The City of Ithaca’s Stewart Avenue hosts many homes, but few have come close the style, history, or price tag of a property there, formerly owned by a famed science writer.
Built in 1926 for use by the longest-running honor society at Cornell University, Sphinx Head, the building at 900 Stewart Avenue was designed to remind visitors of sandy tombs and bygone Egyptian rulers.
It changed hands over the years, eventually ending up with Cornell physicist Robert Wilson in 1978.
Wilson sold the home to renowned scientist Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan in 1981.
Druyan still resides in Ithaca’s Cayuga Heights neighborhood, north of the Stewart Avenue property, but on Nov. 26, 2024 – 18 years after Sagan died due to pneumonia during his struggle with bone cancer in late 1996 – she sold their former home for $2 million – nearly 3.5 times its assessed property value of $585,000.
A study inside the Sphinx Head Tomb at 900 Stewart Avenue in Ithaca.
The buyer, according to Tompkins County Clerk documents, is an LLC in Owego sharing the address of Upstate Shredding and Weitsman Recycling, owned by Adam Weitsman.
Weitsman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Weitsman plans to renovate the building in a historic style and improve surrounding landscaping according to some reports. He has had his eye on the property for years, putting a foot in the door of many local brokers to ask about its market status, as the property lay dormant for nearly two decades.
Background on Sagan: Why might his house be worth so much?
Carl Sagan researched the possibility of extraterrestrial life – life on other planets – and has become known for his snappy quotes that astronomers find inspiration from to this day.
Sagan was the pillar of Cornell’s scientific community for much of his life and would co-found The Planetary Society, a 100,000-member nonprofit organization and the largest space-interest group in the world.
He became a well known astronomer, writer and host of the acclaimed PBS series “Cosmos.”
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Sagan’s book with the same title “Cosmos,” was a New York Times Best Seller for 70 weeks.
Following Sagan’s death in 1996, Ithaca’s Sciencenter created the Sagan Planet Walk in the astronomers honor a 1.2 kilometer model of the Solar System on a 1 to 5 billion scale, crossing through downtown Ithaca.
The Sagan family continues to leave a lasting legacy in Ithaca. Carl Sagan’s daughter Sasha Sagan returned to the city in April to celebrate a solar eclipse and discuss the intersection of science and spirituality.
Much of Sasha Sagan’s recent work focuses on the ceremonies and traditions we humans use to measure the passage of time and natural cycles including life and death.
She talks more on the cosmic phenomena behind our rituals in a video by Big Think, linked here and in her book “For Small Creatures Such as We.”
This article originally appeared on Ithaca Journal: Carl Sagan’s Stewart Avenue home Ithaca sells for $2 million