How Watkins Glen earned the score

Let’s Meet Watkins Glen, NY

Watkins Glen is the county seat of Schuyler County, New York, and by the 2020 census it held 1,829 people. That is a small number to attach to two national reputations, and the village wears both without apology. It sits at the southern tip of Seneca Lake, the deepest and one of the largest of the Finger Lakes, where the water funnels down to a working waterfront of docks, a state marina, and a main street that climbs away from the lake toward the hills. Most towns this size are lucky to be known for one thing. Watkins Glen is known, separately and to different people, for a gorge and for a racetrack, and the story of the place is really the story of how it learned to hold both at once.

Ask a hiker in Ohio about Watkins Glen and they will describe a stone staircase threading under waterfalls. Ask a race fan in the Carolinas and they will describe a fast, undulating road course and a village that once hosted Grand Prix drivers on its public streets. Neither picture is wrong. Neither is complete. The rest of this report is about how a village of under two thousand ended up carrying both.

How the Town Found Its First Thing: The Gorge

The gorge came first, and it came by geology. Glen Creek drops about 400 feet over roughly two miles as it approaches Seneca Lake, cutting through soft shale and sandstone to carve 19 named waterfalls, plunge pools, and narrow slot passages beneath cliffs that rise as high as 200 feet. In 1863 a newspaperman named Morvalden Ely opened the glen as a private tourist attraction, charging admission and building the first wooden walkways. New York State bought the glen in 1906 and made it Watkins Glen State Park, one of the oldest parks in the state system, and set about replacing the wood with something permanent.

What they built is the reason the park still works. The Gorge Trail is a stone path, roughly a mile and a half long, that climbs about 832 steps and passes over, under, and behind the water. It threads a spiral tunnel, crosses a suspension bridge that hangs high above the creek, and walks hikers directly through the spray of Cavern Cascade. The Civilian Conservation Corps rebuilt much of the stonework in the 1930s, and the craftsmanship is a large part of why a two-mile walk feels like an event rather than a stroll. You are not looking at the gorge from a railing. You are inside it.

The recognition followed the stonework. Watkins Glen has repeatedly landed near the top of national state-park rankings, including a number three finish in USA Today’s Readers’ Choice poll for best state park, and the park now reports well over a million visitors a year, with figures commonly cited around 1.4 million. For a park attached to a village of 1,829 people, that ratio is the whole point. The anchor is far larger than the town, which is exactly the condition Creative City Developments looks for.

How the Town Found Its Second Thing: The Race

The racetrack did not come from geology. It came from one determined person. In 1948 a local law student and sports-car enthusiast named Cameron Argetsinger laid out a 6.6-mile course on the public roads in and around the village, over pavement, concrete, dirt, and a railroad crossing, and staged the first post-war road race in the United States through the streets of Watkins Glen. It was, by most accounts, the event that launched American sports-car road racing. Drivers ran past the same storefronts that sold groceries on Monday.

Street racing has a hard ceiling, and the village hit it. A 1952 crash killed a spectator, a child, and injured others, and the race was pushed off the public streets and onto safer ground. The answer was to build something permanent. The purpose-built Watkins Glen circuit opened in 1956, and in 1961 it was chosen to host the Formula One United States Grand Prix. Its proximity to the dense population of the northeastern seaboard made it work where earlier American Grand Prix venues had failed financially.

Watkins Glen hosted Formula One for twenty consecutive seasons, from 1961 through 1980. The circuit earned a reputation as one of the best-organized stops on the calendar and won the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association award for best-run Grand Prix in 1965, 1970, and 1972. The names that raced there are the names in the sport’s history books. Then the money failed. After the organizers defaulted on the prize purse for the 1980 race, Formula One left and never returned. A lesser town might have let the track fade with it.

What Kept the Circuit Alive

Stock cars did. NASCAR had run at the Glen as far back as 1957, when Buck Baker won the first Grand National event there, and again in the mid-1960s, but it became a fixture in 1986 and has raced there every year since, on the 2.45-mile short course. The circuit, now owned and operated by NASCAR, still carries the longer 3.45-mile Grand Prix configuration and roughly 38,900 permanent seats, and it hosts IMSA sports cars, vintage weekends, and driving events on top of its Cup date. The August NASCAR weekend is one of the largest tourism events in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier, filling hotels and campgrounds across a rural county for days. The track proved it could outlive the single series that made it famous, which is a harder trick than winning a race.

