Why the ‘real' New York has nothing to do with Manhattan

Telegraph

14-06-2025

Whether you date the moment of birth to the seizure and rechristening of Dutch outpost 'New Amsterdam' in 1664, the founding, in the same year, of a British colony whose name referenced the king's brother (the Duke of York) – or its secession to the USA in 1788 as the 11th state in a new national jigsaw – there have long been two 'New Yorks'.
One, of course, is the mega-city which swallowed the island of Manhattan, and now spreads its tentacles, famously, to 'Five Boroughs'.
The other is the broader state of New York – which encompasses its metropolitan namesake, but is also a very different animal.
So different that their shared existences look incongruous. The state of New York is the USA's fourth most populous (behind California, Texas and Florida).
But of its 20 million residents, 14 million (70 per cent of the total) reside in 'the city', on Long Island, or in the urban hubs in the southern half of the Hudson Valley – including the capital, Albany.
What remains – stretching to the Canadian border – has little in common with the stores of Fifth Avenue or the Empire State Building.
It is quiet, even silent in parts; lushly forested, thrillingly rugged – the mountains of the Adirondacks and the Catskills rising mightily. Spend time in one of the New Yorks, and you could never deceive yourself into thinking you were in the other.
So much is clear when I leave the 'first' New York for the 'second'. The road-signs along my route read like the lyrics to Chattanooga Choo Choo, albeit with a north-easterly quaintness, indicating possible stops in Tarrytown and Hopewell Junction, Lagrangeville and Pleasant Valley, Rhinebeck and Stottville.
Only Albany feels like an interruption, shoving its rush-hour traffic and its comparative sprawl into my path.
There at the heart of it, on Empire State Plaza, the New York Capitol adds an extra layer of surreality by resembling a grand, turreted Swiss hotel, rather than a classic domed American government building.
But I am not looking for epic out-of-context 19th century neo-Renaissance architecture. I am looking for the shadows beyond the street lights; for 'the other New York'.
And I find it, emphatically, some 200 miles north of Manhattan – at the bottom of Lake George.
While the River Hudson, ebbing through Albany 60 miles to the south, ultimately drains into the Atlantic as it passes Manhattan, Lake George sends its currents in the opposite direction, pouring its soul into the border-spanning Lake Champlain – and eventually, into the St Lawrence.
This is not the only hint as to the northerliness of my location. There at the lake's south edge, Fort William Henry is a timely link to American literature. It was built in 1755; a British bastion in the colonial push into the higher reaches of North America, designed to stymie France in its identical ambitions.
In this, it failed. It haunted the shore of Lake George for just two years before, in the summer of 1757, it was destroyed by Gallic and Huron troops in a bloody chapter of what became known as the 'French and Indian War'.
Yet it enjoys a strangely enduring afterlife. The existing structure, a 1950s replica, receives a steady stream of visitors as the Fort William Henry Museum. In part, this is because it is to Fort William Henry that the key characters are travelling, across wild and perilous terrain, in The Last Of The Mohicans – the James Fenimore Cooper novel which, though it uses the fighting of 1757 as its deadly backdrop, was published in 1826, and is celebrating its bicentenary this year.
Lake George has moved on, but only a little, from that era of siege and massacre. The tree-defined landscape around it may no longer be dangerous, but it is certainly still wild.
And beautiful. For a while, at the turn of the 20th century, it became a magnet for the era's financial elite; wealthy figures such as Spencer Trask and George Foster Peabody crafted homes as palatial as those on Long Island along the lake's west flank, in what was jauntily called 'Millionaires' Row'.
Inevitably, in an era of private jets and Caribbean playgrounds, things are not as chic as they once were, and the town of Lake George now makes its living out of motels, T-shirt shops, amusement arcades and candy-floss stands.
But the majority of the tourists who inflate the local population from 3,500 to more than 50,000 during the hottest months still come for the scenery, and the area's closeness to nature – the water still refreshingly cold during the heat of August, the Adirondacks bothering the horizon away to the north-west.
But if Lake George seems to embrace the warmest season as a temporary arrangement, other corners of upstate New York seem never entirely to escape the winter.
At Lake Placid, another 80 miles north, this is partially the point. Indeed, you can hardly move a metre along Main Street without noticing reference to the two occasions – 1932, 1980 – when it hosted the Winter Olympics. Supporting evidence is everywhere – Whiteface Mountain, the ski resort, 10 miles up the road, where the downhill events were held in 1980; the Lake Placid Olympic Museum, which salutes both games with medals and memorabilia.
And the Olympic Ski-Jumping Complex is as close as 'Upstate' comes to skyscrapers, its twin towers piercing the treeline. Thrill-seekers can ride down from on high via a zipline.
Rather confusingly, the water feature on which the town largely sits is not Lake Placid (which lies directly to the north), but Mirror Lake.
An appropriate name. By now, my journey has brought me into the grip of the Adirondacks, and the lake's smooth surface captures the mountains in gentle reflection; a wholly pretty picture, whatever the season.
A century or so ago, travellers came this way for more than such vistas. Saranac Lake, 10 miles to the west, blossomed not as a rich man's plaything, but as a sanctuary for the sick.
The catalyst was the arrival, in 1876, of Edward Livingston Trudeau, a New York City doctor and tuberculosis sufferer who had ventured to the Adirondacks in search of the fresh air and cool climate he hoped would heal his condition.
Revived by mountain life, he decided to stay, and opened a sanatorium for the treatment of fellow TB victims in 1884. Transport links came with this boom – the New York Central Railroad rolled into the town in 1877.
These unlikely 'good times' could not last. Within 50 years, advances in medical science had rendered Saranac Lake's treatment centres obsolete. But it has fought back gradually against irrelevance, as a haven for fishing and boating. To that list can now be added hiking and cycling.
The last train departed in April 1965. But while part of the line – a 108-mile stretch from Utica to Tupper Lake – has been preserved as a heritage operation, the Adirondack Railroad, the 34-mile section which links Tupper Lake to Lake Placid via Saranac Lake has been stripped of its track and relaunched as a space for adventures by foot and pedal – the Adirondack Rail Trail, which will be fully open by the end of 2025.
It definitely feels like a useful addition as I cycle along it on a breezy afternoon, through thick patches of forest, finally reaching the town's former station – another sturdy relic that will be restored, with cafes and a gift shop, as part of the trail experience.
I am a long way – almost 300 miles – from New York, as I stand on the decommissioned platform. The New York of subway trains and yellow cabs, that is.
The 'other' New York – of fir trees and granite peaks; of rivers, lakes, and mossy tranquillity – is all around me.
Essentials
Airlines including British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines fly to New York from various British airports. Lodges at Cresthaven, Lake George starts at £147 per night. Mirror Lake Inn, Lake Placid has rooms from £306 per night.