New York

Unique and Varied Regions: New York State

The state is made up of several distinct but informally defined regions. The North Country is the largest region in area, comprising Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence Counties along the extreme northern border of the state, bordering Vermont, the St. Lawrence River, and Lake Ontario. It is the most sparsely populated, consisting of less than half a million people. The North Country is predominantly non-Hispanic white, and most of the foreign immigration to the area comes from Canada. The African American population is especially concentrated in Ogdensburg, a border city in St. Lawrence County.

The Syracuse metropolitan area and its surroundings, sometimes called Central New York, includes the roughly 1.2 million people in parts of Cayuga, Cortland, Herkimer, Madison, Oneida, Onondaga, Oswego, Tompkins, and Otsego Counties. Education is strong in the region, which is home to Cornell University, three State University of New York (SUNY) campuses, Utica College, Ithaca College, Colgate University, and Syracuse University. The area has a strong regional identity, standing out against the linguistic backdrop of western New York and residents speak with a distinctive regional accent. Syracuse was an active center of the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad and today has an African American population of about 25 percent, significantly more than that of the state as a whole. Irish, Italian, German, and Anglo are the largest white ancestry groups, and there is a large Little Italy neighborhood. Industrial jobs have declined since the Cold War, and the top employers in the region now are in education and the service sector.

The Southern Tier encompasses the counties on the northern border of Pennsylvania, west of the Catskill Mountains, a definition that includes Allegany, Broome, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Chemung, Chenango, Cortland, Delaware, Otsego, Schoharie, Schuyler, Steuben, Tioga, and Tompkins Counties (overlapping with part of the Syracuse metropolitan area), for a combined population of about one million people. The Southern Tier can also be seen as the northernmost reach of the Appalachia region, with which it shares a great deal of history and common roots. Government services [Page 647]account for most of the jobs in the area, followed by the long-declining manufacturing sector. Many families who have lived in the region for a long time have ties to the materials manufacturer Corning, best known for its glassware, headquartered in Steuben County. The land continues to be farmed in this part of New York, especially for wine grapes and apples, and the northernmost portion of the Pennsylvania oil field has been extracted by Southern Tier oil wells since the turn of the 20th century.

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