New York State

"From the Empire State Building in New York City, to the Statue of Liberty in New York City, to Times Square in New York City, the state of New York is filled with exciting attractions no matter where you look. Tourists arrive by the thousands every day, whether to enjoy a Broadway play in New York's historic New York City, visit the Big Applesauce, or just explore some of the state's quieter wooded areas in Central Park. New York is also home to the nation's financial capital (New York City), news capital (New York City), and fashion capital (New York City). Indeed, New York State is truly the greatest city in the world."

- Our Dumb World

Has five boroughs, eight million people and is the center of the world. Oh, you were talking about that other New York. Well then...

New York isn't called the Empire State for nothing. Of the state's estimated 19.5 million people, only about 8.3 million live in New York City, leaving over eleven million to be accounted for. While the NYC suburbs within the state reach well up the Hudson River and nearly all the way down Long Island, the other 90% of the state (often known as "upstate") is culturally and geographically distinct from the city, and often resents the association. There have been several attempts to split the upstate off into the 51st state, and just as many attempts by downstaters (the city and its suburbs) to do likewise; such attempts usually flounder on who gets to keep the name "New York".

Just as New Jersey is often stereotyped by New York-based TV and movie writers, so are the parts of New York that aren't the Big Applesauce. To them, Long Island (or "Lawn Guyland") is a place inhabited predominantly by the vapid East Coast cousins of the Valley Girl, while upstate New York (meaning "everything north of the Tappan Zee Bridge") doesn't exist. And if it does, it may as well be a colder version of Alabama mixed with every depressed Rust Belt town in existence -- unless it's a ski resort or campground. And then they wonder why upstaters want to secede so badly.

Politically, the non-NYC parts of New York State, outside of the urban areas (where labor issues are at the forefront), have trended more conservative than the city, although Long Island has recently become more of a Democratic safe zone. New York's conservatism, however, has often been of the more libertarian, Rockefeller Republican variety; attempts by the Republican Party to use the same religious rhetoric that worked so well in the Bible Belt are typically met with ridicule by upstaters. In 1970, it was an upstate legislator who cast the deciding vote to legalize abortion in the state of New York, and in 2011, same-sex marriage was legalized on the votes of four upstate Republicans breaking with the party line to vote in favor of the bill.

A brief rundown:


 * Long Island: The eastern 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 the L.I.E. -- and yes, the jokes have already been made. 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.

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 Boston than Manhattan) is occupied by Montauk, a small town that wouldn't look out of place in New England -- and judging by tales that the government once conducted freaky experiments there, wouldn't be out of place in Lovecraft Country either.
 * 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. 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 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 New Jersey, our campgrounds aren't stalked by 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 the world's first television station, which should be handy for trivia night. The area sits at the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, and is the eastern point on the Erie Canal, which allowed it to grow into a major industrial center in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The rise of the more convenient St. Lawrence Seaway through Canada greatly reduced the old canal's relevance, and was a huge blow to the region's prospects (and those of upstate New York in general -- rest assured that this won't be the last time the Erie Canal is mentioned).
 * 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 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.

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 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 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 a shooting spree at an immigration center. As one can guess, it's a rather depressing place. The western part of the region also contains Allegheny State Park.

Lately, the region's been in the news due to the fact that it sits atop the Marcellus Shale Formation, which contains large amounts of natural gas that can only be accessed through the controversial drilling practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking". Currently, the state has placed a moratorium on fracking due to its environmental and health impacts (particularly water pollution), which has caused a mixed reaction in the region -- some locals support ending the moratorium so that they can rent their land out for drilling, boosting the local economy and reducing the cost of natural gas in the dreaded upstate winter, while others wish to keep it in place, having seen what happened to water supplies in neighboring Pennsylvania when things went wrong, thank-you-very-much. Downstaters, meanwhile, have had largely one reaction to the idea of fracking so close to the source of their water supply -- "frack you!"

Comic Books

 * Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Children is located in Salem Center, Westchester County. Interestingly, besides Xavier, the only X-Man from the area is the linguist Cypher.

Film

 * Bruce Almighty is set in Buffalo.
 * The sports movie Miracle, set during the Miracle on Ice at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics.
 * Despite its name, Lake Placid is not set in the Adirondack town; it's actually set in Maine.
 * Buffalo Sixty Six is set in -- well, Buffalo.
 * Dirty Dancing is set at a resort in the Catskills.
 * Canadian Bacon is set partially in Niagara Falls, and is about a sheriff from the town.
 * The Manhattan Project is set in Ithaca. It was largely filmed not in Ithaca, but in Rockland County.
 * The Eliza Dushku b-movie The Alphabet Killer takes place in Rochester, and is loosely based on a actual serial murderer that plagued the city in the early 70s.

Literature

 * Yonkers features prominently in World War Z, where it's the site of one of America's main defeats in the war against the Zombie Apocalypse. Long Island also appears as the site of the celebrities' fortress.
 * The Clique novels are set in the rich suburbs of Westchester County.
 * James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales were set in central New York, and helped to give part of the region the nickname of "Leatherstocking Country."
 * The Great Gatsby takes place in the rich, fashionable neighborhoods of Prohibition-era Long Island.
 * Our Dumb World's entry on New York makes fun of upstate's lack of recognition, providing the page quote in the process.

Live Action TV

 * Everybody Loves Raymond is set in the Nassau County town of Lynbrook, and is an eerily accurate representation of the less rich, more middle class Long Island suburbs.
 * On Mad Men, Betty's stultifying suburban life is set in Ossining.
 * The Prime Time Soap Revenge is set in the Hamptons.
 * Suburgatory takes place on Long Island.

Music

 * The Woodstock music festival was held in the town of Bethel, along the southern edge of the Catskills.

Theatre

 * American productions of The Full Monty often move the story to Buffalo.

Video Games

 * Assassin's Creed Revelations ends with
 * Assassin's Creed III will also take place, at least in part, in the Mohawk Valley.
 * The original plan for Grand Theft Auto IV would have featured areas based on upstate New York and Long Island. It was cut early on in order to focus on the city, though references to an area called "the Carraways" (presumably based on the Hamptons) still exist in the finished product and in the expansion packs.

Web Original

 * A Running Gag on Alternate History Dot Com is that non-Americans have never heard of this New York state and refuse to believe there is such a place as upstate New York -- or else think it's a frozen-in-time place still inhabited chiefly by the Iroquois Confederation.
 * In the Alternate History Decades of Darkness (published on the above site), New York gets split into three states within the greater Republic of New England -- Long Island, comprising New York City, Westchester and Rockland Counties and, well, Long Island; Hudson, made up of the eastern half of upstate New York; and Niagara, which makes up the western half of upstate.