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A large crowd gathers on Clayton Avenue in Cortland during "Cortaca" celebrations Saturday afternoon. Cortland police said dozens were arrested as crowds swelled into the hundreds.

(Photo by Rachel Moriarty)

CORTLAND, NY -- Last Saturday not long after sunrise, downtown bars in Cortland threw open their doors. Some had been promoting weekend drink specials for days.

The beer started flowing four hours before the annual Cortaca Jug football game between SUNY Cortland and Ithaca College, which was being played 22 miles away in Ithaca.

Just around the corner from the Dark Horse Tavern, one of those early-opening bars, a crowd of nearly 6,000 eventually filled Clayton Avenue for a bacchanal that saw cars tipped on their side, students leaping from roofs and furniture thrown into the street. One student sped down a long hill street in a shopping cart. Another rode spread-eagle on the hood of a car.

Photos and videos of these activities and others from the mass drunken gathering were Tweeted and posted and viewed around the world.

Cortland, a city of 19,000, and its biggest employer, SUNY College at Cortland, were making national news for what some were calling a drunken riot. Police arrested 80 people, 19 of them SUNY Cortland students. Of the eight arrests involving misdemeanors or felonies, two were Cortland students, said Frederic Pierce, a SUNY Cortland spokesman.

In the days following, city and college officials and Cortland residents have begun to explore what went wrong and how another Cortaca fiasco might be avoided. The city and college have formed a commission to study it. Tuesday night at a Cortland city council meeting SUNY Cortland President Erik J. Bitterbaum and Student Government Association President Leigh Marie Weber apologized to city officials.

Earlier Tuesday a Cortland High School student was questioning the behavior of his college neighbors.

"With all these college kids it's hard to tell who's old enough to drink and who's a kid," said Marcus Minix, 17. "If I had the choice for Cortaca to be banned, I'd like for it to be."

Minix, who lives a block from Clayton Avenue, where most of the estimated 6,000 people gathered, said in the midst of the Cortaca celebration a window in his house was broken and his family couldn't drive off their street because police had blocked it.

Cortaca - the 54-year football rivalry between Cortland and Ithaca, has been taken over by Cortaca - the party, said Brian Tobin, Cortland's mayor. Police, college and city officials had planned weeks ahead of time for the event, which they figured would kick in after the game ended, around 3 p.m., Tobin said. Instead, the street party seemed to reach its peak hours earlier.

"The assumption that people would not even pay attention to the game was something we didn't really consider," said Tobin. "Cortaca is the name that refers to the tradition of the rivalry. That name was hijacked and used as an excuse to throw a raging kegger."

Even as he decried the crowd's behavior, he downplayed the event's impact. There was little visible damage in the city, he said.

"By 10 o'clock Sunday morning, if you had not been in town, you would not have known that anything occurred, "said Tobin.

The city paid police about $15,000 in overtime this past weekend, Tobin said, as off-duty officers were called in to try to control the unexpectedly large crowd.



Asked if the bars played a role in fueling the party early, Tobin said no.

"To be honest, I don't think the bars are the problem," he said.

He pointed the finger at landlords on Clayton Avenue who have converted nearly all the two- and three-story Victorian houses into student apartments.

"If it's a mixed neighborhood and you have an issue, people are going to call the police," he said. "But the college kids aren't going to call the police on the college kids next door."

In a long posting on Facebook, Tim Davis, a Cortland resident, criticized the college, the city and the bars for complicity in setting up students to party irresponsibly in the streets. Davis has since taken the posting down.

The Cortaca celebration has been getting "progressively worse" each year, he said. "The town is ready, willing and able to be taken over once again... drunk, young and stupid, times 7,000 people."

"This kind of negative attention will likely draw the exact students and individuals that Cortland does not need more of," he wrote.

Among devoted partiers, Cortland's Cortaca reputation was widespread before this past weekend. That's in large part what made the drunken crowds in downtown Cortland so big.

"I ran into groups of people that didn't even know any of the students here," said Paloma Bido, a SUNY Cortland senior, from New York City. "They just heard that it gets crazy and they were staying in motels nearby just to come and party for the weekend."

Contact Dave Tobin at 470-3277, dtobin@syracuse.com or via Twitter: @dttobin