven from the real world? Who was the killer—or killers? And of all people, Tony and Dodie Harris, the nicest, kindest people you could ever meet, and their two popular children, Shelby and Marc. Were the Harrises intentionally sought out, and if so, why? Or was this a random killing, a tragic lottery that could just as easily have chosen them? A madman might still be out there, ready to strike again. It made no sense. People felt helpless.
Although burglaries were common in certain parts of the city, there were rarely serious crimes in Tompkins County. The well-entrenched illusion continued: Ithaca was a kind of country paradise where bad things just didn’t happen. The small-town atmosphere and the cultural and intellectual tone set by Cornell University and Ithaca College gives the place an untouchable quality. The “ivory tower” appeals to many, because it seems detached and protected from the world in a cocoon fashioned by man and nature. Locals were proud of a recent study that named Ithaca the top small city in the East based on quality of life and the well-educated population of some thirty-five thousand people.
The town is located at the southern tip of the Finger Lakes region of New York State, where past geology sets the landscape apart, giving the area a grandiose beauty. Some twenty thousand years ago ice sheets moved down from Canada, leaving behind deep lakes and rocky gorges. A hilly terrain and the valleys below offer a pastoral contrast to the more rugged scenery. The eleven Finger Lakes (so-called because they look like slender, blue fingers on the map), are scattered over the western arm of the state below Lake Ontario between Livingston and Onondaga counties. They are intimately tied to the region’s history. As far back as the Thirteenth Century the Iroquois peoples built their villages along the banks, fished in its waters, and hunted in the surrounding dense forests. Names of lakes and counties today, such as Owasco, Keuka. and Seneca are a reminder of the Iroquois tribes who were the first inhabitants of the land.
In 1779 during the American Revolutionary War General John Sullivan marched into central New York with over two thousand men to attack the Iroquois, who had sided with the Tories. His intention was to force the tribes to move westward and disrupt the Tory offense. Sullivan found most of the villages deserted (the Iroquois knew they were outnumbered), but by the end of the march he claimed his men had burned forty villages, 160,000 bushels of com, well-established orchards, and quantities of vegetables. The Iroquois paid heavily for supporting the British.
The men in Sullivan’s army saw great potential in these lands of forests and lakes that were “bluer than indigo” where acres of crops and fruit orchards flourished in Indian villages. Eventually tracts of land were awarded to war veterans by the Land Commission in Albany, the amount of land each was given was based on military rank. So began the white man’s settlement of upstate New York.
Members of the Land Commission set about naming towns (twenty-six of them) for ancient military and classical heroes and empires, believing the rhetoric of the Revolution that compared American aspirations to ancient Greek democracy and Roman Republicanism. So we have, among others, Carthage, Fabius, Cicero, Romulus, Ovid, Virgil, Ulysses, and Ithaca.
Peleg Ellis, a war veteran, came in 1799 to settle on his tract of wilderness in what is now Ellis Hollow to the east of Ithaca. Most of the first settlers were of northern European stock. The next century brought Italians, Greeks, and Jews to populate the growing cities, to build the Erie Canal, and then the railroads. Immigrant groups in town formed enclaves for support. First on Ithaca’s flats were the Irish, who then moved uphill to Irish Nob. There were 104 blacks living as freemen on the south side of town by 1830; they had the lowest paying jobs as domestics, janitors, or seasonal workers. A slave burial ground was discovered on Ellis Hollow Road on the J.D. Schutt Farm in 1928, settling the question about whether there had ever been slaveholders in Tompkins County.
The region’s hopes of being a big commercial depot for northern and western markets in the 1800s were dashed twice; first when canals weren’t built to connect Cayuga Lake to the Erie Canal and second when major railroads bypassed the town. In both cases the area’s topography made the projects too costly. With an abundance of water power, mills of all sorts flourished, keeping Ithaca a small manufacturing center.
It was Ezra Cornell, a Quaker farmer and businessman, who transformed Ithaca from the typical upstate village to a university town. A man of extraordinary vision—he helped to build part of the first telegraph lines in the country—he wanted “to found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” His idea of offering everything from the newest methods of farming to Latin and Greek, for the poor as well as the rich, was a radical concept at the time. Cornell took the European university model and made it into something uniquely American: democratic with an appeal to the diversity of individuals.
Cornell University opened in 1868 on some of Ezra Cornell’s farm land atop East Hill overlooking Cayuga Lake. Many of the 332 original freshman climbed the legendary Buffalo Street hill to the new campus that October day, finding one gray, austere building, Morrill Hall, barely completed for their classes and dormitory space.
Ithaca’s steep hills and harsh winters have become synonymous with the Cornell experience. The famous American writer, E. B. White, talked about putting on his sheepskin coat the first of November to dig in for the long winter while he was a Cornell student in the early twenties. He liked to recall those cold mornings before six when he trudged up the hill from the downtown offices of the Cornell Daily Sun—he was editor-in-chief—after putting the paper together for another day, watching the lighthouses shimmer on the inlet and feeling glad he had come to such a grand place.
The campus is well known for its spectacular scenery with trails winding down rocky gorges and foot bridges over waterfalls that drop hundreds of feet. Unfortunately the sheer drops are also a temptation for those who can no longer cope with life. Students and townspeople have committed suicide down these precipitous slopes in spite of high guard rails that have gone up over campus bridges. It’s a dismal part of local reality that isn’t talked about.
