What is Upstate???

[I'minformed2]

Rochester and Buffalo have NEVER been referred to as "the southern tier". That is the southern hill country counties near the PA border.

[Jeromeville]

Upstate has many definitions, with the correctness depending on where you are located. However, I second that Rochester and Buffalo are not and have never been considered part of the Southern Tier!

Here are some different ways of defining Upstate-

1. "Upstate" as north of 14th in Manhattan :-)

2. "Upstate" as anything north of the 5 boroughs of NYC.

3. "Upstate" as everything that's not Long Island, NYC, or the counties most often labeled Downstate: Westchester, Putnam, Rockland and Dutchess. (I would not be surprised if this is the most commonly agreed upon definition.)

4. "Upstate" as that part of New York State which lies outside the NYC watershed (see map I posted earlier in this thread). This definition would view the Catskills as "not Upstate."

5. The most extreme view sees "Upstate" as being the Adirondacks and North Country only. This is probably not a view shared by NYC residents, but perhaps by some Adirondacks/North Country residents.

I don't really know of any popular or semi-popular definitions that would fit between Nos. 4 and 5.


As for regions, which are a completely different animal... it is a perverse delight of New Yorkers, to slice up their state into as many competing regional systems as possible. A lot of this has to do with the many media markets in the state, which affects perception of regions. And you have the New York State tourism region definitions (I think 12 in all); you have the whole north-south-east-west stuff; and all of this overlaps... However, here's a listing of different and possibly competing areas and the cities they do or might plausibly include:

Western NY (WNY): Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Jamestown, Batavia, Olean, Dansville, Geneseo. MAYBE: Rochester, and the area around the smaller Finger Lakes of the west. I-390 seems to be an eastern limit of sorts. There is also a linguistic difference because more people in WNY say "pop" instead of "soda" and especially in far WNY they say "take the 90 to your exit" to give people road directions for the Thruway (I-90), where someone elsewhere might say "take 90."

Southern Tier: Elmira, Binghamton, Corning, Olean. MAYBE: Jamestown. NOT: Ithaca, Oneonta. Definitely anything south of I-86 and along both sides of Route 17.

Finger Lakes: This one's pretty easy. It's the heart-shaped area that contains all the Finger Lakes. Draw a shape along the Thruway, down I-81, Route 13, Route 17 and I-390, with Rochester, Syracuse, Ithaca and Corning along the edges. Of these cities, Corning and Syracuse are not so strongly associated with the Finger Lakes region as Rochester and Ithaca, but are still considered "gateways" to it.

Central New York: Syracuse yes, Rochester no. MAYBE: Utica/Rome. CNY definitely contains five counties: Onondaga, Oswego, Madison, Cayuga and Cortland. It also is sometimes thought to more widely include Oneida, Chenango, Tompkins, Seneca and even Wayne. The Post-Standard's weather maps depict CNY as an even bigger central slice of the state that includes parts of the Southern Tier and the North Country, although this isn't a popular definition of CNY at all. In CNY, most people say "soda," not "pop."

Mohawk Valley: Kind of self-explanatory. Utica, Rome, Amsterdam, Schenectady and all points in between. Overlaps with CNY and the Capital District a bit.

North Country: This gets used broadly for all of northern New York, including the Adirondacks (i.e., North Country Public Radio, which certainly covers the Adirondacks)... but there's also a more specific definition that it's anything in northern NY *outside* of the Adirondack Park. Any part of northern NY that's outside the Blue Line; any part that's relatively flat; etc.

I'll let someone else handle "the Capital District" and whatever the heck "Leatherstocking Country" is. :-)

[Puru]

Originally Posted by Jeromeville

Upstate has many definitions, with the correctness depending on where you are located.

Yep, I agree that it sort of depends on where you're located. My boyfriend (who grew up and lives in the Adirondacks) considers everything south of Glens Falls Downstate NY, and anyone from "downstate" is a "flat-lander" (but for the record, being someone who grew up in West Glenville, I wouldn't call myself a flat-lander).

[7 Wishes]

Sorry to bump a thread but I just had to respond to this one.

I live in southern Westchester (definitely not upstate, culturally and even mostly in terms of "urban landscape" just NYC scaled back a little) and I've always had a unique definition of "upstate".

I feel it's the area north of NY City where the climate changes to the point where it is generally more like that of NY State outside of NY City (yes, I know there are differences, like places on the lake like Buffalo, Watertown, etc. get more snow, and places like Albany and Plattsburgh are a little colder than the lake places, but generally, especially in winter, the differences between them are less than the differences between all of them and NY City itself).

I think generally this puts the line in the northernmost reaches of Westchester and Rockland counties (yes, I know there are times when it snows in northern Westchester while it's raining points south, but in those cases the snow usually is still kind of "wet"......as an example I think of the famous Albany area snowstorm of October 4, 1987 (earliest in history) as a guideline.....I was visiting home in the Yonkers area and driving back to college in the Albany area........it was raining until about Chappaqua, then wet snow until about Mahopac, then by the point where I-84 meets the Taconic is was bad enough that I diverted onto I-84 to the Thruway to get back to school.).