Thousands of people love living in the region surrounding where I have called home since the early 1980s — Central New York, with the City of Utica at its core.
They have family here, jobs here, many happy memories here. They just find so much to enjoy here.
So far, so good.
But for many there is at least one ugly outgrowth of this love affair. To them, it is extremely important that their hometown also be held in high regard by any and all.
God help anyone who dares utter a disparaging word or issue a critical report about the Utica area, as seems to happen at least once a year. (The latest coming a few weeks ago with a Forbes magazine ranking the area as having the third worst climate for business and careers.)
The “critics” are vilified in print and online as ill-informed and ignorant. If they have the courage to identify themselves as fellow residents, they get the good ole “love it or leave it” retort — words usually aimed by super patriots/jingoists at level-headed patriots who raise questions about the absolute wonderfulness of the United States of America.
As you may have guessed by now, I just don’t get this provincialism, this emotional defense of a living area, this anger that someone may think you’re not living in one of the best places on earth.
As a person who has lived for extended periods in 10 different locales, and has family and friends residing in many more, I can attest that great people, great schools, great community leaders, great natural beauty, great businesses and, yes Uticans, even great local foods and great pizza exist in copious quantities throughout our great land.
People in the Utica area certainly have every right to claim their own greatness in all of the categories listed above. They just don’t have the right to posit superiority in any of them — that’s just being blind — or to get hyper defensive when someone finds fault.
To use the popular paraphrase of a line from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: “Me thinks they doth protest too much.”
To be clear on that point (from Wikipedia): “The phrase's actual meaning implies the increasing likelihood of suppressed feelings for the contrary of that which is being argued. i.e., the more passionate and fervent the argument, the greater likelihood the cause is a suppression of belief for the contrary argument, and the subsequent confirmation that it is the (actual) truer statement.”
Put another way, if this area was really as wonderful as all these passionate defenders claim, they wouldn’t have to go around loudly blasting its critics or trumpeting its virtues. They could calmly slough off criticism, confident in the virtues of their chosen hometown while privately aware that, like all areas of the world, it has its weaknesses. Big deal.
That’s how most of the really nice places, like my current 33-year hometown of Clinton, function — with a quiet confidence.
If anything, these communities are loath to loudly proclaim their virtues lest they attract an influx of new residents who may not fully appreciate the wonderfulness of their surroundings. (At the same time, I’ve seen many new residents who do immediately recognize what a prize location they’ve just found and then want to quickly close the door behind them, stopping all new developments or community growth.)
So, as Shakespeare would no doubt see, dwellers in Greater Utica, both the self-confident ones and the hyper-sensitive ones, evidently doth realize a lot of negative things exist here. Many are working hard and long to counter this and bring good things to the community.
Understandably, some involved in those efforts feel compelled to rebuff the area’s detractors lest their progress be impeded by negative attitudes within the community itself or those thinking about moving here.
But many other defenders go beyond simple spinning or fact-checking the narrative.
And I’m not just talking about those anonymous social media commenters or tweeters who plague all current-day public discourse. Many of the extremists have been community leaders or government officials, pressed to state politically correct loud defenses of the area lest they lose voters/business.
In my observations over the years, one particularly awful such case came in the spring of 2012, when the then-editor of the Utica Observer-Dispatch reacted harshly to the work of an award-winning freelance photographer who stopped by and snapped a few shots of downtown Utica.
(Blogger side note: I’ll refrain from naming the individuals involved. Their identities are not germane to the issue and I really don’t want to involve them personally at this juncture, three years removed from the dispute. The reason I have so much information on this particular situation is that I saved, in my computer files, what was publicly written at the time, intending to send my reaction to the OD, but I never got around to it. )
Dozens of his photos appeared under the headline “Utica Struggles” in slideshows featured on the websites of the Albany Times Union and USA Today. Among other things, the editor pointed out in a more than 1,000-word demagogic rebuttal that the pictures showed “dilapidated buildings with broken windows and graffiti marks, empty and lonely streets and people without jobs and, seemingly, without hope.
“Local people were puzzled and annoyed at the narrow focus of the package. There’s no mention of the Boilermaker, the thriving immigrant population, the safe neighborhoods, the burgeoning nanotech industry, the widely-respected colleges and much more.”
She goes on to depict the photos as misleading and misrepresentative, basically accusing the photographer — a well-traveled professional and winner of the 2006 World Press Photo of the Year award — of shoddy journalism and having an agenda to only show the negative side of Utica as part of his project.
It was a stunning overreaction to a simple series of photos that candidly took a look at one aspect of Utica as an example of one upstate community trying “to make the transition from a former manufacturing hub,” a situation the editor did not refute.
