However much the tourist authorities
try to encourage visitors, the large
and rambling state of
NEW YORK
stands inevitably in the shadow of
America's most celebrated city. The
words "New York" bring to
mind soaring skyscrapers and
congested streets, not the 50,000
square miles of rolling dairy
farmland, colonial villages,
workaday towns, lakes, waterfalls
and towering mountains that spread
north and west from New York City
and constitute
upstate New York
. Just an hour's drive north of
Manhattan, the valley of the
Hudson
River , with the moody
Catskill
Mountains rising stealthily from
the west bank, offers a respite from
the intensity of the city. Much
wilder and more rugged are the peaks
of the vast
Adirondack Mountains
further north - far beyond the scope
of a casual excursion, but holding
some of eastern America's most
enticing scenery. To the west, the
slender
Finger Lake s and
endless miles of dairy farms and
vineyards occupy the central portion
of the state. Few of the cities hold
much of interest, but the smaller
towns, like Ivy League
Ithaca
, can be quite charming for a day or
two, while the venerable spa town of
Saratoga Springs attracts
thousands of punters during the
August horse racing season.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, as nation-molding
political and military battles were
taking place, semi-feudal Dutch
landowning dynasties such as the
Van Rensselaers held sway upstate.
Their control over tens of thousands
of tenant farmers was barely
affected by the transfer of colonial
power from Holland to Britain, or
even by American independence. Only
with the completion of the Erie
Canal in 1825, linking New York
City with the Great Lakes, did the
interior start to open up; improved
opportunities for trade enabled
canal-side cities like Rochester,
Syracuse and especially Buffalo
to undergo massive expansion. On the
other hand, this industrial and
agricultural growth in the
hinterland served, inevitably, to
increase the financial standing of
the Wall Street capitalists. The
story of the past century and a half
has been one of New York City's
political and economic domination of
New York State, though Governor
George Pataki's popularity has
buoyed upstate politicians, if not
fully redressed the imbalance.
