Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

House on Fire
again and carted off to a vacant shop.
Moves to other empty shops followed until an Ithacan named
Bob Leathers, an architect world-renowned for designing innovative
community-built playgrounds, drew up and donated the plans
for a permanent Sciencenter. Gifts from local firms provided
enough money to purchase an abandoned lot from the city and
then hire an executive director, Charles Trautmann, a Cornell
civil engineer. He and Leathers travelled to the annual meeting of
the National Association of Homebuilders in Atlanta. Trautmann
relates how they told the story 'of a community eager to take
responsibility for the education of its youth and secured donations
of many key items such as windows, skylights and lumber'.
Before they could start building, some of the old pumphouse on
the site had to be torn down. Members of a Cornell fraternity
were enlisted. With hardhats and sledge-hammers, they demolished
the place joyfully. 'This is the kind of thing,' they said, 'we
usually get into trouble for doing.' In two days, they carted away
200 tons of rubble.
What followed were images straight out of an America that
many of us fear has vanished. In the tradition of pioneer barnraising,
members of the community - bricklayers, doctors, carpenters,
university professors, plumbers, farmers, the very young and
the very old - all rolled up their sleeves to build the Sciencenter.
'The continuous seven-days-a-week schedule was maintained,'
says Trautmann, 'so that anyone would be able to help anytime.
Everyone was given a job. Experienced volunteers built stairs,
laid carpet and tile, and trimmed windows. Others painted, nailed
and carried supplies.' Some 2,200 townspeople donated more than
40,000 hours. Roughly ten per cent of the construction work was
performed by people convicted of minor offences; they preferred
to do something for the community than to sit idle in jail. Ten
months later, Ithaca had the only community-built science
museum in the world.
Among the seventy-five interactive exhibits emphasizing both
the processes and principles of science are: the Magicam, a
microscope that visitors can use to view on a colour monitor and
then photograph any object at 40 times magnification; the world's
only public connection to the satellite-based National Lightning
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