Tiny Town, USA – "Beast, You're Skying" – one of our favorite crew team slogans on state bridge Route 79 was temporarily scoured out of existence as part of a deal with the City of Ithaca, Cornell University and Ithaca College.
Now it's back and more inspiring than ever.
In exchange for some sort of tax break or code variance (unclear) the city agreed to the building of boathouses for both schools on the inlet as long as they cleaned up the jocular graffiti on the bridge's ironworks and concrete abutments. At roughly $16,000, according to one source, nothing could be sillier.
With one exception: this ass-in-pockets deal probably went down under ousted Hizzoner Carolyn Peterson's regime, was probably part of some covert operation to eradicate that scourge of the Evinrude, Yamaha and Mercury engine: Hydrilla, the Kwazy Aquatic Weed that ate Ithaca.
But something went wrong with the scrub job (and the over-the-top Hydrilla weed whacking scandal that should've been and wasn't).
Neil Young could've told you: Rust never sleeps:
Now, jusst a few months after it was disapppeared, the good ol' rah-rah graffiti that makes a collegetown a collegetown and crewing and skulling something for privileged white kids as well as the Crips and Bloods, is again visible.
Sadly, some fine words for the women's crew teams were lost under the heavy deck paint that got rolled on the concrete supports but live by Title IX, die by Title IX.
Never mind: BEAST, YOU'RE SKYING high again.
– C. Penbroke Handy, fond of things that are best left alone
credit Frankie14850
