page_title: Upstate New York
section_title: Culture
hierarchical_section_title: Upstate New York / Culture
caption_attribution_description: English: Opening ceremony at Woodstock
context_page_description: Upstate New York is the portion of New York State north of the New York metropolitan area. The Upstate region includes most of the land area of the state of New York, but a minority of the state's population. Although the precise boundary is debated, Upstate New York excludes New York City and Long Island, and most definitions of the region exclude all or part of Westchester and Rockland counties. Major cities in Upstate New York from east to west include Albany, Utica, Binghamton, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.
  Before the American Revolutionary War, Upstate was populated by Native Americans and was home to the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The region saw many battles between the Iroquois, the inhabitants of the region, and the Continental Army, and several treaties drawn up after the war forced the Iroquois to relinquish control of their land to settlers of European descent. It is largely rural with rugged terrain.
  Upstate New York was transformed by the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which greatly eased the movement of goods from the upper midwest, the cities along the Great Lakes, and Upstate New York, to the port of New York City.
context_section_description: The other regions of New York State are culturally and economically distinct from the New York City area and in many ways from each other.  Most of New York State is characterized both by agricultural and forested rural communities, and by small and medium-sized cities and their surrounding suburbs located along major transportation corridors.  The state's major metropolitan areas outside of New York City are Buffalo, Rochester, Albany-Schenectady-Troy, and Syracuse, each of whose population exceeds 500,000.
  The different regions of New York State are influenced by and have affinities with other adjacent regions.  Western New York has cultural and economic ties to the other Great Lakes states as well as Southern Ontario.  The Capital District, the Hudson Valley, the Mohawk Valley and the Plattsburgh area have ties to New England. The North Country, the extreme northern portion of the state, also has strong cultural, economic, linguistic and familial ties to Quebec and Eastern Ontario.  Thus, Plattsburgh has close ties to its neighbors in the Montreal area as well as Vermont.  Much of New York State receives television and radio broadcasts from Canada and there are often other cross-border ties, both historical and familial.  A similar relationship can be seen in Northern New England.
  Linguistically, upstate New York from Western New York east to Utica is part of the Inland North region of American English dialectology, a region which includes Midwestern cities as far west as Chicago and Milwaukee. The Hudson and lower Mohawk Valley has more in common dialectologically with western New England and New York City.  The boundary between the use of the words pop and soda to refer to soft drinks, however, falls farther west than the edge of the Inland North, running just to around the city of Rochester: Buffalo and areas west of Rochester use pop, like the rest of the Inland North to the west, whereas areas east of Rochester, like Syracuse and Binghamton, use soda, like New England and New York City. In Ithaca and Elmira, the border is less clear, with some people having grown up with pop and some with soda; however, current trends see Ithaca, at least, turning to mostly "soda."
  Foodways indigenous to regions of Upstate New York include:
  Buffalo wings and beef on weck sandwich (Buffalo)
  the chicken barbecue (Ithaca)
  garbage plate (Rochester)
  white hot dogs, known as a white hot or Coney (Rochester, Central and Western New York)
  salt potatoes (Syracuse)
  spiedies (Binghamton)
  chicken riggies, tomato pies, Utica greens, and halfmoon cookies (Utica)
  Michigan hot dogs, a variety of the Coney Island hot dog (Plattsburgh)
  Although one local legend lays claim that the potato chip was invented in Saratoga Springs, it has achieved such universal popularity that it is no longer identified with the region. Winemaking is a growing industry in the Finger Lakes as well as in Chautauqua County, where Welch's operates one of the oldest extant grape juice factories in the United States. In the center of the Finger Lakes region, Ithaca is known for the Bo Burger, a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top.
  Two of the most important rock festivals of the 20th century were held in Upstate New York. In 1969 the Woodstock Festival was held in Bethel, New York, while in 1973 another multiday festival was held at the Watkins Glen International Raceway.
  Some literary, documentary and cinematic depictions of upstate present a sense of small town, simple lifestyles, such as It's a Wonderful Life, set in a small upstate town (probably based on Seneca Falls) in the 1940s.
caption: Opening ceremony at Woodstock
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