The treats of New York

If city streets aren't your thing, the Empire State offers more: countryside byways with hamlets and villages and a charming dose of Americana.

By ROBERT N. JENKINS

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 8, 2000

[Times photos: Robert N. Jenkins] Bob Schultz starts the apples-to-cider process, moving apples toward the washing area before a conveyor moves them to the second floor of his Busti Cider Mill.

GREAT VALLEY, N.Y. -- These are the busiest times for Dan Pawlowski and Suzanne Geisz, these October weekends. For Dana Keeler and Bob Schultz, too.

They have pumpkins to sell, beer pumps to pull, wine grapes to process and apples to press.

Customers to chat up as well. Summer isn't the only time the tourists roam western New York state: Changing leaves and fall harvests lure visitors from Toronto, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland. City places, where farm life and produce are encountered only in glossy monthlies and grocery stores.

What the visitors also find is a charming dose of Americana, as obvious as the different architecture and different attitudes.

The call for entries to the Soap Box Derby is still worth space in the newspaper serving Jamestown, for instance, as are amateurish photos of summertime fun sent in by readers. Radio news near Olean might include the arrest of two men for shooting road signs.

In these places, people stepping out of stores, even joggers trotting along, offer a hello to passers-by.

The state police station can be a one-story building that was someone's home until the highway was widened.

In the countryside, narrow clapboard homes from the 19th century, two and three stories tall, often front the barnyards.

Rainbows of flowers in the yards and wash hanging on the line add little splotches of color. Big splotches are the nearby barns, in varying shades of red or white, or just weathered gray.

In more-prosperous towns, some residences immodestly display turrets, wraparound verandas, gingerbread moldings, fish scale sidings, bay windows -- all singing of an era gone for more than a century.

The differences from the big cities continue in these country towns. Bustling Corning's handsomely restored, 1800s-era Market Street is home to three old-style barber shops -- not fern-accented "styling" parlors -- where people actually sit and chat with other customers and the barbers.

Communities on the rural roads post signs declaring themselves not cities but "hamlets" and "villages." Occasionally those declarations are painted large on the broad blades of snowplows, a bit ominous to a visiting Floridian.

Amish children in shirts of royal blue and dresses of emerald green play in the dirt driveways of their farmhouses, near the horse-drawn buggies that carry neon orange triangles on the back, in place of taillights.

Two-lane blacktops wend through valleys filled with crops or gently climb the sides of the old, low mountains. Sunflowers climb to the sky; gangly yellow and purple wildflowers rush up to the shoulder of the road, their disarray mocking the corn rows marching across the flat valleys like ranks of soldiers.

Some of the flatland is planted in pumpkins, squash, apples, hay; there are also pears, beans, tomatoes. There are dairy farms, too, their barnyards and pastures occupied by wide black-and-white Holsteins. Dan Pawlowski fits in here.

Not that he's been a full-time farmer very long. "I spent 20 years as an accountant," he says between bites of a hot dog. "I lived in a suit and tie. But I always kept some beef cattle."

Pumpkin Royalty: Dan and Diane Pawlowski, the rulers of Pumpkinville.

He grew up "a mile and a half down the road" from the hamlet of Great Valley, where he now surveys his empire: Pumpkinville. He and his wife, Diane, and their children were still living close enough to the area that they were familiar with the original Pumpkinville, sort of a glorified roadside stand that sprung up every fall for 27 years.

About five years ago, "the opportunity came up" to buy Pumpkinville, Pawlowski explained. "I've never looked back. I like the outdoor work."

That includes growing pumpkins on about 27 acres, as well as expanding and maintaining the tourist attraction -- it has hayrides, goats to pet, food stands -- since he moved it from the busy highway. Now customers wander a grassy area larger than a city block.

The treats of New York If city streets aren't your thing, the Empire State offers more: countryside byways with hamlets and villages and a charming dose of Americana. Falling for the Finger Lakes region Nature entices visitors to northern New York with 25 state parks. And, with Cornell University at its heart, it's a breeding ground for fine inns, hotels and restaurants. Awash in wine A score of western New York's wineries welcome visitors with free tours that are similar in nature. But it's the tastings that define them. Company town reborn Corning, N.Y., reinvents itself as a prosperous marketplace, with nods to its architectural past and its ties to Corning glassware and Mark Twain. If you go Beyond all the longer articles today about western New York, there are still more places worth visiting, and they run the gamut from geologic wonders to a museum of the history of aviation and its place in warfare. Except as noted, these attractions are open year-round, closing for major holidays:

Pawlowski is also marketing director, though this largely consists of nailing roadside signs to telephone poles or fence posts. "We have to do our own marketing. If we don't do a good job, come winter we're going to have to eat a lot of pumpkins."

That seems unlikely. "We get 100,000 to 110,000 visitors annually," says Pawlowski. "We get maybe 7,500 on a really banging day; I wouldn't have time to talk to you then."

From the third Saturday in September until Halloween, "from 9 till dusk," Pawlowski is among his stands, his "Bootique" selling seasonal indoor and outdoor merchandise. He supervises up to 50 part-time employees, who help pick and sort the six sizes of pumpkins and nine kinds of squash he sells.

On the weekends, Pumpkinville becomes Pawlowskiville: His high school-age son acts as cashier; his daughter drives 300 miles from college to work here; his wife, who has a weekday job, fills in where needed, perhaps tending the machine that churns out pumpkin-flavored doughnuts.

"I get to come to work every day and make families happy," Pawlowski said. And when they clamber out of the car and first see Pumpkinville, "I get to see kids' eyes get big."

