Geneva: Queen City of the Finger Lakes

Geneva, New York sits on the northern shore of Seneca Lake, the deepest of the Finger Lakes and the deepest lake in New York State, perched on a bluff above the water with a main street of Federal and Greek Revival architecture that speaks to the prosperity of its early years as a regional center of commerce and education. People have called Geneva the Queen City of the Finger Lakes, a title it earned in the early nineteenth century when it was not merely a pleasant lakeside town but a city of genuine ambition, one of the more significant settlements on the young republic's expanding western frontier.

The Finger Lakes are the defining geography of central New York, eleven long, narrow lakes carved by glaciers and deepened by millions of years of geological action. Seneca Lake is the largest and the deepest, reaching more than six hundred feet at its deepest point and extending about thirty-eight miles from north to south. The lake's great depth gives it unusual thermal properties: it almost never freezes. The moderating effect of the lake on surrounding temperatures is what makes the hillside slopes above its shores one of the most productive wine-growing corridors in the eastern United States, a wine region that did not exist in any serious way before the nineteen eighties and now draws visitors from around the world.

Geneva's history is layered with significant firsts. It was here, in January of eighteen forty-nine, that a woman received a medical degree in the United States for the first time, graduating at the top of her class from Geneva Medical College in an act that the medical establishment had nearly prevented. A few miles south of town, on a slope above the lake, stands one of the finest examples of Greek Revival residential architecture in the northeastern United States, built in the eighteen thirties and now preserved as a house museum. And at the northern edge of the city, an agricultural research station has been developing grape varieties and fruit cultivars for the Finger Lakes region since eighteen eighty-two, its work the quiet foundation of an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars today.

The lake, the history, the mansions, the wine, and the firsts that happened here quietly and changed things: Geneva rewards attention.