The Best Place by a Dam Site

(from the Jan-Feb 1999 Cornell Magazine -- http://cornell-magazine.cornell.edu/Archive/1999janfeb/JanBeebe.html)

BY GOULD COLMAN

It began as a humble pond and grew to be the social center off campus. After decades of pageants and parties, Beebe ain't what it used to be, but the memories endure.

Beebe Lake, the twentieth century, and Cornell hockey reached Ithaca in quick succession. But in the case of Beebe Lake, only the designation "lake" was new. On his 1871 map of the Cornell campus, Professor Albert Prentiss called the area "Beebe's Pond" because when Ezra Cornell had created it in 1838 by damming Fall Creek, Cornell was employed by Jeremiah Beebe. Beebe owned flour and plaster mills downstream and Beebe's Pond stored spring's abundant water for gradual release to power those mills as stream flow declined in summer. According to a biography by Alonzo Cornell, True and Firm, his father's reservoir impounded twenty acres of "surplus" water. Without Beebe Dam, that water would have gone downstream without being productive.

The present Beebe Dam, designed by Frank Washburn 1883 and erected in 1897 downstream of and directly adjacent to Ezra's structure by contractor Ira Shaler 1884, is higher, thicker, longer, and made with concrete instead of the stone that Ezra had employed. Just below the dam, the university's five-story hydraulic laboratory was built into the face of Fall Creek gorge in 1898 in twelfth-century Florentine style with stone that matched the gorge in color. The laboratory has been an unstabilized ruin since the 1960s, but when new, with Beebe Lake holding about 53 million gallons of water, Cornell was among the finest places in the United States for studying what moving water could accomplish. However, water run-off from about 120 square miles of south-central New York State immediately began to deposit silt from Fall Creek's banks and tributaries in Cortland and Tompkins counties into Beebe Lake, and reduced its water capacity.

When Beebe was newly a lake, John T. Parson, who taught mechanical drawing in Engineering from 1895 to 1938, could hardly wait for ice of skating thickness before shoveling snow from its surface. He established a snow removal subscription fund, so Beebe's cleared ice would be attractive to skaters. By early January 1900, hundreds of skaters could be seen gliding about its surface on a single afternoon. Seeking pleasure the modern way, some were skating first and paying later, or perhaps not at all: a notice in the January, 6, 1900, Cornell Era stated, "Mr. Parson urges prompt payment of all obligations."

Professor Parson became Cornell hockey's first patron by reserving a section of ice for the rink and encouraging Cornellians to form a team. By 1905 hockey fans were skating directly to the games. The predictability of the current hockey schedules was unknown in the days when an unseasonable thaw could cancel a game on short notice.

But skaters alone did not transform Beebe Lake into Cornell's principal winter gymnasium. By 1905 students, faculty, President Jacob Gould Schurman, and Ithacans could reach its icy surface at up to fifty miles an hour by sliding down one of two carefully iced troughs on toboggans that had been reinforced for that purpose. The Toboggan Slide stood immediately east of the Hydraulic Laboratory along the lake's south shore, and a lodge that housed those toboggans, located near the slide's upper end, featured a fireplace which converted chilled adventurers into convivial companions.

Nevertheless, around 1940, thrills, spills, and the sense of community associated with tobogganing on Beebe Lake ended abruptly when the slide was demolished, ostensibly to avoid the expense of needed repairs, although risk from litigation when toboggans went awry and injuries occurred was surely an incentive. No "Friends of the Slide" protested its demise. By then, watching movies at the Near, the Far, and the Armpit (what Cornellian would refer to these Ithaca theaters as Strand, State, and Temple?) had become popular; vicarious thrills obtained for pocket change were beginning to displace adventures that required skill and physical exertion. Toboggan Lodge survives, however, and a photograph mounted above its fireplace informs visitors about its prior purpose. The trim, single-story building located next to a parking lot above Beebe Lake now houses the offices of nine university auditors.

As early as 1906, Beebe Lake ice provided the stage for undergraduate pageants. During the Junior Week Ice Carnival that year, costumed skaters whirled around a sizable rink (200 by 150 feet) to the stirring music of Patsy Conway's famous Ithaca band. And Beebe Lake ice was not used solely for recreation in the early years. While skaters were skating and tobogganers descending onto the lake's western end, a crew from the College of Agriculture was harvesting ice at its eastern end that in warmer seasons would cool milk from the university's dairy cows.

With the spring melt, other water-borne activities took over. The Women's Boating Club was founded in 1897, and women rowers were given the benefit of advice from Cornell's famed crew coach, Charles Courtney. While he was perhaps tyrannical about training, he was not sexist. The Women's Boat House appears midway along the lake's south bank on a 1914 campus map. The structure was damaged by fire in the 1920s, and by the time a 1931 campus map was printed it had been demolished. If Beebe Lake had remained deep enough for boats, the boat house might well have been restored. Swimming, however, required a much smaller area of deep water and remained a popular summer sport at the east end of Beebe Lake. Brave swimmers enjoyed entering the lake by diving from the stone bridge erected in 1932 with a bequest from Henry Sackett 1875. For the 1933 Spring Day duck race--the time a visiting Mallard beat the enrolled domestic contestants--the recently dredged lake was at its best.