Suzanne Geisz gets to see big kids' eyes get big, when they ogle the 13 pulls for imported beers on tap or read the names of the 117 other beers sold in bottles at the Village Tavern. This being Hammondsport, the heart of New York's noted Finger Lakes wine region, the tavern also sells 34 New York wines and ports by the glass.

Geisz glides surely behind the bar, equally at ease dispensing beer or expertise about it. She started out as a big-city girl, a Philadelphian, but now she's a villager and quite content.

"My family was vacationing here when I was 13, and we sat at the front table," she recounts, with a nod of her head toward the window on Hammondsport's square, which includes a gazebo.

"There was a sign in that window with a rhyme about this tavern being for sale. Our house had just been burgled, and my father was a policeman . . . " she says, her voice trailing off.

Her family moved, but after she finished high school in the Hammondsport area, she went back to Philadelphia and got a hotel and restaurant management degree at Drexel. Geisz worked in the city and elsewhere before coming back to the village seven years ago.

Once back in town, "I took a compass and a map and drew a two-hour drive-time circle around Hammondsport," she relates. "You can go pretty far at 65 or 70 miles per hour," ensuring herself plenty of day trips to interesting spots.

But even as she makes one-day trips and plots a monthlong trip to Italy early next year, she spends long workweeks in the tavern. Once a burgers-and-fries place for the tourists, it now typically offers 15 specialty entrees a night, from shark or swordfish prepared four ways to a New Zealand rack of lamb with mango-infused plum sauce to five-spice duck breast.

And the third Thursday of every month is Winemakers' Night, when "The vintners bring bottles in brown paper bags and customers have to guess the blend. They can buy those wines, of course."

Just a nip: Winemaker Dana Keeler tests some of his “24th vintage” fermenting in oak barrels at Heron Hill Winery.

Dana Keeler hopes they do. He's the winemaker for Heron Hill Winery, a few minutes' drive from the Village Tavern up a scenic road that looks down on Keuka Lake. He interrupted his chores one afternoon last month to chat with me, though as Keeler put it:

"I'm only working 60-hour weeks right now, as our harvest nears."

He still had a few days before the planned harvest of chardonnay and pinot noir grapes, to be followed "about October 10th or 12th" by the rieslings.

Keeler notes not how many years he has worked but that this is his 24th vintage. So he has known since May what kind of grapes to expect and when to harvest them. "I looked at the weather patterns back then: We had a cool, wet spring, which doesn't bode well. We know what that kind of weather will do to the final products, so we adjust the yeast cultures or the temperatures that we aid fermentation with, or we allow less (grape) skin contact.

"If you know how to use the tools in your toolbox, you can create a good product."

Those tools range from blending the various grapes to processing them in everything from a $70,000 computerized grape press to aging about 10,000 gallons in new oak barrels. Keeler oversees Heron Hill's 90,000 gallons-a-year capacity.

But he interrupted his work one more time to track me down in the processing cellar and announce, "If you're going to be here tonight, they have a Winemakers' Dinner at the Village Tavern."

Cider rules: Bob Schultz wraps the sliced-apple mash in a cloth, which he will press using his 1890s equipment.

Things are a lot more modest for Bob Schultz. He runs an apple press in the crossroads community of Busti (pronounced bus-TIE), a few miles south of Jamestown. Visitors are invited on autumn weekends to watch the simple process carried out by some old and some new machinery, which produces both apple cider and a great amount of noise.

"Some of the machinery was built in 1890," says Schultz. "I saw it sticking through the roof of an old, collapsed building and bought it."

Then he and his son used their skills as building contractors to construct a three-story shed to house the old press. They painted it barn red, of course.

He orders apples from orchards about 30 miles north, close to Lake Erie, though local folks make appointments to bring their backyard harvests to be pressed. The apples are dumped into a trough, where they are lightly bathed in fresh water and brushed by rollers. Gravity moves the apples onto a noisy wooden conveyor belt that squeaks and clunks and carries them up two floors to the business end of things.

The apples -- sometimes Schultz will add pears for sweetness -- are sliced into a pulpy mash by a series of knives. Contained in a heavy cloth, the mash is placed under a press; there is more noise as Schultz works a series of wooden levers, and then brown juice drains from the cloth into a broad basin on the floor.

It is pumped into a refrigeration tank before flowing into a simple bottling system. Schultz must add a label to each gallon and half-gallon plastic jug noting that the cider has not been pasteurized and thus may contain bacteria. A major difference between cider and apple juice is that the juice has been heated to kill any bacteria.

His machinery creates about 3 gallons from each bushel, a process that takes about a half-hour from apple-washing to cider-bottling. It takes another hour to sterilize the parts, dump the mash and throw the heavy cloths into a washing machine.

Schultz is on his third power source in the 18 years he has had the press and notes, "The basic technology dates to 1890, but it's still very effective. It works good, most of the time."

Though Schultz spends weekdays building things, he is proud of his link to agriculture. "My grandparents had farms. It was common for me to go there as a kid. Some people nowadays have never been to a farm."

So Schultz and his wife, Judy, who is retired from various office jobs, grow some tomatoes next to their produce stand/handcrafts gift shop/bakery and have a couple of year-old goats for visitors to feed.

Judy Schultz does all the baking from scratch, makes jams and jellies, and oversees the cultivation, harvest and processing of flowers into dried bouquets of German statis, sea holly, peonies, larkspur and ornamental grasses.

The couple also sell these items at a farmers' market in nearby Jamestown, but as Bob Schultz noted, "Farming is getting tougher and tougher." Offering some brochures, he said, "We've been turning to agri-tourism."

The way he pronounces the words, it sounds like "egg tourism." But that makes sense, too.

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