Tag Archives: walking tour

A Walk in Watkins

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We took a walk in Watkins recently, and it’s a good place to do so. Although we associate Watkins with its spectacular glen, most of the village itself is as flat as a pan. The streets are rectilinear. While the town is busy, especially in summer, most of the time you can get around comfortably on foot, and while Franklin Street is also Route 14, Watkins Glen has a good array of signals and crosswalks. There’s plenty to look at, and there’s even a free municipal parking lot (Third Street, just behind the Chamber of Commerce).
Watkins Glen is like Bath and Corning, in that it doesn’t have a “Main Street” – Watkins has Franklin Street instead. (Some places, like Wayland and Hammondsport, DO have Main Streets, but changing traffic patterns leave them not quite as “main” as they were planned to be.) Bath DOES have a “Maine Street,” though, right next to Vermont Street.
Seneca Lake draws walkers like a magnet draws iron filings. While Cayuga Lake is a little longer, Seneca is decidedly broader and definitely deeper, making it the largest Finger Lake in both volume and area. It’s not quite an inland sea, but it behaves like one, with waves running up the lake to crash against the stone seawalls of the Watkins marina. Of course there are gulls aplenty, but depending on the season you can also spot coots, buffleheads, loons, eagles, osprey, cormorants, and plenty more. A pier jutting well out into the lake has a famed pavilion at the far end. In season you can also see (and book a cruise on) the schooner “True Love,” on which Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly honeymooned (and sang the song of that title) in the movie musical “High Society.”
This waterfront is mostly for pleasure craft nowadays, but time was when it was a hardworking transshipment point. Roads converged here from Horseheads, Corning, Hammondsport, Geneva, and Ithaca. More importantly, Seneca Lake welcomed a canal at Watkins, connecting down into Pennsylvania. And even more important yet, several railroads and a trolley line stopped here. By 1876, as tourism boomed, a brand-new elegant station welcomed visitors. It’s now the Seneca Station Harbor Restaurant, with a spectacular view of the lake.
Most of the Franklin Street structures are historic. A. B. Frost bought a marble business as soon as he got back from the Civil War, and around 1870 put up the three-story iron works at 2 North Franklin. Municipal Hall (303 North Franklin) was a Works Project Administration project during the New Deal. The garage at 111 North Franklin started out in 1874 as a livery stable. Which makes it especially cool that the Glen Theater (112 North Franklin) opened its doors in 1924. Thirty years between livery stable and picture palace! Wow! What a transition, in far less than a single lifetime! (They preserve the original period interior. We love it.)
While you walk you can also keep your eyes peeled for hall of fame blocks set into the sidewalks, honoring racing car drivers – or look up a little and you’ll find huge racing murals on exterior walls. Watkins Glen folks take their racers seriously. There’s now a closed course a little outside of town, but you can visit the original 1948 Grand Prix start line in front of the courthouse. Pick up a brochure, and you can drive the original route yourself.
The Glen, of course, is the town’s stellar attraction, and the state park includes hiking and walking trails (though believe me, they aren’t flat). The 580-mile Finger Lakes Trail wends through the park, and then on sidewalk to the other end of town, where it hits open fields and starts to climb again. Likewise the Catharine Valley Trail begins in Watkins at Lafayette Park, following the old canal-and-trolley route down to Montour Falls.
We first saw Watkins Glen in 1995 when we stopped downtown for lunch as we passed through, just before my wife had open heart surgery. When we moved to Bath a year and half later we said, “Oh, good – we’ll be near Watkins Glen!” It’s a good town to visit. We like it a lot. Good memories.

Join Us for a Walking Tour of Painted Post!

Once upon a time, there was a painted post.

*This was a shaped and embellished tree trunk, standing in a Native American town where the rivers (Conhocton, Canisteo, Tuscarora) came together to form the Chemung. European folks called it the Town by the Painted Post, and the surrounding space they called the Painted Post Country.

*When Steuben County was erected in 1796, Painted Post was one of six “supertowns” that were each eventually subdivided into half a dozen smaller towns. When that process was pretty much done, the Town of Painted Post changed its name to the Town of Corning, after the major landowner.

*The old name passed into history, until a Village was incorporated within the Town of Erwin (part of the original supertown, and also named for a major landowner). The Painted Post name came officially back onto the map, and there it has stayed ever since.

*The rivers were highways back in the early days, and also power sources, as the nearby “gang mills” demonstrated. Painted Post’s position where eastbound/southbound traffic came together… or where westbound/northbound traffic divided… made it a perfect point to stop, to rest, to do business.

*Unfortunately, of course, it was also a perfect spot for flooding. And flood it did, repeatedly, until one flood did away with what remained of the original “painted post.”

*To commemorate that landmark, villagers commissioned one of their neighbors to create a sheet-metal Indian in two-dimensional silhouette… they paid him one cow. This figure watched over the community for decades until a newer version was created. In the late 19th century came a fully-rounded cast-metal statue that actually looked like an Indian, or at least like what someone in a factory THOUGHT an Indian looked like.

*After that statue blew down and got damaged during a 1948 wind storm, a local art teacher created the statue that we know today. Like its predecessor, the new statue stood right smack in the middle of Monument Square, tangling traffic on Water and Hamilton Streets.