The Wharton brothers, Theodore and Leopold, saw the filming possibilities of this dramatic scenery and turned Ithaca into the little film capital of the East between 1912 and 1920, churning out the popular melodramatic silent movies of the day with Irene Castle, Pearl White, and Lionel Barrymore. Heroines were thrown off cliffs, trolleys plunged down gorges, canoes were swept over roaring waterfalls, and bridges were blown up. Their operation folded when they ran out of money and Hollywood became the uncontested movie center of the world. By then Hollywood producers had started using more advanced filming techniques and the mild California climate made it easy to film year-round.
Because of the college-town atmosphere, it was probably inevitable that a town-gown division would eventually crop up. In the literal sense Cornell, high above Cayuga’s waters, looked down on the town below, and as the university grew in stature and reputation around the world, the contrast and tension between locals and Comellians increased. But the town knows that it prospers because of Cornell and Ithaca College, its other seat of learning on South Hill. The campuses define the town and are the drawing cards for people and business to settle there. Tourists often come from big metropolitan areas looking for a slower pace of life, clean air, and less crime. Migration picked up pace in the sixties and seventies and is still going on.
Many college students in the 1960s and 1970s reacted to the country’s upheaval by dropping out of school and making Ithaca their permanent home. A walk on Ithaca’s Commons is proof that the place remains a haven for alternative lifestyles. The small melting pot of well-informed Ithacans support all sorts of causes from saving the rain forests and whales to freeing Tibet and preserv ing Guatamala’s Indian culture.
Small business firms, mostly home-grown, stay in Ithaca because it has a reputation for good public schools and a busy sports and cultural calendar. It’s an attractive place for middle-management and other professional families to settle. It is also Cornell that sets the wage level for the area, which businesses must find appealing, since pay scales are relatively low, especially for clerical and blue-collar workers. Many residents commute to nearby Elmira, Owego, Binghamton, or Syracuse for higher wages. The few technical companies in Ithaca that hire skilled workers and professionals are small concerns with relatively few employees.
Although New York City is less than a five-hour drive down Route 17, when you’re in Ithaca, the city seems light-years away. No passenger trains come to Ithaca, and flights are infrequent at the small county airport.
Part of the area’s remoteness is planned, since no four-lane highways connect it to Syracuse and Binghamton, the two large cities nearby. A fight between developers and environmentalists has gone on for decades, especially over adding highways. So far, the purists have won. The steep and curvy two-lane roads that wind in and out of Ithaca add to the feeling of being sequestered. This is especially true during the winter when snow and ice are apt to keep roads hazardous. Local devotees will tell you, however, that it is the pristine white of snow-covered hills contrasting with the deep blue lake and sky of winter that brings out Ithaca’s extraordinary beauty. But they may not mention the climate: long, harsh winters and many overcast days.
The city of Ithaca is surrounded by towns and villages; most are residential communities with pockets of commercial activity. The more affluent neighborhoods are situated in the northeast part of town, which includes Cayuga Heights, the area’s gold coast.
These upscale communities contrast sharply with run-down trailer parks and shabby houses that sit on the edges of prosperity and dot the countryside. The majority of the small family farms on the outskirts of town are second-income endeavors: many look like transplants from Appalachia. There is no heavy industry in the region; most unskilled people work for one of the colleges or in the service industry.
Most of the city’s less advantaged black citizens still live on the south side of town, where housing is often sub-standard. The more prosperous blacks are scattered throughout the area. Racial tension bubbles beneath the surface, erupting on occasion with incidents that usually involve young black men, the police, and drugs, in lively street disturbances in the Cleveland Street section.
Ellis Hollow, one of Ithaca’s most desirable places to live today, is located on the east side of the city in the Town of Dryden. It was Ellis Village in the 1800s, supporting five mills (powered by the waters of Cascadilla Creek), a lumber business, its own school, post office, blacksmith shop, and general store. The stony soil made farming marginal but allowed for a productive quarry, which is still in use. Families broke their rural isolation by being good neighbors and forming a close-knit community where they often got together for socials and church.
People began to move into town to work at the turn of the century, and it wasn’t until automobiles made commuting practical did Ellis Hollow transform itself into a residential area. In 1952 a few families renovated the old one-room schoolhouse into a community center to recapture the neighborliness of the past.
Ellis Hollow appeals to outdoor types who run and cycle in all kinds of weather. Ellis Hollow Road runs seven miles through the valley eastwest, beginning at the East Hill Plaza Shopping Center and ending at State Highway 79. Among the gentle hills and dense woods Nineteenth-Century farmhouses contrast with elaborate, expensive homes built during the 1970s and 1980s. Although the area today is far different from 1799 when Peleg Ellis cleared the wilderness to build his log cabin, it has kept a measure of its independence and isolation. Tract developments are prohibited, allowing individual taste and spacious lots to remain the norm.
Most Ellis Hollow residents today are affluent and white. When Tony and Dodie Harris moved to the area in 1985 and decided to build their dream house on Ellis Hollow Road, they were looking for a country setting and a close-knit community. They wanted to be near people who cared about each other and especially about children. They liked the activities and facilities of the community center: swimming pool, tennis courts, an outdoor skating rink, ball fields, and programs for all ages. The Hollow seemed an ideal spot to raise their family.
