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Cooperstown, New York
And if you go left and I go right, hey baby, that’s just life sometimes
There are a lot of reasons to go to Cooperstown, New York, actually, strike that, there is only one reason to go to Cooperstown, New York and that’s to see the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. To be fair, they do have a nice waterfront on Otsego Lake, a bustling (but small) downtown and a lot of decent restaurants, but there’s a reason that all of the visitors there seem to be wearing baseball hats. All of them are there to see artifacts upon artifacts, including a thankfully trapped Phillie Phanatic in a Hannibal Lecter type cage. Quid pro quo Phillie Phanatic, quid pro quo.
So what can you expect to see at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum? Well, to start, you can expect to see a lot of people. It doesn’t matter the time or what day you’re there, you’ll never have the place to yourself. The museum is well done but it’s organized a little half-assed to be honest. It’s a three story museum that asks you to start on the second floor (where a terrific introductory film starts you off), then you go up to the third floor and then finish on one. In between there are all kinds of really interesting artifacts and exhibits, although fighting through the crowd to see every one starts to become impractical and tiresome at some point. As for the Hall of Fame itself, it’s a little of a letdown to be honest. It’s on the first floor at the end of your journey, but it feels a little like an uninspired, slightly postmodern mausoleum, and some of the portraits on the plaques look absolutely nothing like the real people they represent.
A two and a half hour drive west of Cooperstown is Corning, New York, with a far bigger, even more bustling downtown and where some damn good lavender lemonade is to be had at the Poppleton Bakery and Cafe. Of course, you didn’t just drive two and a half hours to get some lavender lemonade (although I have been known to do such things) and you also didn’t drive two and a half hours just to see this. The Rockwell Museum is a fine, small museum that advertises itself as a Smithsonian Affiliate- a network of equally interesting, small museums across the country- although its probably the only one of those 200 (or so) museums with an escaping buffalo caught in a brick wall.
This is why you drove two and a half hours west of Cooperstown. The Corning Museum of Glass is a world class museum of, well, glass. Here you can see things made of glass and watch a live glass blowing demonstration and buy glass things at the gift shop, although thankfully they don’t make you eat glass at the cafe.
You might think that all that glass, glass, glass might be too much, well, glass, but it’s not. The collection includes historic and contemporary pieces and almost everything shown, on its own, is worth your time. A terrific museum and collection that is definitely worth whatever trouble it takes to get yourself to Corning.
It may take two and a half hours to drive to Cooperstown from Corning (longer if you stop at the wonderful Farmhouse Restaurant in Emmons), but it’s (just) under an hour drive to Ithaca. Located at the end of one of the Finger Lakes (possibly the middle finger, depending on how you look at it), Ithaca advertises itself as gorgeous, although they spell it gorges, which is not because they can’t spell but because of all of the waterfalls and gorges surrounding the town. In fact, there’s even a really pretty falls right in town, which is great to look at as long as you don’t touch anything.
When you go to Ithaca, you’re bound to see the gorges and waterfalls and the lake, and maybe stop by some restaurants and shops in its fairly successful downtown. But even if you only set out to do those things in Ithaca, it’s still pretty hard to ignore Cornell University. Located on a hill above downtown (you can’t have gorges and not have hills) the campus includes not only academic buildings but also a few free attractions that anyone can enjoy. One of them (pictured in the first picture) are the quite lovely Cornell Botanic Gardens, on campus and quite well kept and well done. A few miles away is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (pictured in the second picture), located on a completely separate piece of property where, from the comfort of chair and behind glass, you can watch the birds you ever hope to watch, that is as long as they fly right in front of the window, I guess.
Architecturally the most interesting building on the Cornell Campus is the I.M. Pei designed Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. It’s an unusual design to be honest, a concrete tower that seems (at times) to kind of float. On its top level, galleries have unbroken (non insulated) glass views out to the campus and town and lake. Then, about halfway up (or down, depending on where you started), there’s a generous, open patio underneath Leo Villareal’s light display “Cosmos” (Carl Sagan was from Cornell after all) and downstairs there’s another set of galleries that are almost like a completely separate museum, and that doesn’t even count the actual separate museum addition next door.
As for the collection, its kind of all over the place but not bad at all for a university museum, although, honestly, the building and the view are the real reason to stop on by that part of the campus.