The editor also agreed that Utica is struggling and the photos accurately depict elements of its problem. No, what she wanted was a totally different story, something entirely removed from the photographer’s limited intent — an all-inclusive profile of the City of Utica.
Whaa?
Geez, any person looking at such pictures could see the photographer’s openly narrow focus. It was clearly not supposed to be a feature on all things Utica.
It’s like someone faulting news reports on the current refugee crisis in Europe for not also showing the many wonderful things also taking place in Hungary, Germany, Greece, etc.
“I didn’t have an agenda,” the photographer told the editor. She noted that he spent one day in Utica, “parked his car, and walked around Genesee Street and nearby neighborhoods, talking with those he found in the streets.”
“It really bothers me that people think this is negative,” said the photographer.
But the editor did not buy it:
“He said his project was part of a series about the economy in smaller post-industrial cities. ‘My interest is old American cities and what is happening there,’ he said.
“He added that the photo gallery wasn’t really about Utica but that the city is just representative of what has gone horribly wrong around the country.
“Which to me sounds like an agenda. Go find a city that looks like what is wrong with America. How else to explain that, if (the photographer) ate lunch at the New York City Gourmet Deli as he said, he missed the beautiful Stanley Center for the Arts across the street? Or the world-class Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute up the hill?
“He said he did ‘street photography,’ meaning he only shot what he saw on that particular day. This is a way of explaining why he didn’t contact any city officials, community activists, historians, artists, business people or anyone else who may have been working (and not on the street) the day he came through town. He didn’t look very hard to find things that didn’t fit his narrow and stereotyped image of what Utica is.
“(He) repeatedly said that, as a journalist, it wasn’t his job to be a cheerleader for the area. He’s right. That isn’t my job either. But just as the picture is not all sunshine and roses, it is not all doom and gloom either. While each extreme serves its own agenda, neither one tells the true story -- which is more nuanced and messy than you can capture in a day.
“We are aware of our unemployment numbers, educational and economic challenges. The issues facing Utica and cities like it are not simple and did not spring up in the past few months or years. They are complicated and represent economic trends that have hammered American cities for decades: suburban sprawl, a switch from manufacturing to service industries, uneven access to quality education and healthcare. Add to that our mix of many immigrant populations and you have a complex set of challenges for the region.
“And ones the community is addressing every day, as evidenced by Utica’s growth, which has increased in population by nearly 3 percent since 2000, according to U.S. Census data, and success – seven out of ten seniors graduate from Thomas R. Proctor High School now and the rate continues to climb. Our growing, nationally-recognized microbrewery has served as the cornerstone for the resurgence of Varick Street, where (the photographer) stopped for a drink during his brief visit. An entire downtown block of Bleecker Street was saved from demolition and every single building was renovated. There are many more examples.
“In our lengthy phone conversation, (the photographer) was clearly passionate about what he called the “crisis situation” in this country, concerned for the most vulnerable members of our community and worried about what kind of world will be left for his daughter and all other children.
“We in the Mohawk Valley share his passion to make our city a better place, to help those who are in need, and to solve the issues that face our region. Yet when I look around, I don’t simply see the lonely faces and abandoned buildings. I see the thousands of caring people who turn out for the Heart Run and Ride for Missing Children each year, who volunteer in extraordinary numbers for all kinds of causes, who take pride in this place we call home.”
Clearly, the editor was pulling an “Emily Litella.” She was a fictional character played by the late comedian Gilda Radner in a series of appearances on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” She famously went on furious rants in her editorial rebuttals, defending issues that she misheard: “What’s all this fuss about violins on television?” or “”What’s all this fuss about Soviet jewelry?”
This editor went on a furious rant about something she misread, seeing an innocent, sincere portrayal of her town’s legitimate problems as an unbalanced, unprofessional attack.
(Blogger’s note: This editor, despite her passionate proclamations for Utica, soon left the area entirely. Such is not an unusual occurrence. Newspaper editors often come to a town, take up the party line of how absolutely wonderful their new home is —and how smart and successful they were to choose it!! — and then leave when the next better offer comes along, former hometown nirvana be damned)
The newspaper followed up the editor’s column with a front-page story headlined “Utica’s Image Problem,” which reported on an outpouring of support for a new pro-Utica photo website — which had a whopping 1,000 views by that time. Now, the Mohawk Valley has close to 500,000 residents. Oneida County has about 233,000 residents. Utica’s population is more than 62,000. One thousand views of a website is nothing to brag about.
