There’s a new hotel and restaurant in Seneca Falls worthy of your consideration.  It’s the Hotel Clarence on 108 Fall Street smack in the middle of town.  Long time Central New Yorkers might remember it as the old Gould Hotel, named for the defunct Gould Manufacturing Company,  but developers chose a different inspiration for the place. They named the facility after the angel who earns his wings in the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life”.  Seneca Falls is widely accepted as the location which inspired director Frank Capra’s fictitious Bedford Falls.

Images courtesy of: Hotel Clarence

I enjoyed lunch recently in the hotel restaurant “DiVine” before touring the nearby wineries.  It’s the perfect stop before you begin your drive south on Seneca Lake.  If you are expecting a trip back in time to the building’s early days of the 1920s, or you seek a 1940′s vibe, you’ll be surprised.  Nothing except the imposing silver door framed in black prepares you for what you will see inside.

The Hotel Clarence is more SoHo than Seneca.  Walls are white, furniture is sparse and tailored, and accessories are virtually non-existent.  The essential design feature of the lobby is a subtle video wall approximately 30 x 30 feet featuring the classic black and white film projected softly onto the entire space.  The juxtaposition of the familiar “feel good” movie with the silvery modern edge makes you wonder if you’ve arrived in the future, or you’ve returned to the Golden Age of Hollywood glamour.

The cocktail lounge, also on the first floor, pays homage to the roots of the building with the magnificent bar running the length of the room.  Gleaming from the renovation which was completed in July, the bar invites you to take a seat and be enveloped by the darker colors and rich texture of the fabrics.

The restaurant is the true star of the first floor.  Predominately black, white and gray, it is lined with windows overlooking Genesee Street in Seneca Falls which lures pedestrians and encourages them to walk this pretty village by the river.  You can people-watch from your warm perch indoors.  Chef Ed Moro’s creations are fresh, inventive and nutritious.

Chef Ed Moro prepares healthy, nouvelle cuisine

The desk clerk kindly gave me a tour of one of the hotel rooms upstairs, and again, it is not what you’d expect, even after you’ve been primed with a walk through the lobby.  Rooms are white, crisp, tailored and modern; not a single cherry federal armoire in sight.  Flat screen TVs, WiFi and white tiled bathrooms are so clean, you might not feel the need for a shower for a week afterward.  It’s heavenly.

There are 48 rooms in this historic building located in the cradle of the national women’s rights movement.  I’m sure rooms fill quickly for Women’s Hall of Fame events, and also during Parent’s Weekend and Commencement at the colleges nearby.  But that leaves plenty of opportunity for a spontaneous getaway from Syracuse and Rochester and points in between.

I have not received compensation for this article.  It’s just a nice place I thought I would share with readers of the blog.  If you go, please let me know if you agree we’re lucky to have this unique option in our area.

http://hotelclarence.com/index.html

If a business that caters to young people cannot survive in an area popular among the young, it may be bad management, or perhaps it’s something else.

Last week Ambrosia closed suddenly, seized by the state for failing to pay taxes.  OK.  The restaurant business is rough.  The percentage that survive five years is pretty low.  Maybe it was time for new ownership or a repurpose of the site.

But now the same fate engulfs the nightclub named Ohm just fifty feet away on the next block.  This isn’t Syracuse’s south side, or the north.  It’s not the near west side which census figures show is among the most impoverished white neighborhoods in the country.    This is Armory Square, where people wear black and every hip Syracusan brings out- of-town family members for a tour of authenticity beyond the back-filled Erie Boulevard with it’s Olive Garden and Applebees.  Armory Square is our ringer, our little enclave that’s supposed to work and expand and lead the way to a brighter future for Syracuse.

I just returned from four days in coastal New Hampshire where I stayed in the home of my sister Karen and her husband Tony.  They’ve completed restoration of their 1790 home less than two miles from the Atlantic ocean.  On a home assessed at triple mine in Syracuse, they pay two thousand dollars less in property taxes, but that gap will surely grow as my assessment in this year of plummeting home values all across America spiked by $50,000.  If I could do basic mathematics I’d use the tax rate to calculate what I’ll pay next year, but I think I’ll wait to be surprised so I can shoot myself when I open the bill.  Apparently, $11,000.00 in annual property taxes is just not enough to keep this city going.  I need to pay thousands more.

