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New York State: Difference between revisions
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A brief rundown:
* '''Long Island:''' The eastern [[Suburbia|suburbs]]. Affectionately known as "Lawn Guyland" after the local pronunciation, or "Strong Island". Shaped like a fish with the "tails" called the North Fork and South Fork. The main road going through here is the Long Island Expressway, or [[Fun With Acronyms|the L.I.E.]] -- and yes, the jokes have already been made.<ref>There's also a road called the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway aka the S.O.B. Well known speed trap.</ref> The western third of Long Island is actually composed of two New York City Boroughs (Queens and Brooklyn), but you will never get a denizen of those boroughs to call themselves Long Islanders. When we talk about Long Island, we talk about Nassau and Suffolk Counties east of the boroughs.<br /><br />The first planned suburb in the United States, Levittown, is in southeast Nassau County. Generally, the further east you go, the more rural and spread out the towns get, with the North Fork home to many orchards and wineries. Located on the South Fork facing the Atlantic are the Hamptons, a collection of super-rich resort towns that you may have seen in TV shows and movies. The far eastern tip (which is closer in geography in a straight line to [[Useful Notes/Boston|Boston]] than Manhattan) is occupied by Montauk, a small town that wouldn't look out of place in [[Hollywood New England|New England]] -- and judging by [
* '''Hudson Valley:''' The area immediately north of the city. Popular definition holds that "upstate New York" begins somewhere in this area -- exactly where depends on where in the Valley you live. <ref>It's often said that people in the city think upstate starts at Yonkers, people in Yonkers think it starts at White Plains, people in White Plains think it starts at Stony Point, people in Stony Point think it starts at Newburgh, people in Newburgh think it starts at Poughkeepsie, and people in Poughkeepsie will say that north of them is the Capital District. Basically, wherever you live is NOT upstate, and everything north of you is. Unless "everything north of you" is Canada.</ref> When most people talk about the Hudson Valley, they're usually speaking of Westchester and Rockland Counties, the two counties closest to the city, and the most suburbanized. Some notable places in the Hudson Valley include Yonkers (home of [[Lady Gaga]]), Nyack (home of a lot of rich Jews and a big mall -- seriously, a ''big'' frakking mall), the Tappan Zee Bridge, the Palisade cliffs overlooking the Hudson, the town of New Paltz (whose Green Party mayor conducted same-sex marriages years before the state legalized them), and [[The Alcatraz|the maximum security Sing Sing Prison]] in Ossining.
* '''Catskill Mountains:''' The area that New York City gets its water from. Most of the area is kept as a forest preserve/state park, which serves the dual purpose of protecting the city's water supply (contrary to popular belief, New York's water is some of the cleanest in the nation) and providing New Yorkers with easily accessible nature. Consequently, the area is home to some of the closest ski resorts, hiking trails and campgrounds to the city -- and unlike [[Joisey|New Jersey]], our campgrounds aren't stalked by [[Friday the 13th (Film)|masked, machete-wielding slashers]]. In the mid-20th century, before [[Civil Rights Movement]] and the rise of cheap air travel, this area was home to the [[Borscht Belt]], a collection of summer resorts and campgrounds that welcomed New York's Jews when most other resorts discriminated against them. The stand-up comics who performed here soon became famous for their trademark "Jewish humor".
* '''Capital District:''' As the name suggests, this area is home to Albany, the capital of the state of New York and a name that is often spoken in angry tones, accompanied by profanity (as in "those f--kers in Albany are stealing my tax dollars"). Nearby Schenectady is the home of General Electric and [
* '''Adirondack Mountains:''' New York's other mountain range. Larger and more remote than the Catskills, the Adirondacks aren't actually a part of the Appalachian Range, but rather, an extension of the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec. Culturally, they're more an extension of [[Hollywood New England|northern New England]] than anything else, sharing a media market with most of Vermont -- and with nearby [[Montreal]], which dwarfs both areas in population. (Stations in the area often carry advertising for Canadian businesses.) The old Fort Ticonderoga is located along Lake Champlain at the edge of the mountains, as are a large collection of ski resorts (the most famous being Lake Placid). North of the Adirondacks is the North Country, a vast, sparsely-populated area along the Quebec border consisting of Adirondack foothills, Plattsburgh, and the western shores of Lake Champlain. The proximity to Quebec means that a lot of the signage in the Adirondacks is bilingual, written in both English and French -- which makes the state of New York better at accommodating French-Canadians than Alberta despite not being bound by Canadian language laws. Weird, eh?
* '''Central New York:''' Like many of upstate New York's urban centers, this area lived and died on the Erie Canal. Today, as one might guess, it is an economically depressed area, with cities like Syracuse, Oswego, Utica and Rome all symbolizing the declining Rust Belt. Syracuse has a college which, due to its good journalism program, often gets name-dropped in the news far more often than it probably deserves. The eastern part of the region, formerly known as the Leatherstocking Country, is carved by the Mohawk and Susquehanna Rivers, and used to be the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy. It was of major strategic importance during the French and Indian War, as it was one of the main routes into the North American interior (which is why the Erie Canal is there) -- the British and French could easily attack the hearts of the other side's respective colonial empires through the Mohawk Valley.
* '''Western New York:''' This area is the site of the cities of Buffalo and Rochester, and acts as the western end of the Erie Canal -- which means it got screwed economically when the Canadians dredged the St. Lawrence. This is the part of upstate that most people have heard of. Culturally, the area is more Midwestern than East Coast, which shows in the accent and a few expressions ("pop"). [[Niagara Falls]] is located out here, but everybody knows that the view is better on the Canadian side of the river, which means that the New York side hasn't really benefited all that much from tourism. <ref>The Canadian side, however, has benefited from favorable exchange rates and a heavy push towards tourism to basically become the Canadian [[Joisey|Atlantic City]]. Which drains even more tourists from the American side of the falls.</ref><br /><br />Buffalo is notorious for getting blizzards that are gigantic even by the tough standards of upstate New York, while Rochester was once a major hub of both the abolitionist and women's rights movements. In the early 19th century, the area was called the "burned-over district" due to all the religious revivals in the area -- it was so heavily evangelized that there was no "fuel" (people) left to "burn" (convert). Among the religious movements that emerged here were [[Useful Notes/Mormonism|the Mormons]], the Millerites and the Shakers, making it something of a 19th century version of [[California]] in terms of being a hub for new religious groups. Fun fact: Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse are each fully separate media markets despite there being larger cities in [[New York State]] and along the Canadian side of Lake Ontario that aren't due to their proximity to [[New York City]] and [[Toronto]].
* '''Finger Lakes:''' South of Rochester and west of Syracuse, the Finger Lakes are a chain of long, narrow, finger-like lakes in the west-central part of the state. It's the site of New York's wine country, and a major summertime tourist destination. One of the largest cities is Ithaca, site of two major colleges (Ithaca College and [[Ivy League|Cornell University]]) and the North American seat of the Dalai Lama, and one of the few places in upstate New York that still has a healthy economy. The town of Seneca Falls is notable for having been the birthplace of the women's rights movement.
* '''Southern Tier:''' Yeah, as you can gather, we're really not all that creative naming parts of upstate New York. (That's because all the creative types in the city don't care about upstate New York.) This area is located along the border between New York and Pennsylvania west of the Catskills. It is very rural and sparsely populated, with the only sizable cities being Binghamton and Elmira. Binghamton is the site of a large state university that often gets name-dropped in New York-based media, and the city recently entered the news after a guy went on [
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=== '''In fiction:''' ===
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