After the
Revolutionary War, much of
Upstate New York was divided and given to veterans as part of the
Central New York Military Tract. Several veterans received lots in what is now Cayuga Heights and started farms. In the early 1800s,
Ithaca started to grow as a small city and inland port. In 1865,
Ezra Cornell started Cornell University. Students and faculty members initially lived on campus and in Ithaca, but rapid expansion in the late 1800s and early 1900s spurred new development north of the Fall Creek gorge. Two trolley bridges were built across the gorge, and a streetcar connected downtown, Cornell, and the budding residential development north of the gorge. In 1901, local businessmen Charles Newman and Jared Blood bought nearly 1,000 acres of farmland and started the Cayuga Heights Land Company. They hired landscape architect Harold Caparn, who designed the
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, to design an organic, curving, park-like layout of roads and trees. Cayuga Heights was incorporated as a village in 1915, consisting of a one-half square mile of land from the City of Ithaca line to what is now Upland Road. The name
Cayuga Heights reflects the village's position overlooking
Cayuga Lake. In 1924, Cayuga Heights Elementary School was built. After World War II, Cayuga Heights continued to expand. Community Corners Shopping Center was built in 1947 as a small suburban shopping plaza for residents. In 1952, the village opened its wastewater treatment plant on the shore of Cayuga Lake. The village resisted attempts to be annexed by the growing City of Ithaca. Instead, it more than tripled in size in 1954 when it annexed approximately 1.4 square miles of land in the Town of Ithaca, extending from Upland Road to the Town of Lansing border. A large addition was built onto Cayuga Heights Elementary School in the late 1950s. In 1969, the First Congregational Church relocated from downtown Ithaca to a new building on the former site of the Country Club of Ithaca, which had relocated a mile east. The village was a founding member of the
Bolton Point Water System when it opened in the mid-1970s. In 1980, Cayuga Heights Elementary School closed due to declining enrollment. It reopened in 1988. In 1995, the last large plot of open land in Cayuga Heights, the former Savage Farm, was developed into a retirement community, Kendal at Ithaca, by the Kendal Corporation. Kendal has since become home to many retired Cornell University faculty members; a local joke for many years was that it had the best physics department in the country, as
Nobel Prize winner
Hans Bethe, along with
Boyce McDaniel,
Dale Corson, and many other physicists, were long-time residents. On January 12, 2015, the board of trustees of the Village of Cayuga Heights unanimously adopted a resolution declaring freedom from
domestic violence to be a fundamental human right.
Deer controversy Cayuga Heights has received national attention for its large white-tailed deer population, as many as 125 per square mile. Efforts to control the deer population have sparked huge controversy in the village. In 2011, the village Board of Trustees approved a plan to reduce the deer population by sterilizing 20 to 60 does in two years while killing the remaining 160 to 200 deer in the village. Paul Curtis, a Natural Resources Professor at Cornell who has worked with the board of trustees, said "The primary problems that the deer cause to the community are damage to garden plants, deer-vehicle accidents, and the potential threat of the spread of foreign diseases.” Opponents of the deer culling program have criticized it as a "war on sweet innocent deer", a "brutal slaughter", and Cayuga Heights as a "constant killing field". Local opposition group CayugaDeer.org has accused the board of trustees' actions of being deceptive and dishonest, and sued the village to stop the culling. Few residents agreed to allow the village to cull deer on their property, and in November 2012, the board of trustees abandoned its plan to cull the deer, instead deciding to capture and sterilize does. ==Geography==