Karen and Tony in their North Hampton home

It’s interesting to note that taxes claimed the Armory Square businesses, not failure to meet payroll or declining revenues which shuttered businesses all over the country since this recession began.  Taxes.  A tax official proudly proclaimed on the news tonight that his office of tax enforcement recently hired new staff members to collect on these cheats, because it’s not fair for the rest of us who do pay taxes on time.

Well I have a different opinion of who are the cheats and it’s not these guys trying to make a go of it with a business in Armory Square.  It’s the layer upon layer of useless and unproductive duplication and bureaucracy in Albany.  I’m tired of hearing New York State has terrific schools and unique challenges that make the cost necessary. Hogwash. Every rust belt state is suffering and many of them, like Massachusetts, have better schools that don’t cost as much as ours.  In New York, our answer is blow up the size of government and pass more laws so our elected officials can show they’re accomplishing something.

New England creativity. People made cottages from old fish shacks.

In New Hampshire, the “live free or die” state,  we spoke of taxes over a fine dinner of $4.79 per pound lobster and salt potatoes.  New Hampshire has no income tax, and no sales tax.  I told Karen and Tony the state makes up for the difference by charging higher fees, but they haven’t seen it.  They’ve had a big real estate transaction, they’ve registered vehicles, gotten driver’s licenses. And they have experience.  Karen and Tony have lived in Massachusetts, California and Virginia before this latest adventure in New Hampshire.  They claim the fees they pay now are no higher than anywhere else.

My sister and brother-in-law also live in what is referred to in New Hampshire as a “donor county”, which means it’s more affluent than others.  Donor counties pay higher taxes than non-donor counties, and the money is spread out across the state to help residents in the rural areas far from the ocean estates and tourist draws.  Even in a donor county, Karen and Tony find their tax burden to be reasonable.

Lively Portsmouth, host to the President's Town Hall meeting on health care two days later

In the late 19th century, before a Pittsburgh company named Mine Safety Appliance invented detection equipment to alert miners to the presence of deadly gases, they used to lower cages of canaries down the shafts.  After a few minutes the cages were brought up and if the canaries were dead, the miners knew not to descend that tunnel or they’d be dead too.

The “canary in the mine” is a phrase used to describe foreshadowing, a phrase that seems apt with the sudden closure of two well-established businesses in Armory Square.  It’s messed up to use tax money to hire tax enforcers to collect more taxes, but that’s the spiral we’re living, and no one seems able to stop it.  How about charging less tax to begin with and letting those workers do something productive like plant more flowers?

Miners never challenged what they saw in the cages. Where the atmosphere was suitable, they dug.  But where it was not, they dropped the birds and went somewhere else.

Call me sexist.  But you’d better call me slender too.  I know if I eat as much as a man, it won’t be long before I weigh as much as one too.  Since both men and women are shown in numerous studies to eat everything put in front of them, it’s time we offer a woman’s portion on every restaurant menu.
A 5’5” woman needs 1544 daily calories to maintain a healthy 130 pound frame.  A similarly healthy man of 5’11” , 155 pounds requires 1994 calories, a 450 point difference between the sexes each day.
The woman’s portion is simply a smaller entrée at a slightly reduced price. For any restaurant owner who thinks I want to put them out of business,  simply place that three or four dollar reduction on the man’s portion.
Why burden the restaurant with this chore? Because women can’t do it for themselves.  In fact, no one can.  The Cornell University Food and Brand lab proved this in a 2005 experiment entitled Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size may Influence Intake.  In other words, whatever you put in front of people will get eaten.
The University invited four study participants at a time to enjoy a bowl of soup in the elegant laboratory kitchen.   The partakers didn’t know two of the four bowls were rigged to slowly replenish the soup.  Everyone finished their bowl of  soup.  Everyone assumed they ate the same volume of soup and all said they were full.  However, two of the four ate 73-percent more.   Researchers concluded people cannot stop when they are full.  They stop when the food is gone.
Let’s use that information to fight obesity.  Will any restaurateur take up the challenge for a woman’s portion on the menu?