Flagpole installation inIthaca, NY

Flagpoles in Ithaca

A university town before anything else: two campuses on the hills, a pedestrian downtown on the flats between them, and a hospital and county government behind that. We cover Ithaca and the Tompkins County area, including the Cornell University campus and the Arts Quad, Ithaca College on South Hill, the Ithaca Commons, Collegetown, DeWitt Park, Cornell Heights, the Fall Creek and Cascadilla gorges and the head of Cayuga Lake.

Wind here. Ithaca sits in an inland, steep-sided area, which works out to roughly 115 mph under the code your town uses. That figure decides how wide and how thick the pole has to be, so we check it against your address before we quote. Ithaca passed its landmarks ordinance in 1971, and the commission it set up now looks after eight local historic districts, DeWitt Park, East Hill, Henry St. John, Cornell Heights and the Clinton Block among them. On one of those a pole needs a certificate of appropriateness, which is the commission's written sign-off on how a thing will look, and it has to be in hand before the building permit, so it is worth starting early. Then there is the ground, and it changes over half a mile. The flats downtown are silt that settled on the bottom of the lake, wet and soft. The hills either side rise several hundred feet on Devonian shale that is often close to the surface, so one address takes a straightforward auger hole and the next has to be cut. The lake is the last of it. Cayuga runs about thirty-eight miles due north from the head of the valley, and a north wind arrives here with the whole of it behind, so the inlet and the waterfront are sized as open exposure rather than as sheltered valley floor.

Most of the people who call us from Ithaca are university and college buildings, school district and private school grounds, county and city facilities, churches, fraternities and student housing, hospitals and medical offices and downtown commercial frontage.