The Microwave to Nowhere: Proposed Cell Tower Impacts

Here are two photos that demonstrate how the Verizon cell tower proposed for Hanshaw Road would impact Ludgate Farms Store and the surrounding neighborhood.

The two red balloons were hoisted on April 16 2009 as a demonstration of the approximate height and location of the cell tower, at the request of the Dryden Town Board at its April 2009 meeting.


Keep in mind that the cell tower would not consist of two pretty red balloons with a gap in between, but a metal tower bristling with attachments. There would also be a microwave installation that, as the Verizon rep admitted under questioning from a Town Board member, would point "Nowhere."

Because this demo was arranged at very short notice with nothing like adequate public notice, working residents along Cardinal and Meadowlark Drives on the Dryden side of Sapsucker Woods Road may not get an opportunity to view the pretty red balloons. Hence a photo is provided here of what the tower would look like from midway along Cardinal Drive. The other photo shows the impact to Ludgate Farms Store on Hanshaw Road.

Thank you to the Dryden Town Board and to Verizon for this demo, which illustrates how inappropriate this tower is at this location. It would intrude on Ludgates, on all hikers using the Cayuga Trail across Hanshaw from Ludgates, on all residents along Hanshaw Road to Monkey Run, and for many on Cardinal and Meadowlark Drives.


All the negative impacts would be in Dryden, while the tower would be invisible to the Ithacans who would reap the cell coverage benefits. Meanwhile many areas of Dryden have little or no cell tower coverage -- and stand to gain no more from Verizon over the next 5 - 7 years, according to the Verizon rep at the April Town Board meeting! Remind me again -- what is Dryden getting out of this proposed deal?


Verizon seems to be playing off one municipality against another, apparently hustling to feed its own business strategy and competitive edge while ignoring the real needs of the community it is supposedly here to serve. It claims special legal privileges as a so-called "public utility," but that's a two-way street.

What would Dryden get in return for allowing Verizon to taint this Dryden neighborhood? Absolutely NOTHING.


It is hoped that the municipalities making up Tompkins County can work together in cooperation with Verizon and other cell phone and internet companies for a better, wiser tower placement policy -- starting with this proposed cell tower. There is no right way to do the wrong thing -- and placing a cell tower at this location is the wrong thing.

Where the Woods Meet

Where Fall Creek’s woods meet Sapsucker Woods, Hanshaw Road curves between them. A small stream is culverted there under the road, carrying Sapsucker Woods runoff toward Fall Creek. Residents know to take it slow on Hanshaw Road through this wooded corridor to avoid hitting the deer and other wildlife who use the continuous woodland cover to traverse a gap between one county-designated Unique Natural Area (Sapsucker Woods) and another (Fall Creek). Those are probably not the place-names used by animals.

Big birds are often perched in the trees here, maybe for the view to be had at this wooded crest of the long slope up Hanshaw Road from Cayuga Heights, Ithaca and Cayuga Lake in its deep valley below. The wooded corridor at the Hanshaw Road crossing is narrow, just a couple hundred feet wide, but it spreads outward to the north and west into the wetland woods on both sides of Sapsucker Woods Road, surrounding the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Across Hanshaw Road southward, a five-minute walk through the arc of woods that widens between Hanshaw and Freese Roads brings a hiker to the steep crumbling bluffs high above Fall Creek, and onto the Cayuga Trail. Just beyond the woodland edge in old pastures is Cornell’s Dyce Laboratory for Honey Bee Studies.

To the east of this wooded corridor, Hanshaw Road curves around the edge of flat Cornell farm fields, bordered on their southern edge by Fall Creek and its woodland cover and on the north by Sapsucker Woods, old pasture lands, and wooded wetlands that extend along Hanshaw as it takes a sharp turn northward (and Lower Creek Road continues straight). Here again there is a narrow wooded meeting place, between the Hanshaw Road wetlands and Monkey Run woods. Again, Hanshaw Road parts them and a stream, culverted under the road, joins them. The stream travels on next to the hiking trail (beloved by dogs and their owners) that was once Monkey Run Road, downhill to Fall Creek.

West and south of the Sapsucker-Hanshaw woodland corridor, blue-hill vistas can be seen beyond patches of woodland as the open Cornell farmland drops away from both Hanshaw and Freese Roads toward the wooded Fall Creek valley below. Westward and downslope lies Ithaca, its suburban homes infringing upon the edges of Sapsucker Woods.

