No One Understands New York

People on Twitter have a recurring bit of sport trying to figure out which states or cities fit into "the Midwest." After a recent round of maps, a user named Spencer Quain put out this county-level map of U.S. regions, based on his knowledge as a geographer:


Looking at Quain's choices, I don't find much to argue with in most of the country, as far as I am familiar with it from my travels, or from the upper Midwest around Minnesota, which I am very familiar with. I don't argue with the choice to not use the term Midwest, either. But my one objection  is this:

Quain, like so many others I have seen make statements about the areas of our country, does not understand New York State north of, say, Kingston.


Here's a close-up of the key, including just the colors used in New York:


First, Quain puts the part of the state from Buffalo along Lake Erie within the Rust Belt... okay, that's  fair for the urban areas, but much of the rest of it is either a tourism or farming economy and really always has been.

The split in the Adirondacks is more bizarre. Just the counties adjacent to Vermont are part of New England? (And that's cutting slack for calling any part of New York "New England" in the first place, of course.) The very rural areas in the middle of the mountains and the protected park area are in the Rust Belt?

The Greater New York area extends too far. Delaware and Otsego Counties, on the very outer edges of the Catskills? Albany, Schenectady and Troy? What?

I don't know what Mid-Atlantic means when you're across a mountain range from the ocean, or why it applies to Broome, Tioga, Tomkins, and the other green counties on this map. (That probably goes for the northern part of Pennsylvania included as well.)

Oh, and Appalachia. You may be surprised to see it extending into New York, but I wasn't because I come from a county that was classified as part of that region by the federal government back in the 1960s... and that county is not colored brown on this map. So Quain missed that as well. Only Steuben County — home of Corning — is in Appalachia? Not Chemung or Tioga? Have you been to Tioga County? I have.

Given Quain's region names, I don't know how I would have named these areas of New York differently, but I guess that's my point. Upstate New York doesn't fit these categories. Maybe it's because I've been gone too long and have forgotten how its parts diverge, but I think New York north of somewhere along the Hudson has more in common with itself than with any of the areas around it.