Meanwhile, the photographer himself said he was surprised by the editor’s rant. He wrote the paper soon after her column appeared and said he was “perplexed about the perceived level of anger as I have so far heard only from her, a local television station and exactly one Utica resident.”
Yes, to repeat his observation: There was no major outrage over his photos, as the editor claimed.
You see, people who are over-the-top in love with Utica may have justifications but they are in the minority. Poll after poll after poll shows a solid majority of area residents are not happy with the key “quality of life” indicators: overall life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behavior, work environment and basic access.
The OD’s own unscientific poll in the wake of the photo flap found that most people (about 70 percent of the 500 or so respondents at the time I voted) agreed with the depiction of the city in the pictures (I forget the exact question).
Who are these people? As one of them, I can tell you we are not the “grumps,” the simply cranky individuals, once mocked by the former OD publisher in a column shortly before the editor-photographer flap, reacting to the latest “happiness index” that ranked the Utica-Rome area near the bottom while putting Hawaii at the top.
The poll respondents are the clerk at the electronics store, the hotel maids, the college professors, the grocery store stockroom workers, the waiters at your favorite restaurant . . . just your everyday people.
I’d bet even many of the OD’s vaunted teen all-stars are in their number, along with their parents. How many will choose to stay here or even return here sometime in their post-college careers? Less than half, I believe.
So, those with the “love it or leave it” mindset may ask, “Why are you here?”
My wife and I came to Clinton DESPITE Utica – despite our drive through the sad, drab city on our way from the Thruway, down Genesee Street to the village. We took a gamble on quaint, attractive Clinton, though, for business reasons (we bought the weekly newspaper). And we found our new home a wonderful place to raise our young family — great friends, the Hamilton College connections, great school, great sports, great music and plenty of news to keep two young journalists hopping.
The point: the Utica area is what it is. A mostly cloudy, mostly ordinary small town. It has very nice people (just like the ones in my former homes in Westfield, N.J., Boston, Chicago, Kingsport (Tenn.), Hickory (N.C.) Bluff City (Tenn.), Bristol (Va.)). It has some quality schools and community features (museums, art centers, nature walks, et.). So do countless other places in America.
If you were born and raised here, chances are you have strong feelings for it — nostalgia beats objectivity. My sons can’t wait to come back here for visits.
Fine, enjoy. But why try and make it something it is not — some unique and wonderful place to live, a little undiscovered slice of heaven? It may be this to you, but remember it is not this for many others, and with good reason.
They have family here, jobs here, many happy memories here. They just find so much to enjoy here.
So far, so good.
But for many there is at least one ugly outgrowth of this love affair. To them, it is extremely important that their hometown also be held in high regard by any and all.
God help anyone who dares utter a disparaging word or issue a critical report about the Utica area, as seems to happen at least once a year. (The latest coming a few weeks ago with a Forbes magazine ranking the area as having the third worst climate for business and careers.)
The “critics” are vilified in print and online as ill-informed and ignorant. If they have the courage to identify themselves as fellow residents, they get the good ole “love it or leave it” retort — words usually aimed by super patriots/jingoists at level-headed patriots who raise questions about the absolute wonderfulness of the United States of America.
As you may have guessed by now, I just don’t get this provincialism, this emotional defense of a living area, this anger that someone may think you’re not living in one of the best places on earth.
As a person who has lived for extended periods in 10 different locales, and has family and friends residing in many more, I can attest that great people, great schools, great community leaders, great natural beauty, great businesses and, yes Uticans, even great local foods and great pizza exist in copious quantities throughout our great land.
People in the Utica area certainly have every right to claim their own greatness in all of the categories listed above. They just don’t have the right to posit superiority in any of them — that’s just being blind — or to get hyper defensive when someone finds fault.
To use the popular paraphrase of a line from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: “Me thinks they doth protest too much.”
To be clear on that point (from Wikipedia): “The phrase's actual meaning implies the increasing likelihood of suppressed feelings for the contrary of that which is being argued. i.e., the more passionate and fervent the argument, the greater likelihood the cause is a suppression of belief for the contrary argument, and the subsequent confirmation that it is the (actual) truer statement.”
Put another way, if this area was really as wonderful as all these passionate defenders claim, they wouldn’t have to go around loudly blasting its critics or trumpeting its virtues. They could calmly slough off criticism, confident in the virtues of their chosen hometown while privately aware that, like all areas of the world, it has its weaknesses. Big deal.
That’s how most of the really nice places, like my current 33-year hometown of Clinton, function — with a quiet confidence.
If anything, these communities are loath to loudly proclaim their virtues lest they attract an influx of new residents who may not fully appreciate the wonderfulness of their surroundings. (At the same time, I’ve seen many new residents who do immediately recognize what a prize location they’ve just found and then want to quickly close the door behind them, stopping all new developments or community growth.)