The northern extent of Sapsucker Woods and the Hanshaw wetlands are abruptly cut off by a strip of intense human development. The heavily-traveled, limited-access Route 13 highway is an ever-humming backdrop to this quiet area. The road severs Sapsucker, Hanshaw and the area’s birds and beasts from wetlands and woodlands to the north. On the north side of Route 13 from Sapsucker Woods is the Tompkins County Airport. Its need for landings, takeoffs, wide beds of flashing lights and extended runways makes it a noisy, light-polluting neighbor for the Hanshaw-Sapsucker area.

Invisible, destructive boundaries cut through the heart of this unified natural area. Sapsucker Woods Road is the border between the Town of Ithaca and Town of Dryden. The southeast border of the Village of Lansing runs east-west across the northern quarter of Sapsucker Woods Road, and contains the airport on the north side of Route 13. This division among three municipal interests has resulted in neglect and misuse on all sides of these arbitrary, highly unnatural straight lines and right angles. An understanding of the whole has been discarded.

From the micro-scale of backyard fences to the international interfaces between countries, borders and margins are places for sloppy land-use at best, and criminal behavior at worst. Farthest from the nearest seat of power and governance, borders are where unwanted land-uses are dumped. At the edges of things, planning and zoning wear thin and can become slipshod, and are more easily set aside for convenience.

Less powerful than residents nearer the center, the human residents of border areas often have the least say in how their land is used. They lose out when land managers and agents of governance are swayed by those with attorneys and a thumb on the scale as the laws are written and the regulations are enforced.

Within the Sapsucker Woods and Hanshaw Road wetlands and woodlands, the non-human residents have the least power and have lost out most of all. Over the past fifty years their land, water and air habitats and travel routes have shrunk and shriveled, severed by new residential roads, Route 13, and airport expansion, and gouged by the bulldozers and bullying of builders who have carved suburbia out of the woodlands and wetlands on the edges of, and driving toward the heart of, Sapsucker Woods.

On the Ithaca side of the line, builders are poised to eat further into Sapsucker Woods very soon, if the planning wizards can be convinced that no real harm will be done. On the Dryden side of the line, businesses were allowed into the wetlands along Hanshaw Road before residential zoning was put in place to slow their spread and impact on this wetland area that feeds Fall Creek. There should not be, but there are, big parking lots and warehouse-sized businesses set on elevated fill pads in the wetlands at Hanshaw Road’s intersection with Route 13.

At the moment (February-March 2009), Verizon is playing games with the governments and planning entities on both sides of the Ithaca-Dryden border, trying to get a (possibly non-complying) cell tower placed on the Dryden side of Sapsucker Woods Road in order to serve Ithaca residents. Verizon proposes to place this tower in that woodland along Hanshaw Road which serves as a corridor from the Fall Creek Unique Natural Area to the Sapsucker Woods Unique Natural Area. The landowner has informed neighbors that if the tower does not go in, he will sell the woodland to a developer.

This immediate situation has prompted me to write this essay, to illustrate how these woodlands, fields, and wetlands make up a unified (though under siege) natural area of semi-wild nodes and corridors between Sapsucker Woods and Fall Creek. I argue that these natural functions outweigh the value to the three adjoining municipalities of continuing to use this area for a dumping-ground of unwanted land uses and zoning waivers.

Our informal group, Friends of Hanshaw-Sapsucker, is made up of neighbors (in Ithaca and Dryden) who see a center here, not edges. We want to protect this wonderful natural area from further fragmentation and neglect. We support the work of the Save Sapsucker Woods group. We invite you to join us.

Becoming Locavores

Peggy and I went a-walking, out in the August morning recently. The sky was a cloudless blue and the air warm with meadow scents as Aurelia pulled us forward with her leash toward the trees across Hanshaw Road. We carried a plastic basket and scissors, in search of rumored wild fruits along the woodland edge.

Peg’s husband Ben had returned with reports of laden blackberry bushes by the path “just beyond the manure pile” in the Cornell field and along the tree line; I had found wild black cherry trees and a fruit-filled apple tree clustered together on the edge of a homely old field tucked into the woods. I had begun roaming through there in the late 1960s dreaming of a quiet retreat, and found an old stove and blue-spotted coffee pot tossed down the slope, suggesting that long ago others had shared my liking for the wooded slopes between creek and fields. Today, though neatened by the Cornell ag school and bordered by the Cayuga Trail, this secluded cove still feels like an old home place. (Is there a New York word for that Kentucky state of mind?)

