How Oneonta earned the score
Population ~13,000 year-round, plus roughly 7,300 students at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick.
Situation A 140-year-old rail and college hub in the northern Catskill foothills that everyone passes through on the way to somewhere famous.
Action New York State named Oneonta a Downtown Revitalization Initiative winner and spent $9.645 million rebuilding the walkable core across seven projects.
Result A Visitor Impact Score of 55, the Emerging band: real assets and real foot traffic, but a visitor story still under-told. The opportunity is to stop being the place you sleep before Cooperstown and become the reason people add a day to the trip.
The Situation: A Hub Hiding In Plain Sight
Drive the back roads of central New York long enough and you start to notice that all of them seem to bend toward Oneonta. That is not an accident. It is the whole point of the place. Tucked into the foothills of the northern Catskills, on a hillside above the Susquehanna River, Oneonta has carried the nickname “City of the Hills” for well over a century, and it is one of the northernmost cities in the entire Appalachian region. The hills are the brand. They are also the reason the railroads came.
The town grew up around a hamlet called Milfordville around 1800, took the name Oneonta in 1832, and incorporated as a village in 1848. The word itself comes from the Mohawk and is popularly read as “place of open rocks,” a nod to the stone outcrops that gave the hillside its shape. But the version of Oneonta that still defines the place arrived with the railroad in the mid-1800s, when the Albany and Susquehanna line reached the valley and turned a farming hamlet into a rail center almost overnight. By 1908 the village had enough heft to become a city. The official record is dry about it. The bird’s-eye map up top, drawn in 1884 and now held in the Library of Congress, is not. You can see the ambition in the grid.
The roundhouse that punched above its weight
Here is the fact locals lead with, and they are right to. In 1906 the Delaware and Hudson built a locomotive roundhouse in Oneonta that the city has long described as the largest in the world, a title it held for roughly a quarter of a century. The numbers still sound made up: a brick rotunda 428 feet across, 52 engine stalls, something like 1.5 million bricks, and nearly a mile and three-quarters of track curled up inside one building. The city’s own visitor history tells the story with obvious pride. The roundhouse ran until 1954, when diesel made it obsolete, and the last of it came down decades later. What it left behind is a town that still thinks of itself as a place where serious work happens, not a postcard.
Wait, was it really the biggest in the world?
Worth a footnote, because honesty is part of the brand here. The “largest in the world” line is how Oneonta has told the story for generations, and the scale was genuinely enormous for its day. The William G. Pomeroy Foundation, which researches and verifies historic markers, is more careful: it notes that contemporary reporting called it one of the finest and largest on the D&H system, and that some have argued it was the largest built at the time, without nailing down a single definitive record. Either way, a 52-stall, quarter-mile-around brick roundhouse in a town of this size is a staggering thing to have built. The pride is earned even with the asterisk.
The two colleges that never leave
The other engine, the one still running, is education. SUNY Oneonta opened in 1889 as the Oneonta Normal School, training teachers in a building still affectionately called “Old Main,” and today enrolls around 5,800 students. Hartwick College moved into town in 1928 and adds roughly 1,500 more. For a city of about 13,000 year-round residents, that is an enormous, renewing population of young people who fill the restaurants, the music venues, and the sidewalks for most of the year. A town this size with two colleges is not a small town. It is a small city that happens to feel intimate.
The Task: Turn A Pass-Through Into A Place
Geography handed Oneonta a gift and a problem in the same envelope. The gift: it sits about 30 miles from Cooperstown and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, one of the most visited small-town attractions in America, and it is the closest real city with hotels, chain stores, an interstate, and an airport corridor within reach. During induction weekends and summer baseball tournaments, when Cooperstown’s tiny lodging supply fills up, the overflow lands in Oneonta. The regional tourism office openly routes visitors through Oneonta, Albany, and Binghamton when Cooperstown is full.
The problem is right there inside the gift. When you are the practical option, the place people sleep and gas up and grab dinner before the thing they actually came for, you capture the spend but not the story. Otsego County pulled in $389 million in visitor spending in 2023, supporting an estimated $135 million in local labor income and saving the average county household about $1,835 a year in taxes that visitors effectively cover. Oneonta touches a real share of that money. The task is to make sure visitors leave remembering Oneonta as a destination, not just an exit.
What “Emerging” actually means for a town like this
A Visitor Impact Score of 55 puts Oneonta in the Emerging band. In plain language, that means the raw ingredients are clearly here, the history, the foot traffic, the food, the arts, the location, but the town has not yet packaged them into a single, unmistakable reason to visit that a stranger could repeat in one sentence. Towns that climb out of Emerging tend to do one thing: they pick their truest story and tell it relentlessly until it sticks. Oneonta has at least three good candidate stories. Choosing is the work.
