I know exactly where it is. I grew up half an hour north of there. My point is that Western New Yorkers prefer to not be lumped in as “Upstate.”
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Imagine if that was salt water.
Years ago I poked around the Ontario side of Lake Erie in the winter, I forget where exactly, but it was all sand and wind. The sand buried the yards, covered the roads, engulfed the soul. It was everywhere, and got in everything.
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I think you’re taking your own preference and extending it to the whole region. I’ve a lot of family in and around Buffalo, bunch of friends in and from Rochester and Randolph, all downright proud to be Upstate New York.
There isn’t a common usage of the term that doesn’t include Western New York, as the whole Upstate/Downstate dichotomy exists to distinguish the New York City Metro and coastal areas from the inland part of the state. I am on Eastern Long Island, that does not mean I am not on Long Island, in the New York City Metro, or in the Downstate Region.
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Very well, I was using a figure of speech in which the whole refers to the part. It was a Schenectady synecdoche.
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Do they have power lines or trees there?
Is that sand mixed with the ice that makes it look beige?
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I remember when I was about three or four, my brother had to climb out the attic portico of our house to go get milk and other groceries from the corner store. The snow had drifted completely over the doors and windows and in some places the roof of our ranch home. This was late 70’s in South Bend, IN.
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I lived in Buffalo for 10 years, and my wife’s entire family are from there.
We apparently know different people in the area, because when I was there you could start a fight by calling Western New York “Upstate.” Exactly nobody that I knew would accept that appellation. Maybe it was the times. I lived there in the 90s when Buffalo was still getting its post-industrial feet back under it and had a chip on its collective shoulder about having its own identity.
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God, I’m glad I live in Houston TX.
I’ve mostly just encountered it the other way. Nasty reactions to friends from that section of the state from townies in the other end of upstate.
Residents of Buffalo are apparently coastal elites!
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That’s just good old Lake Erie water.
(The color comes from mud that got kicked up from the storm before the freeze.)
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According to SNL, that’s the source for a cold glass of Swill! 
I can still remember the jingle they played as it slowly oozed into a glass…
Anticipation, anticipation
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We get the same thing further west along the Lake in Cleveland, but not as much this year. The warm (not frozen counts as warm in this case) water from the lake gets blown as a fine spray and coats the sub freezing surfaces. You get some really cool beard effects on things near the lake.
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That’s around the time I went to work for the EPA. Part of our job was tracking the often-secret routes effluent took when traveling from corporations to tributaries and eventually into Lake Erie. Fortunately, most of the worst offenders (like one steel mill that had hidden culverts dripping “pickle liquor” out of a cliff directly into the Black River) have closed down.
In those days the freezing point of Lake Erie water was probably well below 0C.
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coast of Lake Erie!
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The North Coast!
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Captivating historic home.
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It counts!
Apparently Lake Champlain doesn’t.
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The ice houses look really cool, but when the summer comes I think the owners will regret having built them. A slush house is not so fun to live in.