*That space (and much of the rest of the village) had flooded in 1901, and catastrophically in 1935, 1946, and 1972. After that last flood the river was moved, and so was the statue, finally out of traffic to the northwest corner of the Square, by the urban-renewal Village Square Shopping Center, replacing a couple of blocks lost to Hurricane Agnes.

*ALL THREE of the 19th-century Indians are in the Painted Post-Erwin Museum at the Depot, which doubled as a makeshift morgue in 1972, accomodating the remains of 14 of the 19 Steuben County residents lost in that terrible night.

*When the Erie Canal opened in 1833, the river routes became quaint memories, making Painted Post a sleepy little place. But that changed in 1851 when the Erie RAILROAD came through, connecting Lake Erie with New York City. A few years later Painted Post also became the start/end point for the Erie’s Rochester Branch. Routes 15 and 17… now succeeded by Routes 415, I-86, and I-99… continue Painted Post’s history as a major transportation hub.

*“I have fallen in love with American names,” wrote Stephen Vincent Benet. “Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast, it is a magic ghost you guard. But I am sick for a newer ghost: Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.”

*We love Painted Post too, and at 4 PM on Friday, June 15, I’ll be leading a historic walking tour of the Village, starting in the Museum at the Depot (where we’ll see those three early Indian figures), winding down to Water Street and Monument Square before making our way back to West High Street Cemetery, where we’lll hear from our own “Cemetery Lady,” Helen Kelly Brink. This free Steuben County Historical Society walk was postponed from June 1, when we had torrential downpours. We hope to see you June 15 – weather permitting!

An Addison Walking Tour

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I recently had the fun of leading a historic walk in Addison, starting with the CENTRAL SCHOOL built in 1929 and still in use. We gathered across the street at VALERIO PARK AND VALERIO PARKWAY. Mr. Valerio paved the street and the sidewalk at his own expense when the new school opened so that the children would not have to walk in mud, because he loved them.  The town held a big celebration to thank him, and the small park is now a center of community events.

*The park includes a VETERANS OF ALL WARS MEMORIAL. Now that our country is 240 years old, and has been at war for a good deal of that, communities are increasingly resorting to this approach.

*Right next to the park is the LIBRARY, originally built (1889) as the YMCA.  “Y” was big in those days, especially in industrial towns and railroad towns, to provide the young man with wholesome environment and activities.  It’s now the public library, one of 18 in Steuben County and 49 region-wide.  Addison’s library was incorporated in 1840, which may make it the oldest in our region.

*OLD VILLAGE HALL MEMORIAL PARK across the street is a small space, but it held a pretty good-sized village hall!  They ran out of money part-way through, and had to get underwriting from the Odd Fellows, in exchange for giving them use of the third floor.  Completed 1907, it unfortunately was finally lost due to arson, after the offices had been moved. Floods came down to here from the Canisteo River AND from Tuscarora Creek.

*Nearby on Main Street stood a major hotel, the AMERICAN HOUSE, very popular with travelers in days gone by.  It was demolished in 1971. 

*A few steps farther up is MIDDLETOWN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. The good folks there will make you welcome Wednesday and Friday afternoons, or by appointment. Just about everyone will enjoy the working model railroad.

*Today’s Main Street was mostly erected after a bad fire in 1879. When you’re walking the street you’re also walking the CRYSTAL HILLS TRAIL, a major branch trail of the Finger Lakes Trail. Keep going north and you’ll strike the main FLT in the woods, around the Bradford/Campbell town line. But you’re simultaneously on the GREAT EASTERN TRAIL, a National Scenic Trail. Keep walking south and you’ll end up in Alabama.

*An earlier MAIN STREET BRIDGE came from the Owego Iron Bridge Company.  Downstream, on the line of Goodhue Street, was a decorative suspension bridge.  This was used for foot traffic only after the 1935 flood, and removed altogether after the flood of 1946.  Osprey and eagles both soar up and down the river.

*Another few steps brings you to the METHODIST CHURCH. The congregation goes back to an 1830 meeting in a schoolhouse.  This site was selected, and work begun, in 1875 after a fire at another location – they wanted more space.  It was dedicated in 1876, and used locally-made bricks in construction.

*Up the hill by WOMBAUGH PARK, the EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER congregation also goes back to schoolhouse meetings, about 1847.  This building, which was finished, consecrated, and paid for in 1860, is in a very interesting Carpenter Gothic style… including pointed arches, steep gables, towers, and vertical planking. Diagonally across the way 12 WALL STREET, built in 1849, also shows Carpenter Gothic style, including lots of gingerbread under the eaves.

*The PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH congregation goes back before 1834.  This building on he other side of the park, dedicated in 1882, also used local bricks.

*Doubling back toward Main Street is the EAGLE HOTEL, built as tavern in 1805 and later expanded to a hotel with livery stable.

*The main line of the ERIE RAILROAD came through in 1850-51 – Daniel Webster and Millard Filllmore rode the ceremonial first rain.  Presidential candidates spoke from the observation cars at the ends of trains pulled up to the still-standing ERIE DEPOT, bringing such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, and Charles Evans Hughes. More prosaically, local producers used the Erie to ship out millions of gallons of milk.

*The WADE’S RENTAL buildings once held a company making “Reliance” bicycles and motorcycles, back in the Glenn Curtiss days. And here, by lovely flower beds along the street, we end our tour.