New York Diary

17

It's about 10 p.m. on a Sunday and I'm on New York State Route 17, just outside of the village of Hancock. The night is crisp and autumnal, with just a faint and lovely precipitation that freshens and cleanses.

One day soon, this road will be a part of I-86, running from Erie, Pennsylvania to the New York Thruway at Harriman, New York. Perhaps it will fill with cars. Service stations might spring up. Policement might even start to patrol the highway.

For now, though, we're the only vehicle on an empty road in upstate New York (and we, too, are empty: I am on a dark and unpopulated bus, with the two front seats to myself and with almost nobody behind me). The view out of the front window is of stars, sky, unending highway, and darkness.

Route 17 winds through Fishs Eddy and Downsville, Killawog and Liberty and Horton. If this part of the country were not so poor, it would be idyllic, nestled as it is among the Finger Lakes and rolling hills of pleasant greenery. Right now, though, the winding highway is beautiful only if one ignores the tiny clapboard houses and broken-down barns that occasionally dot the landscape. Indeed, I-86 will be something of a catalog of American poverty in the Mid-Atlantic states when it is finished. Erie, Pennsylvania, in Appalachia, is surely the highlight of the route; it's a port city that has recently been growing in population and, though heavy industry is fleeing the area, it is being replaced by numerous light-industrial plants that suggest a promising future. Corning is a nice little town, too, home to the Corning Museum of Glass, a couple of IB World Schools, and the Corning Country Club where the LPGA makes a tour stop. Other cities on the proposed route are not so lucky, though: they include Jamestown (median per-capita income: $15,316, or $33,675 per family), Olean ($17,169 and $38,355, respectively), and Elmira (a horrible amalgam of jails, strip malls, and psychiatric hospitals--with a per-capita income of $14,495 and with more than 23% of the population living below the poverty line). I-86 will also go through Binghamton, the Carousel Capital of the World. I have a soft spot in my heart for Binghamton, a city characterized by great attendance at and affinity for minor league baseball games, and a kind of picture of an out-of-date Americana that is at once enticing and far past its prime. In New York state, high school students studying for their Regents exams have to learn that Binghamton is home to a thriving shoe manufacture industry--but this is false, and has been for decades; our facts have stagnated like the city itself. In fact, the biggest local employers include Lockheed-Martin, Frito Lay, and Verizon (which operates an enormous series of call centers in the city). Once-beautiful brick buildings are falling down. A greater percentage of the population lives in poverty in Binghamton than they do even in Elmira. There's a thriving university in Binghamton, but there is nothing else.

But those are just the cities. There are no suburbs here (though sometimes people refer to "greater Binghamton," but this is a way to include the folks living in Johnson City rather than a way to talk about urban flight), and the vast space between population centers is characterized by a few ramshackle houses, a racetrack, a coal mine, and several amusingly named rivers.

As we're driving down Route 17, there are several exit signs of the blue, federally-controlled, Interstate-highway type, which are awaiting the full inauguration of I-86 down this deserted stretch of road. At exit 92, there's a sign for camping spots and I learn that one can turn off for the Russell Brook Campground. At exit 89, there's a sign for food; there's nothing on it. At exits 96, 90, and 89, somebody has put up signs labelled "Gas"--but these, too, are blank. At exit 72, there's a sign for attractions. There's nothing on it but the label.

Of course this is not yet an interstate, and I know these signs will be filled in with the relevant restaurants and gas stations soon. I can't help thinking, though, that it is somehow appropriate to pass these signs, so optimistically erected, and to see that there is nothing on offer here in the middle of nowhere. And so we drive on.

posted by Skay @ 11:30 PM