- June 15, 2021
- Posted by: Stratford Team
- Category: Business
ITHACA, N.Y.—If you ask folks to come up with a handful of restaurants and eateries that are iconic to Ithaca, you’ll find a fairly limited subset of places like Moosewood, Collegetown Bagels, State Street Diner, Shortstop Deli and Purity Ice Cream. These places are all local institutions that help to define Ithaca’s character.
It’s a distinction that Bruce Lane and his wife Heather have gratefully appreciated over the past 23 years. Purity, of course, is considerably older than that—it’s been around since 1936, and opened at its current location in 1953. When the Lanes purchased it in 1998, the business had fallen on hard times, according to Bruce.
“This is our 24th summer, when we took it over in the spring of 1998 from the granddaughter of the founder, and it was just about of business at that point. Margo Klose had been trying to run it from Portland, Oregon, but without a steady hand on the helm…at that time, there was a…
