George Frantz has been FOUND!

Carol,

Thanks for the post card reminder about Cornell Reunion. I plan to make it to Reunion, if I am in Ithaca.

Since graduation in 1980 I have migrated into land use and environmental planning after going on to get a Masters of Regional Planning from Cornell. I left Ithaca for a few years to work in Pennsylvania before returning in 1988 to work for the Town of Ithaca. After a 12-year stint I left government work and went into private planning practice here in Ithaca. I’ve worked for Tetra Tech Architects and Engineers here in Ithaca, taking care of their environmental impact review and State Historic Preservation Office compliance, as well as a principal of my own firm, George R. Frantz & Associates.

One of my areas of expertise is agricultural land protection strategies and economic development. I do consulting work for American Farmland Trust. Currently I am also working for a half-dozen towns across New York to draft agriculture and farmland protection plans, and new zoning regulations to better protect agriculture and enhance economic opportunities for farmers. In September I will be speaking on the topic at the ASLA Annual Meeting & Expo in Washington D.C.

It appears that I am coming full circle: at Tetra Tech I was officially nested in the Site/Civil section and about half of my time was spent as a landscape designer. As a result I have begun the process of becoming a registered landscape architect in New York, and have passed the first three of five exams. I also have on the boards (OK ,the hard drive) small scale cluster subdivision designs for two clients here in Ithaca and a subdivision/site plan for an urban infill site.

In addition to my private planning practice I am a visiting lecturer in the Department of City & Regional Planning, where I teach one course per semester. Because I am a practicing planner I teach one of the planning field workshops – courses that place the class in a real world community, with a real world client. Currently I am teaching a class that is completing the inventory component for a new master plan for the village of Cayuga Heights next door to Cornell, but I have taken classes as far as the Lower 9^th Ward of New Orleans (Spring ’06, Spring ’08) to help complete recovery plans for ACORN and other neighborhood groups.

I’ve made a total of 8 trips to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast since Katrina, four with students from the field workshop courses and four with student volunteer work teams that have gone in to do actual clean-up and reconstruction. My Spring’ 08 undergraduate field workshop trip was featured in the May ’08 Cornell Alumni Magazine. (Author Dan Baum shadowed us during our Feb. ’06 trip to the Lower 9^th and mentioned us in his story “The Lost Year," that appeared in August in The New Yorker.)

I’m not totally sure at this point if I will be in Ithaca for Reunion, as I may be representing Cornell in Shanghai during the first half of June. There I will be teaching in a joint Cornell University/Tongji University urban design workshop for three weeks. The project is pending the receipt of funding, but I will know within the next two weeks. Although I will have to bring myself up to speed very quickly for the Shanghai workshop, I will be able to tap about 10 years of research on urban form in cities in Vietnam as well as research on Clarence Stein, Ebenezer Howard and the Garden Cities movement.

Overall I’ve had quite the adventure since graduation in 1980. My teaching appointmentis only a quarter-time position so I am not on campus on a daily basis, but I do have occasional contact with Landscape Architecture people.

Since the early 1990s I’ve also collaborated with Prof. Sherene Baugher on a project utilizing pre-emptive archaeological surveys as a land use planning tool. Since wrapping up a project in the Inlet Valley south of Ithaca we’ve co-authored several papers and collaborated on a design studio project focuses on two new public parks designed to highlight Ithaca’s Native American history that were established in the wake of our archaeological project.

I see Peter Trowbridge on occasion as we cross paths in our respective consulting work

In March we also alerted the Town planning board to the potential for archaeological resources on a site proposed for a new Ithaca Beer Co. brewery. They are fortunately in the very early stages of design, and Sherene and I are now working with Ithaca Beer to ensure any cultural resources are protected. (and the brewery gets built!)

I did run into (Prof.) Bill Green in October 2006 at the ASLA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. He is on the faculty at Rhode Island School of Design. I was there to speak on the abovementioned Inlet Valley archaeological survey.

I hope all is well with you, and barring a trip to Shanghai hope to see you in June.

Best regards.

George Frantz