As the days get longer and summer in Tompkins County draws near, there's no better way to kick off the season than with the Ithaca Festival parade. Volvos in tutus dancing across Cayuga Street? Yes, please!

But the beloved tradition we know today has older — and delightfully weirder — roots than you might expect.

Forty-nine years ago, in 1977, the first festival was held not in June but in September. Called Celebration Ithaca, it was 14 days of free events on and around the Ithaca Commons: music, dancing, sculptures, children's murals, and more. The spark came from Trumansburg artist Loretta Louviere, who invited the Celebration Group — four nationally known artists from New York City who had created similar events in other communities — to share their ideas with Ithaca. Their goal was to plant the seed for what would become an annual event grown and tended by the local community itself.

Public participation was central from the start. Local artists, dancers, and everyday community members were invited to build, paint, and perform together. Equally important was the festival's role in revitalizing Ithaca's downtown. The Ithaca Commons had opened just two years earlier, in September 1975, as "the heart and center of our urban area" — a hopeful answer to the fires, Urban Renewal, and shopping-center sprawl that had hollowed out the city's economic core since the 1960s. Celebration Ithaca brought people back downtown with the best possible reason: fun.

The final day of Celebration Ithaca began with a children's parade and ended with a multi-media finale described as a "visual and auditory spectacle." With music playing, slides were projected across the wall of the former Rothschild's building, imagining what Ithaca might look like in the year 2000. Local athletes and dancers transformed building facades, store windows, and rooftops into a stage. One attendee remembered: "The brick surface of Home Dairy was thrust out at the audience by people walking on it (space-suited mountain climbers are aerial dancers!)" The whole thing was capped by a helium-propelled sculpture rising into the night sky under a spotlight.

By 1978, the Ithaca Festival we know today began to take shape. Organized by members of the local arts community eager to bring something bigger and bolder than the usual summer fare, it became a three-day event spanning Friday through Sunday in June. The first two days took place on the Ithaca Commons, and the third was a blissful finale of dancing, music, food, and relaxation in Stewart Park. No Volvo Ballet yet — but there was a car-painting contest sponsored by the Ithaca Automobile Dealers Association, which provided both the cars and the washable paint. Progress!

This month we’re collecting images of Ithaca Festival, old and new, to share on social media and in our exhibit hall during our Vintage T-shirt Sale. We want all the wonderful, wacky, and weird you’ve captured over nearly five decades. Please be sure to submit images you’ve taken yourself, or have copyright authority for.

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