Ithaca Commons

The Commons is a popular regional destination, and is filled with upscale restaurants and shops, public art, and frequent community festivals.

The Planet Walk is named after famed Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan, and stretches 3/4 mile from to the Sciencenter.

The two main hubs of Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit (TCAT)'s bus network are located adjacent to the Commons.

In 1971, newly elected Mayor Ed Conley, "pulling on a 1950s-era suggestion from a Cornell city planning student",[3] proposed converting several blocks of State Street into a pedestrian mall.

In 1981, several vacant lots created by urban renewal were filled by the construction of Center Ithaca, a large mixed-use building with first-floor retail, an indoor food court connected to the Commons, and upper-floor offices and apartments.

In 2005, Seneca Place, a large mixed-use building incorporating retail, a Hilton Garden Inn, office space for Cornell University and Morgan Stanley, and the Ithaca area's first Starbucks opened adjacent to the Commons.

Between 2003 and 2015, the Cayuga Green project replaced several lots of surface parking adjacent to the Commons with a new home for independent movie theatre Cinemapolis, an Urban Outfitters, two buildings of luxury apartments, and a new multi-level parking garage with first-floor retail.

[5][6] In 2009, the city commissioned landscape architecture firm Sasaki Associates to do a complete redesign,[7] with a more open central lane, "patterned pavement, varied and movable seating, improved performance spaces, energy-efficient lighting, an outdoor reading area and a small playground.

In 2012, a stainless steel and bronze sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled at the western end of the Commons.

[10] In late 2015, construction began on a new, ten-story Marriott hotel on a vacant triangular lot at the eastern end of the Commons.