So, as Shakespeare would no doubt see, dwellers in Greater Utica, both the self-confident ones and the hyper-sensitive ones, evidently doth realize a lot of negative things exist here. Many are working hard and long to counter this and bring good things to the community.
Understandably, some involved in those efforts feel compelled to rebuff the area’s detractors lest their progress be impeded by negative attitudes within the community itself or those thinking about moving here.
But many other defenders go beyond simple spinning or fact-checking the narrative.
And I’m not just talking about those anonymous social media commenters or tweeters who plague all current-day public discourse. Many of the extremists have been community leaders or government officials, pressed to state politically correct loud defenses of the area lest they lose voters/business.
In my observations over the years, one particularly awful such case came in the spring of 2012, when the then-editor of the Utica Observer-Dispatch reacted harshly to the work of an award-winning freelance photographer who stopped by and snapped a few shots of downtown Utica.
(Blogger side note: I’ll refrain from naming the individuals involved. Their identities are not germane to the issue and I really don’t want to involve them personally at this juncture, three years removed from the dispute. The reason I have so much information on this particular situation is that I saved, in my computer files, what was publicly written at the time, intending to send my reaction to the OD, but I never got around to it. )
Dozens of his photos appeared under the headline “Utica Struggles” in slideshows featured on the websites of the Albany Times Union and USA Today. Among other things, the editor pointed out in a more than 1,000-word demagogic rebuttal that the pictures showed “dilapidated buildings with broken windows and graffiti marks, empty and lonely streets and people without jobs and, seemingly, without hope.
“Local people were puzzled and annoyed at the narrow focus of the package. There’s no mention of the Boilermaker, the thriving immigrant population, the safe neighborhoods, the burgeoning nanotech industry, the widely-respected colleges and much more.”
She goes on to depict the photos as misleading and misrepresentative, basically accusing the photographer — a well-traveled professional and winner of the 2006 World Press Photo of the Year award — of shoddy journalism and having an agenda to only show the negative side of Utica as part of his project.
It was a stunning overreaction to a simple series of photos that candidly took a look at one aspect of Utica as an example of one upstate community trying “to make the transition from a former manufacturing hub,” a situation the editor did not refute.
The editor also agreed that Utica is struggling and the photos accurately depict elements of its problem. No, what she wanted was a totally different story, something entirely removed from the photographer’s limited intent — an all-inclusive profile of the City of Utica.
Whaa?
Geez, any person looking at such pictures could see the photographer’s openly narrow focus. It was clearly not supposed to be a feature on all things Utica.
It’s like someone faulting news reports on the current refugee crisis in Europe for not also showing the many wonderful things also taking place in Hungary, Germany, Greece, etc.
“I didn’t have an agenda,” the photographer told the editor. She noted that he spent one day in Utica, “parked his car, and walked around Genesee Street and nearby neighborhoods, talking with those he found in the streets.”
“It really bothers me that people think this is negative,” said the photographer.
But the editor did not buy it:
“He said his project was part of a series about the economy in smaller post-industrial cities. ‘My interest is old American cities and what is happening there,’ he said.
“He added that the photo gallery wasn’t really about Utica but that the city is just representative of what has gone horribly wrong around the country.
“Which to me sounds like an agenda. Go find a city that looks like what is wrong with America. How else to explain that, if (the photographer) ate lunch at the New York City Gourmet Deli as he said, he missed the beautiful Stanley Center for the Arts across the street? Or the world-class Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute up the hill?
“He said he did ‘street photography,’ meaning he only shot what he saw on that particular day. This is a way of explaining why he didn’t contact any city officials, community activists, historians, artists, business people or anyone else who may have been working (and not on the street) the day he came through town. He didn’t look very hard to find things that didn’t fit his narrow and stereotyped image of what Utica is.
“(He) repeatedly said that, as a journalist, it wasn’t his job to be a cheerleader for the area. He’s right. That isn’t my job either. But just as the picture is not all sunshine and roses, it is not all doom and gloom either. While each extreme serves its own agenda, neither one tells the true story -- which is more nuanced and messy than you can capture in a day.
“We are aware of our unemployment numbers, educational and economic challenges. The issues facing Utica and cities like it are not simple and did not spring up in the past few months or years. They are complicated and represent economic trends that have hammered American cities for decades: suburban sprawl, a switch from manufacturing to service industries, uneven access to quality education and healthcare. Add to that our mix of many immigrant populations and you have a complex set of challenges for the region.