Many Beebe Lake skaters, tobogganers, boaters, swimmers, and miscellaneous revelers were able to relax in pleasant surroundings, warm in winter, cool in summer, availing themselves of coffee, soft drinks, and hamburgers when in 1922 the university erected a two-story, house-sized facility near the dam's north end. The athletic department was in charge; there was a warming room with a fireplace in the basement to serve skaters in winter, while upstairs anyone could enjoy a rustic sort of eatery that was cooled in the summer by open casement windows overlooking Beebe Lake and its varied happenings. It was named the Johnny Parson Club to honor Beebe Lake's patron saint, but most everyone called it Japes or "the best place to eat on campus by a dam site."

To many former soldiers on campus, Japes resembled chalets seen in wartime Bavaria. Yet the kitchen and the seating area that helped make Japes delightfully bucolic and serviceable to a generation of Cornellians were hardly economically efficient. In 1958, when skating at Cornell moved under cover at Lynah Rink, the powers that be decided to raze the upper structure rather than repair it. Noyes Lodge, a more efficient (if somewhat sterile) eatery had been erected a few feet to the south and west, and has since been converted to the Language Learning Center. Robert Purcell Union currently wears the mantle as the campus gathering and eating spot north of Fall Creek.

Japes's truncated basement became an Outing Club meeting room and storage space for canoes. On university maps it is still listed as Japes, or with its longer name, The Johnny Parson Outing Center. Alumni returning for reunions are able to rent canoes to paddle the lake for old times' sake.

Beebe Lake water still fulfills utilitarian functions for the university. Ice is no longer harvested, but since it was built in 1967, the Chilled Water Treatment Plant, near Toboggan Lodge, has made use of the lake's water to cool Clark Hall and adjacent buildings. This small closed-loop system exchanging building heat for lake-water coolness is, while increasing the comfort level in a few university buildings, contributing in part to Beebe Lake's problems. The somewhat warmer water at the west end of the lake promotes the growth of some plants, which are further encouraged by nutrients washing in from upstream farms and septic tanks. The university's planned and much-debated Lake Source Cooling Project is a far larger system utilizing far colder water from the bottom of a much larger lake--Cayuga--to cool many more buildings on the Hill.

Electricity production is another matter, though. After moving 1,700 feet downstream through a large pipe, water from Beebe Lake reaches the generating station below the Suspension Bridge with the force of the significant head of 144 feet, with enough energy to provide about 2 percent of the electricity the university currently requires. In the 1880s, however, Frank Washburn had larger ambitions. He designed the Beebe Lake dam to support a ten-foot addition, an elevation that would have tripled the lake's capacity and complemented other parts of the university's Fall Creek Water Power Development Project. Cornell officials acquired 667.25 acres under and along Fall Creek to support this project, mostly from 1903 to 1913. One 1903 purchase of thirty-seven acres for $5,500 is noteworthy because the transaction with the estate of Ezra Cornell's son, Franklin, included Beebe Lake itself. In the end, the Fall Creek Water Power Development Project did not achieve its goals, however, in large part because Fall Creek kept on turning water into mud everywhere its progress was halted, especially in Beebe Lake.

The Era writer who suggested calling the new body of water Crystal Lake in 1898 didn't understand about silt. Fall Creek had been steadily dropping dirt and debris in the fifty years since Ezra's building crew placed the last stone in Beebe's Dam. By 1897, when the new dam was built, Beebe's Pond had become an island lying between two branches of the creek. While the new dam obliterated that island, it did not do away with its cause. So, by 1930 Fall Creek had almost returned to its 1897 condition. University authorities then reversed nature's course by dredging 100,000 cubic yards of accumulated soil and debris. (Think of 800 ten-wheel dump trucks.) Five years later, the Great Flood of 1935 brought soil, sizable boulders, and tree trunks that again reduced much of the water capacity. The flood also caused extensive damage to the dam (the present top tier is post-flood construction).

Beebe Lake has been dredged at least twice during four subsequent decades, although not as extensively as in 1930. Yet when the last Spring Day highjinks took place during the early 1960s, jousters who were dislodged from floats could stand in water only knee-deep; and before the 1970s had passed, small islands were contributing to a swamp-like character that suggested that the name "lake" was mostly embellishment. What to do?

Dredging had become expensive and Department of Environmental Conservation regulations restrictive, but Cornell University had a deal with F. R. Newman '12, the principal patron of its outdoor spaces and a generous giver within. According to the late Bob Kane '34, Cornell's longtime director of athletics, the university told Newman that if he would build a women's gymnasium on Beebe's north bank, Cornell would take care of the lake.

Newman did his part, and honored his wife, Helen, in the process. The university reshaped Beebe Lake rather than removing the fill, and when breadth was exchanged for depth, the Class of 1966 Beach emerged along the north shore and an island, yet to be named, appeared at the eastern extreme. In 1988, Beebe Lake's "restoration" was celebrated with five hours of fun for 200 people who had contributed to the project. The event also celebrated the 150th anniversary of what Ezra Cornell had done there, with a floating birthday cake that released a barrage of balloons.

But what should be done when another island appears--as it will around 2020, unless another 1935-sized flood leaves debris that builds it even faster? Ending the need for Beebe Lake's Chilled Water Plant and efforts to control nutrient run-off upstream will not end soil erosion along Fall Creek. Letting nature take its course will make the area known as Beebe Lake a candidate for the name Beebe Swamp and, eventually, Beebe Parking Lot. And what Cornellian would willingly accept that trade-off?

Gould Colman '51, PhD '62, is the university archivist emeritus.