Nobody can agree where Upstate New York actually begins
Manhattanites joke that anything north of 14th Street counts as upstate. The joke lands because there is no official line. When New York voters were polled in 2016, three rival definitions each won roughly a quarter of the vote, and the Hudson Valley remains the most fiercely disputed ground.
The broadest definition, popular in New York City and used by the state's environmental agency, calls everything upstate except the city and Long Island. Others draw the line where the city's suburbs give way to exurbs, placing most of Westchester and Rockland counties downstate. Many locals simply use Interstate 84. State laws disagree among themselves about which counties count, and the federal court districts split the Hudson Valley differently again. People who live there tend to sidestep the argument by naming their subregion instead: the Finger Lakes, the North Country, the Capital District, Western New York.
The region's history runs deep. It was the homeland of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois confederacy of Five and later Six Nations, whose Mohawk members called it the Land of the Flint. Their Two Row Wampum agreement with the Dutch in 1613 shaped later treaties. Henry Hudson explored in 1609, and the Dutch built Fort Orange, today's Albany, in 1624, the first permanent European settlement in New York. In 1754 delegates meeting at Albany debated Benjamin Franklin's plan to unite the colonies, an early attempt at union that the colonies rejected. After the Revolution, a series of treaties beginning in 1784 stripped the Iroquois of most of their land.
The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, turned the region into a corridor carrying goods from the Great Lakes to New York City's port. Manufacturing followed, and upstate became the birthplace of General Electric, IBM, Kodak and Xerox, drawing waves of immigrant workers. Deindustrialisation since the mid-20th century has brought decline, and the area is now counted part of the Rust Belt.
It remains rich in other ways. Farms produce milk, maple syrup, apples and wine; the Hudson, Delaware and Susquehanna rivers all rise there; and reservoirs in the region help supply New York City's drinking water.
Source: Upstate New York
