Thank you! It is, perhaps, not nice to aim directly for the heartstrings, but it's nice to hear that you've hit the target. *wry*
Cornell has a very attractive campus, by and large. There are a few inevitable ugly mid-20th-century institutional blocks, but there's a lot of lovely stone Gothic construction from earlier decades, and more recent construction has at least paid lip service to that aesthetic.
As for the suicide shrine thing... well, suicide by bridge-and-gorge is an old tradition in Ithaca, and specifically at Cornell. The actual suicide rate is no higher than anywhere else -- in fact, it may be somewhat lower due to extra attention given to suicide prevention -- but that method is pretty final (no way to take it back once you've jumped) and the successes are the dramatic sort that get a lot of news attention, rather than someone taking sleeping pills and dying quietly in a dorm room. (People also die in the gorges from general stupidity -- swimming despite warnings about rocks and vicious eddy currents, getting drunk and falling over the cliff edge, etcetera -- but it's the suicides that get mythologized.)
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Date: 2014-03-21 07:22 pm (UTC)Cornell has a very attractive campus, by and large. There are a few inevitable ugly mid-20th-century institutional blocks, but there's a lot of lovely stone Gothic construction from earlier decades, and more recent construction has at least paid lip service to that aesthetic.
As for the suicide shrine thing... well, suicide by bridge-and-gorge is an old tradition in Ithaca, and specifically at Cornell. The actual suicide rate is no higher than anywhere else -- in fact, it may be somewhat lower due to extra attention given to suicide prevention -- but that method is pretty final (no way to take it back once you've jumped) and the successes are the dramatic sort that get a lot of news attention, rather than someone taking sleeping pills and dying quietly in a dorm room. (People also die in the gorges from general stupidity -- swimming despite warnings about rocks and vicious eddy currents, getting drunk and falling over the cliff edge, etcetera -- but it's the suicides that get mythologized.)