Upstate Ethos

Dean has agreed to let me live out my frustrated dream of being a travel writer. Alas, he has no salary to send me to resorts, no plans to cover a road trip through Romania, no way to finance a ticket on the QE2. Dean can’t even send me to Albany. So, while Travelogue will follow my footsteps through the unique, the historical, the picturesque and the droll, this will all be done within a hundred-mile radius of Rochester, NY.

I moved to Rochester, NY from North Carolina three years ago and haven’t found the time yet to relocate. It’s not a bad place. The economy’s lousy, but now that everyone else is in the same boat it’s not so much of a big deal. The weather’s bad, but we can think about North Dakota and feel a little better about ourselves. We’ve got the depressing grime of any rust belt city, but we also have two notable research universities, one of the nation’s top music schools, scores of lovely turn-of-the-century homes that sell for less than you’d pay for parking in Manhattan, and more bars and restaurants than a city of 1,000,000 should reasonably be expected to economically sustain.

Despite its inferiority complex, or perhaps because of it, Rochester seems to work doubly hard at trying to convince people that it’s really, really not as bad as they think it is. We have a $14 million private enterprise that exists solely to market the region. (By an interesting coincidence, if you take that figure and divide it by 1000, you get the number of jobs the Rochester area has lost in the past twelve months.) We also have “Cold Rush,” a campaign to heighten awareness of Rochester’s many winter events. Cold Rush merits an article in and of itself, but suffice it to say that one of top events in January involved constructing a snow-hill in a downtown Rochester street for skiing and snowboarding. The catch is, we haven’t had any snow. There are people in North Carolina who have seen more snow this year than we have. So we had to borrow it from Buffalo. And then it rained. We also have scores of committees and public officials who meet semi-regularly to announce that things aren’t as bad as we think they are. One such event was even recorded by NPR’s Talk of the Nation, where a handful of Rochester’s business leaders tried to convince a nationwide audience that our good city is being transformed into a center of culture, sports, and good restaurants.

Even if that argument is hard to swallow now, in the nineteenth century Rochester used to be a hell of a town. Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglas were both long-time residents. We are with half an hour of the courthouse that Susan B. was tried in for voting. (Which proudly bears a plaque reading “where justice was denied”.) I can walk from my apartment to George Eastman’s home (founder of Kodak), which now serves as a museum featuring photography exhibits and photography-related antiques, or to a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, or to a turn-of-the-century church featuring Tiffany stained glass windows. If I ever develop the inclination, I can even take my brand new, never-used mountain bike on a ride along the Erie Canal. Really, I swear, at one point Rochester really rocked, but, admittedly, when you have to go to the town cemetery to point out the local luminaries, the city has seen better days.

We still have much more than most similarly-sized cities. But despite our music scene, despite our ridiculously affordable cost-of-living, despite some of the most amazing Thai or Vientamese food you’ll find anywhere, despite our proximity to natural wonders like Niagara Falls and the quieter beauties of the Finger Lakes, you will likely never, ever hear any muse, “I think I’ll move to Rochester New York.”

Ah, how to explain Upstate’s ranking as someplace not interesting or notable enough to be ranked. Perhaps it’s best to start by qualifying part of Upstate’s inferiority complex is due to not being New York City. Which isn’t fair, really, because, outside of New York City, there isn’t anywhere else that is. If this were Indiana, or South Carolina, or almost any other state, the cities and towns in Upstate New York wouldn’t seem so depressingly bland and boring. But we do live in the shadow of the City. Worse, it seems as if the rest of the country feels as if we are New York City’s cast-offs. While many of us do have relatives in the City, to put it in perspective, it takes me just about as long to get to my sister’s apartment in Brooklyn as it does to get to my friend’s apartment just east of Capitol Hill. And just because we don’t live in the city doesn’t mean that we’re a bunch of slack-jawed locals. At least not any more so than the rest of the nation.

This, too, maybe wouldn’t be so much of an issue if it weren’t for the one other blight of upstate, the weather. Winters are long and can be brutal. My first year here we had the snowiest March in over eighty years by the fifth of the month. The National Guard literally had to dig us out. It snows in April. Although it usually doesn’t, you have to be prepared to not have a mental collapse if it’s still snowing in May. One the other hand, really cold weather—provided that you can get out of it—makes you feel stronger, a little tougher, even more resourceful. Spring is gray and never as warm as you think it ought to be, but you can’t beat the experience of seeing the your first crocus of the season, or the smell when the ground begins to thaw. We have gorgeous autumns, where just when you think you’ve seen the last of the sun, you’ll get one last weekend of blue skies and temperatures in the 70s. Summers are amazing. Vegetation makes the most of the short growing season. In a few short weeks in June, you’re suddenly living in a different world. Plus, summer is festival season. Once the weather warms, we have festivals for just about everything. Entire communities dedicate weekends to the celebration of garlic, apples, or sauerkraut. I promise to make an extra special effort to bring full reports on those.

So, to realize my dream of becoming a travel writer and to defend the many delights of this overlooked region of our great, great country and this great, great state, each month I will visit a new Upstate location. I will see towns, I will go to festivals, I’ll explore our parks, I’ll stop in seedy roadside bars. I’ll beg, plead and threaten various friends to come with me. Hopefully individuals who will lend interesting perspectives on our various sites, or at the very least raise their eyebrows in a knowing and comforting way when we encounter something odd. It’s time for me to do my part. And maybe, after my loyal contributions to Skewed in defense of New York’s unsung glories, if Dean wins the lottery, he’ll send me to report on Cancun. Hopefully In February. For maybe about two weeks. With per diem for beach-side margaritas.

-K. Mitzel