Freeville resident’s West End Diorama finds a new home

Village of Freeville resident David Fogel started creating his West End Diorama in 1978.

Fogel, an Ithaca native, has installed the diorama in various locations for the past 40-plus years. However, the diorama has never had a long-term home. 

This year, the West End Diorama is stationed at the Cherry Gallery at 130 Cherry St. in Ithaca. The diorama will be at the location for the long haul.

The Cherry Gallery is located on the ground floor of the Ithaca Arthaus, an apartment community and cultural center in Ithaca’s West End.

“I’m delighted that the West End diorama will remain on permanent display in the West End,” Fogel said.

According to a description, the West End Diorama is a “scale-model recreation of Ithaca’s West End neighborhood circa 1953, before this vibrant working-class neighborhood was largely razed to create the much-needed flood control channel.”

“The diorama is a deeply detailed, precise and endlessly fascinating document of the life of a neighborhood that was sacrificed to the civic good,” according to a release by The Cherry Arts, Inc.

The 8-foot-x-8-foot diorama was previously on display at the DeWitt Historical Society (now The History Center in Tompkins County) in 1986 and 1995, the Tompkins County Public Library in 1998 and Alternatives Federal Credit Union from 2003 to 2020.

Fogel’s diorama was at the Ithaca Station branch of Chemung Canal Trust Company before that branch closed in November of last year.

Now, the gallery includes the diorama as its newest exhibit.

“The model takes up a lot of floor space, and there aren’t a lot of options out there for displaying it on a long-term basis,” Fogel said. “Tompkins County Public Library expressed interest last fall, but ultimately decided that they couldn’t commit to a long-term exhibit. And as much as The History Center would like to have the diorama in their collection, they simply can’t accommodate it in their current location on the Commons.”

Fogel continued, “It came as a huge relief when Cherry Arts director Sam Buggeln reached out to me just a few weeks before my March 1 deadline to move the model out of the old train station. I had looked at the Cherry Gallery as a possible display space in 2023, before Chemung Canal Trust Company agreed to take possession of the diorama, but had concluded that there wasn’t enough room there. As it turned out, there was an area at the rear of the gallery that hadn’t previously been used as an exhibit space. The diorama looks great back there, and there’s plenty of room to view it from all four sides.”

Fogel, also a village of Freeville trustee, noted that the diorama shows Ithaca’s West End neighborhood “as it looked in the 1950s.”

The diorama is an outlook about a decade before the area’s residential and community-oriented character, Fogel added, was “virtually obliterated” by the construction of the Cayuga Inlet flood-control channel.

“I grew up in Ithaca and was in high school in the 1960s when the flood-control channel was being built,” Fogel said. “Though I never lived in the West End, I remember the old neighborhood with great fondness, so pure nostalgia played a role in my decision to build a model of it.”

Fogel mentioned that he was motivated by the challenge of reconstructing a “vanished neighborhood” that was not documented well enough.

“There were photographs of landmarks like the West Side House and the Beebe Chapel, but to see what the dozens of razed houses looked like, I had to turn to the former residents of the neighborhood, many of whom lent me photos of their homes,” Fogel said. “Getting to know those people and learning about the circumstances surrounding their forced eviction from their homes gave me added incentive to persevere with the project, which took almost eight years to complete. When the model was unveiled in 1986, many of the former residents were there, and the tears flowed freely.”

The Cherry Arts will hold a free-of-charge reception on the installation of the diorama on Thursday, March 20, from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

Fogel will be at the gallery for 10 consecutive Saturdays between March 22 and May 24. Fogel will showcase the exhibit from 2 to 4 p.m. on each of those Saturdays.

“After the diorama was installed at the bank last year, I was on hand for 10 consecutive Fridays to give guided tours of the old West End,” Fogel said. “I look forward to doing the same thing at the Cherry Gallery.”

Dryden Dispatch appears every week in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@vizellamedia.com.

In brief:

Silent book club at the library on March 24

Southworth Library in Dryden will have its silent book club gathering at 6:30 p.m. March 24.

“We’ll spend some time chatting and getting snacks, and give a preview of the give away book and then you will be free to grab a cozy seat and read in a room with other readers, no conversation required,” according to a description on the library’s website.

The club allows people to choose a free book from the library’s pile to read and take home. Participants can also bring a book to the gathering.

The club is for ages 16 and older. To register, go to southworthlibrary.org.