Upstate New York - Culture

Culture

Upstate New York is culturally and economically distinct from the New York City area, though the Hudson Valley counties of Putnam, Orange, Dutchess, and Ulster have increasingly become a part of the New York City metro area. To the north and west of those counties, upstate New York is characterized both by agricultural and forested rural communities and, along major transportation corridors, by small and medium-sized cities and their surrounding suburbs.

Influenced by and with affinities to other adjacent regions, the several regions of upstate New York have identities and cultures distinct from one another as well as from the New York City area. Western New York has cultural and economic ties to the other Great Lakes states as well as Southern Ontario. The Capital District, the Hudson Valley, the Mohawk Valley and the Plattsburgh area have ties to New England. The North Country, the extreme northern portion of the state, also has strong cultural, economic, linguistic and familial ties to Quebec and Eastern Ontario. Thus, Plattsburgh has close ties to its neighbors in the Montreal area as well as Vermont.

Linguistically, upstate New York from Western New York east to Utica is part of the Inland North region of American English dialectology, a region which includes Midwestern cities as far west as Chicago and Milwaukee. The Hudson and lower Mohawk Valley has more in common dialectologically with western New England and New York City. The boundary between the use of the words pop and soda to refer to soft drinks, however, falls farther west than the edge of the Inland North, running just to the east of the city of Rochester: Buffalo and Rochester use pop, like the rest of the Inland North to the west, whereas Syracuse uses soda, like New England and New York City. In Ithaca and Elmira, the border is less clear, with some people having grown up with pop and some with soda, however current trends see Ithaca, at least, turning to mostly "soda".

Foodways indigenous to regions of Upstate New York include Plattsburgh's "Michigan" hot dog, a variety of Coney Island hot dog; the white hot dog of central and western New York that is known variously as the "White Hot" or "Coney" (pronounced alternately as either "coney" or "cooney"); the "Spiedie" of the Binghamton area, Central New York's salt potatoes, Utica's Tomato Pie, Chicken riggies, Greens and Halfmoon Cookies Rochester's Garbage plate, Buffalo's kummelweck and perhaps most famously, Buffalo wings. Calvin Trillin chronicled the origin of Buffalo wings in the August 25, 1980 issue of The New Yorker. Although the potato chip was invented in Saratoga Springs, it has achieved such universal popularity that it is no longer identified with the region. Winemaking is a growing industry in the Finger Lakes as well as in Chautauqua County, where Welch's operates one of the oldest extant grape juice factories in the United States. In the center of the Finger Lakes, region Ithaca is known for the Bo Burger, a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top.

Two of the most important rock festivals of the 20th century were held in Upstate New York. In 1969 the Woodstock Festival was held in Bethel, New York, while in 1973 another multiday festival was held at the Watkins Glen International Raceway.

Some literary, documentary and cinematic depictions of upstate present a sense of small town, simple lifetyles, such as It's a Wonderful Life, set in a small upstate town in the 1940s. A Home Box Office miniseries is planned that will dramatize a New York magazine article on natural gas drillers coming to the region. Richard Russo, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is writing a script for the project.