The Action: What Oneonta Already Put On The Board
The most encouraging thing about Oneonta is that the investment is not hypothetical. In 2016, New York State named Oneonta a winner of its competitive Downtown Revitalization Initiative and committed roughly $10 million, ultimately $9.645 million across seven projects, to remake the core of the city. The state’s own language is telling. It describes Oneonta as “an urban center of commerce, higher education and culture” that is “ideally situated as a regional center for economic growth, the local food and beverage industry, tourism, heritage and the arts.” When a state writes a check that size, it is making a bet, and the bet was that Oneonta’s downtown is worth visiting in its own right.
That money went into real things: a Food and Craft Beverage Innovation District, new upper-floor housing to keep downtown lived-in after dark, facade and signage grants for small businesses, and a new transit center on Market Street that knits the bus lines into the walkable core. The DRI work wrapped with a ribbon-cutting that closed out all seven projects. A downtown that has been physically re-stitched is a downtown that can hold a visitor for an afternoon instead of a fuel stop.
The food story is already legendary
If Oneonta has a single ambassador, it is a chicken. Brooks’ House of Bar-B-Q opened in 1961, growing out of a family poultry business that dated back to 1912, and over six decades it has become the thing people drive in from out of town specifically to eat. The restaurant claims the largest enclosed barbecue pit east of the Mississippi, and on a busy day the smell carries down the hill. A local library history traces the family’s slow pivot from selling eggs to pioneering barbecued chicken. This is exactly the kind of ownable, repeatable, only-here story that destinations are built on. You cannot get Brooks’ chicken anywhere else, and people know it.
The arts run deeper than a college town’s usual
For a city this size, the cultural depth is unusual. The Catskill Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1953, has been giving the region its own hometown orchestra for more than seventy years, performing with professional union musicians at the Foothills Performing Arts Center downtown. The Community Arts Network of Oneonta runs out of the Wilber Mansion, an 1875 banker’s house that was rescued from decline and turned into a center for arts education, and every September it spills onto Main Street for a free two-day arts festival. Layer in the colleges’ galleries and performance calendars and you have a downtown with a real cultural pulse, not just a couple of murals.
And a sports heritage most towns would kill for
Here is a piece of trivia that genuinely surprises people: from 1979 to 2010, Oneonta was the home of the National Soccer Hall of Fame. The museum has since closed and the official Hall moved on, but the soccer roots run deep, anchored by a celebrated SUNY Oneonta program and a dedicated soccer campus on the edge of town. Combine that with Damaschke Field, one of the oldest continuously used ballparks in the country, and Oneonta has a sports-heritage story that pairs naturally with its baseball-pilgrim neighbors down the road.
The college energy, once a year, at full volume
For a sense of how much life two colleges pump into a small city, consider OH-Fest. The collaborative SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick spring festival debuted in 2006 with Blues Traveler and a crowd estimated at more than 15,000, described at the time as the largest outdoor event in the city’s history. The format has shifted over the years between downtown’s Neahwa Park and the campuses, but the underlying fact holds: this is a small city with the audience and appetite of a much bigger one. Channeling that energy outward, toward visitors and not just students, is part of the upside the score is pointing at.
The Result: A Score Of 55 And A Clear Verdict
The Visitor Impact Score weighs a town’s drawing power, its built and natural assets, its access, and the strength of its visitor economy against the size and stage of the place. Oneonta lands at 55, squarely in the Emerging band, Tier 1 provisional. That is a genuinely respectable score for a small inland city with no beach, no ski mountain, and no single marquee attraction of its own. It reflects a place that is doing a lot right: a historic, recently reinvested downtown; an outsized arts and food scene; tens of thousands of college visitors and their families cycling through every year; and a location that sits inside one of upstate New York’s busiest tourism corridors.
What keeps the number in the Emerging band rather than higher is the gap between assets and identity. Oneonta has the ingredients of a clear destination but has not yet fused them into a one-sentence reason to come. Ask a visitor what Cooperstown is and they say baseball. Ask what Lake Placid is and they say the Olympics. Ask what Oneonta is, and most people who have been there will pause, because they came for something else and only discovered the town by accident. That accident is the whole opportunity.
The biggest opportunity, stated plainly: Oneonta should stop competing to be the cheapest bed near Cooperstown and start marketing itself as the day you add to the trip. The railroad heritage, the Brooks’ chicken pilgrimage, the symphony and the Mansion, the walkable reinvested downtown, the soccer and baseball lineage, these are not a backup plan for a rainy day in Cooperstown. Packaged together and told as one story, “City of the Hills, the front door to the Catskills and Cooperstown,” they are a reason to arrive a day early and leave a day late.
The Takeaway: Make Them Add A Day
Oneonta does not need to invent anything. It needs to decide what it is and say it out loud, on every sign, every map, every welcome packet handed to a baseball family checking in for the weekend. The raw materials are unusually strong for a town this size: a Library-of-Congress-worthy railroad history, a barbecue destination people already drive in for, a 70-year-old symphony, a rescued 1875 mansion full of working artists, two colleges’ worth of cultural programming, and a downtown the State of New York just spent nearly ten million dollars rebuilding. The score of 55 is not a ceiling. It is a starting line for a town that has quietly done the hard part already.
The City of the Hills has spent 140 years being the place everyone passes through. The next chapter is convincing them to stop the car.