The City of Ithaca, in the heart of the Finger Lakes wine-producing and resort area of central New York State, is a small but thriving cosmopolitan city surrounded by an unspoiled, easily accessible environment of startling natural beauty. The City's motto "Ithaca is Gorges" derives from several deeply cut gorges, with spectacular waterfalls carved through the rolling terrain.
The area is favored almost equally for its cultural and educational richness, recreational resources and scenic rural charm. Ithaca sits on the southernmost shore of Cayuga Lake, the longest of the Finger Lakes at 38 miles. The City rises to the hillside majesty of Cornell University on the east and Ithaca College on the south.
Ithaca has a resident population of about 30,000, and the surrounding county about 100,000, inclusive of students. The student populations include Cornell University (20,000), Ithaca College (6,500) and Tompkins-Cortland Community College (3,000).
The major industry is education and research, but a wide variety of others exist, including tourism, aerospace, biotechnology, computer software, electronics, guidance system components for the space industry, heat resistant materials, power drive transmission systems for automotive and other applications, pharmaceutical research and drug testing, precision machine tools, scientific research instruments, computer terminals and peripherals, data processing, publishing, printing, photo engraving, salt mining and agriculture.
Ithaca is ranked #8 in Kiplinger's Personal Finance list (June 2006) of "50 Smart Places to Live." Expansion Management's annual 2006 Knowledge Worker Quotient, which ranks a metro area's ability to provide the depth of talent that technology companies require, ranks Ithaca #1 overall, #1 for college-educated workers and #5 for scientists and engineers. In 2004, Ithaca was ranked #1 in the "Emerging Cities" category of Cities Ranked and Rated, a book by Peter Sander and Bert Sperling.