This archive is a record of Where I've Gone, plus Where I've Been. Those two worlds overlap but they aren't the same.
New York does everything in spades. Jackson Heights, Queens is supposed to be the most culturally diverse neighborhood on the planet. All those art galleries in the Chelsea represent the greatest number of businesses of any one type, in any one neighborhood, in the history of Manhattan. That's saying something. What Manhattan is to cities, New York State is to states. Here you can find the Village of Poland in the Town of Russia. NY is lousy with gorges. Every corner of the state. Jaw droppers. Watkins Glen was amazing. It felt like I had been shrunk to a molecule and was passing through a geode, like in Fantastic Voyage. And there are big escarpments that make for sweeping views, such as the Hudson Valley - the Heidelberg of America, red barns tucked into the folds of hills. Somewhere in western New York there is a statue of Grace Bedell, a 10-year-old girl, meeting Abraham Lincoln. He made a train stop to thank her for her letter suggesting he grow a beard. Thousand Islands is actually 2,000 islands. Hard to imagine that this was the original tourist boom. Singer Castle is for sale - 22 million. The Mohawk Valley filled up with workaholic Palatines and became the breadbasket of America. Molly Brant slept here, the Iroquois Confederation being a model for the U.S. Constitution. In every little nook and cranny, something of significance happened. Down the road three miles, near the Canajoharie gorge, during the Civil War a guy invented the flat-bottom folding paper bag (the modern sugar bag). In one generation, it grew into the Beechnut Corporation. Go left three miles, you see the birthplace of Henry Kaiser the Father of American shipbuilding. Allen Ginsberg owned a farm in Cherry Valley. And there it sits in bucolic isolation, collapsing to the ground.
Another thing about living here. It's cold. Look at a gardening map of New York. There is a skinny little finger that comes down from directly north, an icicle hanging down, and it covers where I live. So I am a zone 4. Albany to the east, Syracuse to the west, they're zone 5. But because of this icicle, I'm a zone 4. There are lots of rural roads and the plows can't keep up with it. I'm out of here, these last couple of winters for Central America.
Outside of travel stories I’ve pursued more abstract notions that can be found in the Projects section.
Use the search box in the upper right corner to search the archive.
The pictures here are a sampling of my collection. If you can't find it here, please
contact me.
Philip Scalia
Fort Plain, New York
Philip Scalia
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