“And ones the community is addressing every day, as evidenced by Utica’s growth, which has increased in population by nearly 3 percent since 2000, according to U.S. Census data, and success – seven out of ten seniors graduate from Thomas R. Proctor High School now and the rate continues to climb. Our growing, nationally-recognized microbrewery has served as the cornerstone for the resurgence of Varick Street, where (the photographer) stopped for a drink during his brief visit. An entire downtown block of Bleecker Street was saved from demolition and every single building was renovated. There are many more examples.
“In our lengthy phone conversation, (the photographer) was clearly passionate about what he called the “crisis situation” in this country, concerned for the most vulnerable members of our community and worried about what kind of world will be left for his daughter and all other children.
“We in the Mohawk Valley share his passion to make our city a better place, to help those who are in need, and to solve the issues that face our region. Yet when I look around, I don’t simply see the lonely faces and abandoned buildings. I see the thousands of caring people who turn out for the Heart Run and Ride for Missing Children each year, who volunteer in extraordinary numbers for all kinds of causes, who take pride in this place we call home.”
Clearly, the editor was pulling an “Emily Litella.” She was a fictional character played by the late comedian Gilda Radner in a series of appearances on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” She famously went on furious rants in her editorial rebuttals, defending issues that she misheard: “What’s all this fuss about violins on television?” or “”What’s all this fuss about Soviet jewelry?”
This editor went on a furious rant about something she misread, seeing an innocent, sincere portrayal of her town’s legitimate problems as an unbalanced, unprofessional attack.
(Blogger’s note: This editor, despite her passionate proclamations for Utica, soon left the area entirely. Such is not an unusual occurrence. Newspaper editors often come to a town, take up the party line of how absolutely wonderful their new home is —and how smart and successful they were to choose it!! — and then leave when the next better offer comes along, former hometown nirvana be damned)
The newspaper followed up the editor’s column with a front-page story headlined “Utica’s Image Problem,” which reported on an outpouring of support for a new pro-Utica photo website — which had a whopping 1,000 views by that time. Now, the Mohawk Valley has close to 500,000 residents. Oneida County has about 233,000 residents. Utica’s population is more than 62,000. One thousand views of a website is nothing to brag about.
Meanwhile, the photographer himself said he was surprised by the editor’s rant. He wrote the paper soon after her column appeared and said he was “perplexed about the perceived level of anger as I have so far heard only from her, a local television station and exactly one Utica resident.”
Yes, to repeat his observation: There was no major outrage over his photos, as the editor claimed.
You see, people who are over-the-top in love with Utica may have justifications but they are in the minority. Poll after poll after poll shows a solid majority of area residents are not happy with the key “quality of life” indicators: overall life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behavior, work environment and basic access.
The OD’s own unscientific poll in the wake of the photo flap found that most people (about 70 percent of the 500 or so respondents at the time I voted) agreed with the depiction of the city in the pictures (I forget the exact question).
Who are these people? As one of them, I can tell you we are not the “grumps,” the simply cranky individuals, once mocked by the former OD publisher in a column shortly before the editor-photographer flap, reacting to the latest “happiness index” that ranked the Utica-Rome area near the bottom while putting Hawaii at the top.
The poll respondents are the clerk at the electronics store, the hotel maids, the college professors, the grocery store stockroom workers, the waiters at your favorite restaurant . . . just your everyday people.
I’d bet even many of the OD’s vaunted teen all-stars are in their number, along with their parents. How many will choose to stay here or even return here sometime in their post-college careers? Less than half, I believe.
So, those with the “love it or leave it” mindset may ask, “Why are you here?”
My wife and I came to Clinton DESPITE Utica – despite our drive through the sad, drab city on our way from the Thruway, down Genesee Street to the village. We took a gamble on quaint, attractive Clinton, though, for business reasons (we bought the weekly newspaper). And we found our new home a wonderful place to raise our young family — great friends, the Hamilton College connections, great school, great sports, great music and plenty of news to keep two young journalists hopping.
The point: the Utica area is what it is. A mostly cloudy, mostly ordinary small town. It has very nice people (just like the ones in my former homes in Westfield, N.J., Boston, Chicago, Kingsport (Tenn.), Hickory (N.C.) Bluff City (Tenn.), Bristol (Va.)). It has some quality schools and community features (museums, art centers, nature walks, et.). So do countless other places in America.
If you were born and raised here, chances are you have strong feelings for it — nostalgia beats objectivity. My sons can’t wait to come back here for visits.
Fine, enjoy. But why try and make it something it is not — some unique and wonderful place to live, a little undiscovered slice of heaven? It may be this to you, but remember it is not this for many others, and with good reason.