It has also proven it can hold a crowd far larger than the sport. In 1973 the circuit hosted the Summer Jam rock concert, headlined by the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and The Band, and it drew a reported 600,000 people, one of the largest gatherings in American concert history to that point, to a rural corner of Schuyler County. That figure is a useful reminder of the ceiling here. The infrastructure a village of 1,829 quietly maintains, the roads, the parking, the camping, was built to absorb numbers that would overwhelm most towns fifty times its size.

What the Village Built With Both

Here is the interesting part for anyone thinking about their own town. Watkins Glen did not choose between its two anchors. It kept both, in different seasons, and then added a third layer underneath them. Seneca Lake is the deepest and one of the largest of the Finger Lakes, and its microclimate makes it the center of New York wine country. The Seneca Lake Wine Trail, founded in 1986, is the largest and most active wine trail in the region, an association of roughly 35 wineries ringing the lake. A visitor can hike a waterfall gorge in the morning, taste Riesling on the lake shore in the afternoon, and watch stock cars in August, and never leave the same small county.

The waterfront gives the village a fourth reason to exist that owes nothing to the gorge or the track. Watkins Glen anchors the south end of the lake with a public pier, a state marina, and sightseeing and dinner cruises, and the lakefront Watkins Glen Harbor Hotel put a full-service, four-star property directly on the water. Boating, fishing, and the wine trail together stretch the season on both ends, so the town is not living or dying on a single summer weekend. That layering is the quiet engineering underneath the two famous anchors, and it is a large part of why the Stay and Return categories score as strongly as they do.

The village also learned to celebrate the thing it lost. Since 1993, the Grand Prix Festival of Watkins Glen has closed the village streets on the first Friday after Labor Day and run vintage race cars around the original 1948 to 1952 course, up Old Corning Hill, through downtown, and back to the waterfront, drawing crowds reported around 20,000 to a village of under two thousand. It is a reenactment of the street race that could no longer safely be a real race, and it turns the town’s origin story into an annual, bookable event. The heritage did not have to be preserved in a museum. It became a festival.

Do Two Anchors Dilute a Brand, or Reinforce It?

This is the honest tension in the Watkins Glen story, and it is the reason the report scores the way it does. Conventional place-branding advice says pick one thing and own it, because a town that stands for two things risks standing for neither. Watkins Glen is the working counter-example. The gorge and the track do not compete because they do not overlap. They pull different people, in different months, for different reasons, and the wine country underneath them catches everyone. A waterfall hiker and a NASCAR fan are rarely the same visitor on the same weekend, so the two reputations stack instead of colliding. The risk is real, but the seasonality is what resolves it: nature in spring and fall, racing and boating in summer, wine year round.

The soft spot is downstairs, on the main street and the curb. A village this size, absorbing a million-plus gorge visitors and a stadium-sized race crowd, has to work hard to keep the downtown between the park entrance and the lake feeling like more than a pass-through. That is where a field visit will matter, and it is why the curb and downtown categories in this report are treated with more caution than the anchors.

Why Other Towns Should Follow Watkins Glen’s Lead

Watkins Glen ran a play that looks impossible until you see it work: hold two unrelated world-class anchors in one small footprint, and let the calendar keep them from fighting. The lesson is not that every town should chase two anchors. Most towns struggle to build one. The lesson is that a second draw does not have to dilute the first if it lands in a different season and pulls a different crowd, and that a town can turn even a lost asset, like a Grand Prix it can no longer host, into a living annual event. Detroit Lakes, Minnesota did a version of this by adding Thomas Dambo’s giant troll sculptures as a new reason to visit a lake town that already had summer covered. Watkins Glen simply did it twice, decades apart, and kept both.

The instruction for a town reading this is narrow and practical. Inventory what you already have that outsiders cannot get anywhere else. Protect it as public and permanent, the way New York protected the gorge in 1906 and the way the region rebuilt the racetrack in 1956. Then look for the second season your first anchor leaves empty, and fill it with something that does not compete. A village of 1,829 people proved the ceiling is higher than the population.