You may have to be patient with these photos or reload the page or something – I had to use Imageshack since my Photobucket bandwidth is running low. Sorry about that.
I recently spent a week and a half on vacation in upstate NY. Most of that time was spent at a lake in Adirondack State Park, but my family and I drove down to Utica one day (it was supposed to be a rainy day – it wasn’t). I hadn’t been there since I was too young to remember.
Many upstate NY cities have been in decline for a while, and Utica is no exception. In the 1800s, Utica benefited from its location along the Erie Canal and became a textile industry hub. By WWII, though, most of the manufacturing had left for the South. In the mid 1900s, the population was over 100,000. Since then Utica has been bleeding people, though there has recently been an influx of immigrants from abroad, most notably from Bosnia, but also from Somalia and Southeast Asia. The current city population is under 60,000 with about 295,000 in the Utica-Rome metro area.
The downtown area was fairly quiet, but there were some people walking around. We drove around some rougher areas outside of downtown where there were more people out, but I didn’t get the feeling that they’d appreciate me sticking my head out of the car with a camera, so I didn’t get too many photos of those areas. There were some pretty nice old home that we drove by, too, many of which had been converted into doctors’ or lawyers’ offices.
This is not meant to be a comprehensive look at the city – we were only there for a couple hours, and I took pics of what I saw.
Genesee St – the main street in downtown Utica.
I knew I recognized it from somewhere…
Pedestrian mall?
And you thought the Liberty Bell was in Philly
Set your watches
I think all the rest of the photos were taken from the passenger’s seat in my parents’ car, so lower your expectations accordingly
I wanted to see what this house would look like if it were built on a slope…
I was pretty impressed by this apartment block…
The end