Although not radical locavores, Peggy and Ben are well on their way. The choices they now make tend to be either local – or not at all. They bike and walk great distances, or use the bus. They sort and recycle every darn scrap, and have a compost heap for the rest. Their house is undergoing a major energy-conserving overhaul. Casual long-distance travel has faded away. Their food choices focus on what is in season and what is produced locally and or with a minimum of industrial inputs.

As part of these life-altering strategies, they have purchased a “harvest share” in Full Plate Farm Collective, the local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Each week they pick up a box of produce at Ludgate Farms, gathered from three local organic farms, and each week they come to terms with chard, spinach, beets, and other crops that ripen as the season rolls forward. This relentlessly fresh array of beautiful foods demands to be eaten, every single day – there is no rest from its neediness: “Eat me while fresh – and before the next box arrives!” Since June, the packaged and processed foods in Peg and Ben’s diet have in large part been replaced by vegetable-focused dishes supplemented with pastas, home made breads, local cheeses and the occasional dab of meat from the Farmers Market. (Not forgetting locally-made Finger Lakes wines and beers!)

Additionally a modest garden was started in the least-leafy, least-wet area of their big backyard. While stealthy gophers have taken the best stuff from under the fence, there has been lettuce, a few beans, cucumbers and one healthy pumpkin; and the promise of many pounds of tomatoes – if they would only ripen.

By mid-August, Peg and Ben were comfortable enough in their new vegetable-based habits to try the wild foods that grace roadsides and woods-edges during central New York’s glorious midsummer.

On this particular morning, Peg and I scrambled into a creekbed to grab green and red apples from the sunnier side of a big old tree on its bank, and snipped a half bucket of ripe wild black cherries. These became, respectively, deeply-flavored applesauce and a small bottle of cherry juice concentrate that shouted good health. Wandering along the woodland edge, we also gathered two cups of sublimely ripe blackberries.

What a haul! And our day of small, gem-like harvests had just begun. Peg and I and Aurelia took my car on the back route across the Cascadilla and Six Mile Creek valleys, up past Ithaca College to the heights where one of the cooperating organic farms, Three Swallows Farm, is situated. Probably the proprietors work far too hard most of the year to appreciate the wild romanticism of their view across the deep hidden valley with horizons of cool blue hills further on, and a glimmer of the deep blue coolness of Cayuga Lake far below.

We were there to pick stuff on our own sweet free time, and could glance up from plucking basil leaves to look at the cows in the field below, or pause between the long undulating rows of jalapeno pepper plants to gaze at other folks like us, ambling and plucking. A mother and daughter gathered a massive bouquet of zinnias, snapdragons and cleome, an outrageous blast of bright colors. The flowers were free after all so we overcame our Puritanical tendencies and collected our own bundle of bright sweet blossoms, laid carefully in our paper bags on top of piles of peppers (four different kinds), basil leaf heaps, and sharply-scented lemon verbena. The rows of beans were done, the okra was not in yet (and difficult for Peg to love), and the masses of hanging cherry and plum tomatoes were, like the ones in the backyard, not yet ripe. But we gathered in plenty for our needs.

Back at the house, scratched and sun-warmed by our day outside, we sorted our goodies, and topped off the collection with a visit to the backyard garden, adding several crunchy green beans and a cucumber to the day’s haul.

None of these beautiful foods were gathered in great quantities. We had enough basil leaves for one big pesto meal on pasta, with leftovers. The cherry juice concentrate was enough for five drinks added to wine or sparkling water (five amazing drinks). The blackberries went into a couple of servings of morning yogurt; the lemon balm made a nice small bouquet as did the fancy flowers. The apples made plenty of applesauce, lasting several days. We did have a heck of a lot of jalapenos. A few went into two fresh salsas that very night; most of the rest were frozen for individual thawing and use.

For all the time spent working at it on that breathlessly beautiful day, we did not collect massive quantities: we gained a few handfuls of most things. But you know, a little bit of intense flavor goes a long way. And, when you become immersed in the collection, harvest and preparation of locally, sustainably grown produce, the preparation becomes part of the meal: actually part of the food value. The entire process nourishes and sustains, so that you do not need as much to eat as when your food comes from packets and boxes and frozen microwave pouches.

Within a few days after our varied harvest, Peg and Ben had gone back across the road with Aurelia to gather another batch of even riper cherries. When I last checked, they had their eyes on apple trees, heavy with fruit, going unharvested across the Cornell campus and the city of Ithaca. There’s one next to the old schoolhouse, one on Triphammer Road next to a fraternity house, one on Campus Road next to frats and dorms, and one on Buffalo Street below Stewart Avenue. The harvest becomes the meal.