Buildings tell us stories of people and architecture but also, through their stones, those of the earth itself.

BY CHRISTINA LE BEAU

Today it's called Libe Slope, and Cornell University students of the past quarter-century know it primarily as the location of Slope Day, when smart kids prove they can do dumb things during the school's annual farewell to classes, an event so profligate that MTV once rated it among the best college parties in the country. At its steepest incline, Libe Slope rises at 18.8 percent, which is more than a train can climb but passable for most cars. You can stand at the top of the slope, with your back to the campus libraries (the source of the name), and look out over Cornell's Gothic revival Baker Court dorms and Ithaca's Fall Creek community below. It's a natural amphitheater, perfect for listening to the popular bands that come to send students off for the summer.

A century and a half ago, students had a different sort of rock in mind. Then, Libe Slope was a quarry on the edge of campus, the source for the richly variegated Devonian shale that would be used in the 1860s to construct some of Cornell's first buildings, in the area now known as the Arts Quad. Cornell's first students worked off tuition payments excavating that quarry. Fifteen thousand years before, Ithaca, like the rest of the Finger Lakes region of western New York, was trapped beneath a mile-thick sheet of ice. As the continental glacier melted, massive lake basins drained away, leaving valleys and later forming peaks where earth and rocks were swept by the receding glacier. The melt also revealed earlier, shallower valleys carved by rivers flowing during dinosaur days. When glacial debris created natural dams and those fanned-out valleys filled with water, the Finger Lakes were born.

Underneath it all was the product of more than a billion years of ebb and flow, layers of earth and dead sea creatures that eventually formed the region's foundation, exposed over time through erosion, abrasion, periodic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and the glacial advances and retreats. You'll find the resulting sedimentary rocks—sandstone, limestone, and shale—in the stunning gorges that rim the Cornell campus. But to get a close-up view of the rocks and the history they evoke, just take a walk through Cornell itself. Or closer to home, wander your own city block. The buildings we live with every day can tell us not only about the history of society and architecture but also about the history of the earth itself. It's the ultimate expression of place. And what better case for preservation?

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