Kaeleigh Banda
On Jan. 30, Ithaca College Dining Services announced South Hill Sweets will be temporarily closed until further notice due to unexpected maintenance repairs. The shop remains gated with a sign specifying its closure.
After a grand opening Sept. 10, Ithaca College’s newest retail dining location, South Hill Sweets, temporarily closed Jan. 30 due to maintenance repairs. The shop, in Egbert Hall within the Campus Center, is set to reopen for Fall 2025.
South Hill Sweets sells some baked goods that cannot be purchased at any other retail dining location, as well as pastries, coffee and tea. The shop gained popularity in Fall 2024 upon its soft opening Sept. 5, when free samples were offered to students who attended during their operating hours. The shop’s hours of operation are displayed on the dining services page of the college’s website. Until its closure, the shop was open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Jeffrey Golden, associate vice president of Auxiliary Services, said the shop was added to the dining program as an outlet for the bakery, providing baked goods for the dining halls and retail dining locations on campus.
“The inclusion of another retail location wasn’t a bad thing,” Golden said. “It was intended to be baked goods, which were not necessarily meant to be part of your three square meals. The intent is that it was a fun thing, and it was a way for us to showcase what we think is a cool part of the [dining] program, which is the bakery.”
After Ithaca College Dining Services announced South Hill Sweets’ temporary closure, the shop was gated with a sign specifying its closure.
“If you look at the gate, it’s broken, and we’re in the process of repairing that,” Golden said. “But on the ensuing day [after the gate broke], the principal oven in the bakery broke, which is a far more extensive undertaking to fix. The fundamental internals of the oven are what’s broken, and so parts are in order.”
Reginald Briggs, senior director of Dining Services, said the cost of the oven repair is estimated at $37,000 because of its size. He said it is not a type of oven that the bakery has, as it has 36 shelves that hold five to six trays each.
Briggs said the cost of repairs would not directly affect the dining budget because the repair costs are coming out of the capital budget as opposed to the day-to-day operating budget.
“This, unfortunately, is a capital expenditure,” Briggs said. “It’s a bummer because there’s so many other things that we would like to invest our auxiliary services capital into, but now we won’t be able to because we’re obligated to fix the oven first before … we get to have the things we want to improve the program.”
Parts for the oven repair have been ordered and they are expected to arrive and be repaired before the end of the semester, however, there is a chance the shop will not reopen until the fall. With South Hill Sweets’ oven in need of maintenance, Golden said it has been challenging to produce baked goods for the remainder of the retail dining locations and dining halls on campus.
“Now we’re kind of scrambling, using ovens, mostly in Terrace Dining Hall, to keep up with the normal, everyday output that’s required for the bakery,” Golden said.
Several students have noticed the prolonged closure of South Hill Sweets. First-year student Felix Aguayo said he visited the shop weekly in the fall semester as it was a convenient stop on his walk back to his dorm from class.
“I went like once or twice a week, probably,” Aguayo said. “I was in a class with other people who would go to South Hill Sweets after the class. I would usually get a cookie or something. It was nice.”
First-year student Natalie Bencivenga said she walks by South Hill Sweets often and notices its closure as well, despite never purchasing a baked good from the shop.
“I walk by pretty often and I noticed that it’s been closed recently,” Bencivenga said. “Sometimes I feel like I am in need of a little sweet treat. But it’s been closed for so long, and I vaguely remember it being open for different hours than Ithaca Bakery or Scribe might be open. So, if I’m in need of a coffee, sometimes South Hill Sweets might be the only place to get it.”
Both students said they were under the assumption that the shop was not going to reopen as the maintenance repairs are taking longer than expected.
“It’s been closed for so long, you would think that it would have been fixed by now already. So, I kind of assumed it was out of commission for the rest of the year, and that the sign on the wall was just an excuse,” Bencivenga said.
Part of the delay is due to the long delivery time of one of the oven’s fundamental pieces. With the oven and gate being fixed in the coming weeks, South Hill Sweets should be back up and running by the beginning of the Fall 2025 semester.
“We’re still literally waiting on parts,” Briggs said. “By the time those get fixed and we’re back, we would probably have three weeks of the semester left. It doesn’t make sense for us to repurpose the staff and try to revamp all of the logistics of getting the products baked here, carted up, traded up, transported down to [South Hill Sweets] just to sell it. It’s not going away. It will be back in the fall [in] one version or another.”