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.
