New York's Mohawk River Valley between the Albany and Syracuse areas is a place I’ve only passed through on a couple occasions on my way to the Adirondacks or Canada and is a place of which I have generally not had a very positive impression. The towns I’ve passed through mostly seem to be old declining industrial places without many noteworthy sights and quite dull scenery. We stopped in Utica for a night on my first road trip with my family to Canada in 1977. I recall thinking it was a big city because it showed up in yellow in my World Atlas, meaning it had over 100,000 people as of the 1960 census. I think Utica’s population is now down to around 60,000, a significant part of which consists of refugee immigrants from Bosnia and other countries, a kind of resettlement as local economic development because no one else will willingly move there.

I made stops in Utica and Rome on the first cloudy and rainy day of my Upstate New York trip because of two sights I wanted to see – The Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica and Fort Stanwix National Monument in Rome . Passing through both towns, though, I noticed little else of interest and didn’t think they looked nice enough to be interesting to explore on foot in the rain, so I limited myself to the two highlights.

The Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute has a relatively small but high quality collection of mostly American art with a few works my European modernist masters from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I was surprised to find the main museum consisting not of an elegant historical building but a big black modern cube surrounded by a huge green lawn. The architectural style is described as "Internationalist", and it was designed by architect Philip Johnson and opened in 1960, the heyday of black box type museums. A historic mansion called Fountain Elms, the former home of the museum’s founders, is adjacent to the big black cube and is part of the institute and connected by a below ground passage.

Overall I found the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute to be an interesting collection of mostly American art with a good portion of the works by regional upstate New York artists . The museum’s most famous works are four paintings by Hudson River school master Thomas Cole on “The Voyage of Life”, large luminous allegorical works depicting four stages of life – childhood, youth, manhood, and old age – as a traveler on a small boat in a river. They’re probably Cole’s most famous works, and ones I’ve seen a few times over the last two years. How did I see them if I’ve never been to Utica? Well, they were on tour of several museums across the country a few years ago and I happened to hit the Taft Museum in Cincinnati while they were being exhibited there in 2014. Cole later painted another four series version of the same subject which is now part of the collection of the National Gallery in Washington. I saw them a few months later on a trip to DC. This virtual overdose on the “Voyage of Life” over the last couple years seems fitting to me as I’ve been dealing with the illness and death of my parents and have been wondering where I fit into the journey as I near age 50. Am I still in manhood or am I getting into old age already?

There are rather few units of the National Park Service in Upstate New York where many of the historic sites are administered by the state rather than federal government . Until planning out this little road trip to central and western New York, I couldn’t have named any beyond the Hudson Valley, but there are a couple. Fort Stanwix National Monument consists of a Revolutionary War era frontier fort – well, a recreation of that fort since its construction was almost entirely wood. The fort is best known for a prolonged siege in August 1777 by the British and Indians when it was held by American forces as part of the Saratoga Campaign. The fort was originally built at was called Oneida Carrying Place, a short ford between the Mohawl River (Hudson River Drainage) and Wood Creek (Lake Ontario drainage) and was the site of an even earlier fort where a 1768 peace treaty with the local Indians was negotiated by the British. Fort Stanwix has some reasonably interesting displays on both life in the fort during that era and the broader early history of the region and the relationship between the Indian tribes (Mohawk, Iroquois, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca) and British and colonial forces.

All in all this was some pretty good stuff for a rainy day. I based myself in the Syracuse area for a few days while heading out in different directions each day because my gym chain (Gold’s Gym) has two locations in the Syracuse area, so I could keep up the good work in evenings and early mornings while on the road. And a wonderful gym the DeWitt/East Syracuse location is – big, airy, nice locker room, good equipment, pool and hot tubs. If my home gym in central New Jersey were as nice I think I’d be much better shape.