There wasthis news item re some teens that had gotten attacked formaking a mocking video of this very poor town.
Here is some background commentary.
Honestly I was kind of suprised in that New York State is one of the per capita wealthiest states in he US, I had never imagined poverty like this in New York.
NYS’s wealth is very concentrated in NYC, Long Island, and the 'burbs. Upstate’s economy has been kept going by state services for years, ever since first agriculture and then heavy industry got out-competed and died out. The state’s single biggest employer, IIRC, is the prison system.
I’m from that part of New York State originally (went to high school in Poughkeepsie, grew up near Mahopac).
I don’t understand the sudden fascination this particular community has for people from more urban areas. There are similar pockets of rural poverty all over upstate NY, as well as northern New England. This area has for some reason suddenly experienced YouTube fame, in a bad way.
Those kids are idiots, but I was shocked a number of years ago when I saw some of the backwards rednecks in PA and upstate NY a number of years ago because yankees are always making fun of Arkansas, West Virginia and the like for that sort of thing. They have the same damn crap in their own back yards!
Mon Dieu! What would they think of Oakland?
Come to think of it, they wouldn’t have time to form an opinion.
Those boys are so obviously from NYC. Only three city boys would think Dutchess County is rural.
I’m puzzled by the fact that the one guy they caught got charged with criminal mischief. IANAL, but shouldn’t that would have been attempted murder, or at least assault?
If you want a tour, I’ll show you some of the places just outside the where the remaining Onondagas live in NYS. For a job I’d had in the 90s I did boiler water treatment for a lot of public buildings, including many of the schools across the northern part of the state. I’ve seen school buildings that were falling into their basements, because maintenance was being done by a shoe string budget for ages. I’d driven into some school parking lots where my six year old Ford Escort was the newest, and best looking car in the lot.
And these districts were those with enough money (and determination) to pay for boiler chemical treatments. There were school districts that are even poorer. Forex: I never did get into the Onondaga areas, just their neighbors. (Though, AIUI money has started coming into the area, there, from proceeds from Turning Stone. Not without some bad blood, and wars of words concerning how the money would be spent. ISTR even some gunfights that the outside world heard about, too, all going back to the same issues.)
Then there are places like Watertown, or Utica, - which used to be a fairly healthy manufacturing town. They may not be a ghost town any longer, it’s been almost 12 years since I’ve been to either. I have a college friend from NYC/LI area. And when he came up to Rochester he was going on about all the urban blight he was seeing. And I was getting pissed, because he couldn’t believe that I could show him much worse in many other upstate cities.
In Rochester? I’ve been in a number of upstate New York cities - Amsterdam, Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Elmira, Jamestown, Niagara Falls, Rome, Schenectady, Syracuse, Troy, Utica, Watertown - and Rochester always struck me as being the one that beat the curse that hit all the rest. It’s the only one that still has a working economy and doesn’t have neighbourhoods of empty storefronts.
But your friend’s from NYC. He apparently suffers from the provincialism of that city. Manhattan is perfection and every other spot on Earth is only good to the degree that it resembles Manhattan.
I’ve known about his provincialism for a while. 
When we met, my family was still living in MA, and I chose to pay the subscription rates to have my local paper mailed to me at school. In a large part, because I wanted to be able to keep up on local news.
And he honestly couldn’t understand why I would do that, and not prefer to get the NY Times mailed to me, instead - since it’s such a better paper.
Reminding him that I wanted local news would only temporarily convince him of the merits of getting the paper I had subscribed to. I usually heard about the superiority of the NYT twice a month.
It depends when you were there and what your previous experience was. When I got to Rochester in nthe late 1970s it was clear to me that it still bore the scars of the riots of the 1960s. Downtown itself didn’t have all those dead storefronts, but it was surrounded by burnt-out core areas and places people didn’t want to go to at night. And downtown closed by 6 and rolled up its sidewalks (except for one nioght a week) I lived in Binghamton after that, and it felt much more vibrant and alive, and un-cursed (although much smaller).
But both towns were real letdowns after New York and Boston, and I was glad when I moved on to Salt Lake City.
I grew up in the Finger Lakes area of NYS, and have many relatives in the Southern Tier and north central PA. There are some seriously poor people there, many of my relatives included. They are mostly former farmers whose farms failed in part due to being unable to compete with large scale factory farms out in the midwest. Then they turned to factory jobs, and made an OK living up until the mid-80s when the rest of the manufacturing industry left. Now they work several jobs in order to scrape by. One of my uncles works about 70 hours a week at slightly-above-minimum-wage jobs and he’s in his 60s.
The one thing many of my relatives have going for them is that the own their land and houses outright, because the land has been in the family for 200 years. If wealthier people move in and property taxes go up, they’ll be screwed. Right now rural Tioga county, where a lot of them live, is so poverty stricken they’re getting a good break on property taxes. Who knows if that will last. I am hopeful it will last until my mom’s generation dies out. The cousins are doing much better.
Cal, Binghamton, and Broome County, has been hit particularly hard by the downsizing of IBM since the 70s and 80s. Without knowing the dates that Little Nemo had been through Binghamton, if the timing were right, I find it easy to accept that you both are accurately reporting the situation in the city, as it was when you went through. I know that while Broome County had been a customer I was servicing for the boiler water chemical company, there were a lot of signs of former prosperity that weren’t matched by current conditions.
Does anyone else think this calls for a new Billy Joel song?
“Well, we’re waiting here in Oniontown
For the New York State that we never found.
Gonna get our torches and pitchforks.
Give a smackdown to those filming teen dorks.
And we’re waiting here in Oniontown.”
Sorry, the accent’s wrong. The closest to the city those guys live is Mamaroneck. From the orig link:
As I understand it, those were a different group of teenagers. They had seen the YouTube video of the original trio and decided to visit Oniontown themselves. The Oniontowners, who had now seen themselves being mocked online by the first group, were now on the lookout for out-of-town visitors and assaulted the Mahopac teens.
Last time I was there (~2 yrs ago,) most of downtown-ish Syrcause doesn’t have a lot of empty store fronts per se, but only the bottom floor of most buildings are being used – the top 4-8 stories are totally empty. I think that subway or light rail would really revitalize downtown Syracuse moreso than most places because you have the office capabilities but not enough parking to make office space worthwhile in this everyone-has-a-car environment, and yet the place is still generally safe enough that retail business are – well not thriving, but still there.
Had thought you meant Silver Creek for a second there. Last time I drove past (~1 yr ago,) it literally did not seem to have changed from 25 years ago, except the wear and tear on ~70 year old houses. So they’re prosperous enough to have people living in most of the houses and make necessary repairs but not enough to make cosmetic changes or tear and build new stuff.
When I was a kid growing up in Scarsdale in the 70’s, the thing to do was to drive to Hunt’s Point in the Bronx and look at all the prostitutes. Times change, I guess.
I grew up just outside Schenectady in the 70s and early 80s.
Once you get outside the cities you most certainly do get very rural, and in some cases quite poor. I grew up not far from a pig farm, but nominally suburban.
It’s pretty country in the foothills of the Adirondacks, but not particularly productive farm-wise.
The industry has long since fled; much of it in my area due to General Electric. Unfortunately not much has moved in to replace it, so it seems like many areas are on a slow downward spiral with little hope.
You’ll find some very real Adirondack rural culture upstate. Also some incredibly beautiful terrain, but I’m admittedly prejudiced.