Yeah, shoot that baseball near you to me, and then we’ll share a couple-three beers.
What’ya’ MEAN I talk funny?
(The poster A.K.A. as the “Upstate Upstart”
– And yeah, dammit, Rochester is Upstate!)
Whatever that whole sentence means, I saw “baseball” and “beers”, so I’m game. Best not forget the chicken wings, BTW.
Having grown up in northern NY (we travelled south to go to Plattsburgh) our definition of downstate New York began in Albany.
Western New York is where you stop drinking soda and start drinking pop.
Port Jervis west of the Hudson; Poughkeepsie and Wassaic east of the Hudson.
Home.
Take the Thruway to exit 44, head south. Do not drive off the end of the City Pier. Look fondly on Canandaigua Lake. Roseland has been gone for over twenty years.Time flys.
Sonnenberg is coming back. It may never have the splender it had in Mary Clark Thompson’s time, but is is a beautiful slice of a bygone time.
The old Academy building is now apartments. Spent two good school years there.
I love my home town.
The Rochester paper “Democrat & Cronicle” had a Sunday supplement called “Upstate”
While all you natives argue over which particular county lies in which particular region, let me give you a working definition from the other 49 states.
New York comes in two pieces. One is New York City, Long Island and the counties where the commuters live.
Everything else is upstate.
You may now return to your petty bickering.
Another former rochester victim (henrietta, honeoye falls, gates) checking in. Rochester is definitely not upstate to me anyways. I would even go as far to say that parts of south western vermont are more upstate than rochester ever was. And as a slight hijack, Nick Tahou’s may have invented the garbage plate, but henrietta hots perfected it.
Isn’t that like saying, “The Mongols may have invented the Black Death, but the Europeans perfected it!”
After a night at the bug jar, or foxy’s in scottsville, a little black death is just whats called for.
Calling anything north of Westchester upstate is a perfectly meaningful distinction from where I sit on Manhattan. Considering that about half of us New Yorkers do live here, it is pretty difficult to argue that somehow we are wrong.
I went to something we call Black Bike Week in South Carolina. It was my first time ‘down South’, and I thought to myself, “I am going to have me some good ol’ fashioned Southern grits and fried whiting!”
Me: I would like the fried whiting, grits and a splash of Boss Sauce
Waitress: Excuse me??
Me: Oh…um…ok, Smitty’s sauce…you know…sweet chicken sauce
Waitress: blink
Me: Oh. My. God.
I ended up eating it dry, after she tried to serve me some kind of honey mustard sauce with it.
When I discovered that Boss Sauce is a local thing, I just wanted to try to understand how Philly could have the best steak sandwiches in town if they don’t have boss sauce! I don’t eat steak, but I can’t imagine they can be all that great without Boss Sauce.
I’m surprised that we haven’t gotten any nosebleeds-above-14th Street types in here claiming that Upstate is anything north of Grand Central.
I think upstate means whatever the group you’re in considers it to be.
I’m from Queens (one of the 5 boroughs of NYC) and my circle considered anything above the Bronx to be upstate. You can tell us we’re wrong, but that won’t change a thing.
We know. I really don’t care, as long as you’re not one of those people who think NYS is one huge city.
That would be my cousin. When I told her that what we mostly had in my town was cows and farmland, her eyes popped out of her head. She honestly thought that West Walworth was nothing but skyscrapers and muggers. Hey, she lived in Kansas City, and I was pretty sure that that was more than just a cornfield with a yellow brick road running through it.
I often got that. I’d say I was from Long Island, and some upstater would say, “Oh. Long Guyland.”
No. Long Island. That particular accent is nonexistent on the eastern end. If anything, we pronounce it Long Island.
Also, Long Island gets its name for a reason: it’s long. If one end were placed at Buffalo, Montauk point would be at Auburn NY (near Syracuse).
Beats being in Jersey, everyone knows we are nothing but cities, sprawl and factories belching out smoke and now the Mafia. I had a friend from Chicago visit and he was has taken the train from DC to Newark and then down to the Matawan station. At this point NJ was everything he expected. When we visited my parents in a development surrounded by horse farms and woods and then headed down to Beach and Popcorn Zoo*, he kept asking if we were really still in New Jersey.
He later visited me in Howell and could not get over the deer in the backyard and the chicken farms nearby. He ended up stationed in Lakehurst for a few years and definitely left NJ with a very different impression than the one he had first arrived with on that first train ride.
Jim
- This is in the Pine Barrens, very little around it for miles.
Yep. That’s what I’ve heard.
A few years back, I saw a show on The Travel Channel that listed the top ten beaches in the US. While four were in Florida, and one was nearby Cumberland Island, New Jersey got on the list. It had exactly as many winning beaches as Hawaii.
Hey, that’s not true. If it were I could buy better beer Eh?
My husband spent a summer painting houses in Rochester and goes on and on about Sal’s Bird Land. It’s some chicken place with a good hot sauce and chicken served over white bread. This mean anything to you Rochester folks?
I live near the Catskills, but work in New Jersey. I find that if talking to someone who’s spent most of their time in the 5 boroughs or Jersey, any more information that “I live upstate” will cause them to glaze over. For anyone who lives further north or west than than, I just say “the Catskills” to avoid the debate about whether I live Upstate or not.
Hearing about downstate legislators’ “Bear Mountain Bridge Rule” makes me think that a lot of folks think of that as the dividing line.