Clift Park

Skaneateles is one of the Finger Lakes villages that earns its reputation. The village sits at the northern tip of Skaneateles Lake and the combination of lake water that is among the clearest in New York State, a Main Street that has maintained its architectural character across multiple economic cycles, and the particular quality of light that twenty miles of east-west oriented lake water produces in the late afternoon, makes it one of the more photogenic small villages in the state.

Clift Park is the small public green at the water's edge in the village core, at the corner of West Genesee Street, and it sits directly on the northern shoreline. The park is where the lake begins in terms of public accessibility, a small lawn dropping to a stone edge with the lake extending south for twenty miles in conditions of clarity unusual for any body of water this size.

I checked in here on an October visit that was part of a day working the central Finger Lakes region. The lake in October has a specific color register, somewhere between the summer blue-green and the winter gray, that I find more photographically interesting than the summer version. The fall color on the hills framing the southern view is at a different angle than the summer relationship between the hills and the water, and at the northern end of the lake looking south the composition of hills and water is at its clearest.

The park itself is minimal: grass, a few benches, the stone shoreline, and the view. There is no formal infrastructure beyond that, which is correct for a space this size and in this position. The value is entirely in the relationship between the water, the village edge, and the southern view down the lake. That value is significant. A thirty-minute stop at Clift Park on the right October afternoon with the late sun moving toward the western hill line produces light on the water that I have not replicated at any other lake in the Finger Lakes system.

Skaneateles earns a return visit in every season. The summer version is the crowded version, the one the day tripper traffic from Syracuse and beyond descends on. The fall version is the one with the best light and the most manageable visitor volume. The winter version, when the lake surface begins to show ice at the margins and the village is operating at its own pace rather than the summer pace, is the version I am most interested in documenting next.