Cooperstown
Diversions

In baseball land, you'd expect to find a baseball theme, from the Short Stop restaurant and Third Base (“the last stop before home”) to the Cooperstown Bat Co. But there's much more to this appealing village, some of which we concentrate upon here.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Main Street , Cooperstown .

Enshrined here in 1939 on the apparently erroneous theory that Abner Doubleday invented the game in Cooperstown a century earlier, the four floors dedicated to America 's national pastime are what draw most visitors to Cooperstown . This is a museum in which hordes of men and boys stand mesmerized for hours – in front of an old uniform, a signed baseball, a recital of statistics, or the bat Mark McGwire used to stroke his 500th home run. Since a major addition in 1979, it has been transformed from a primitive museum with tabletop glass cases and encyclopedic sweep into a scattershot, state-of-the-art story of the game. The zoom-in, flashback approach is tailor-made for today's attention spans and the increasing enormity of the subject matter. Ever expanding, the museum opened a new National Baseball Library & Archive complex with exhibits on “Scribes and Mikemen,” and in 1999 opened the Barry Halper Gallery for changing exhibits. Everyone has his favorites (ours include the section on baseball parks and the lifelike statues of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams carved from single pieces of laminated basswood); others prefer the awesome cathedral dedicated to the more than 200 Hall of Famers or the statistics spewed out by IBM computers. Who can fail to appreciate the magic of the animated, thirteen-minute multi-media presentation in the Grandstand Theater? The audience sits in grandstand seats, shouts of “play ball” and “get your popcorn here” punctuate the ever-so-realistic crowd noise, the organ pumps up the fans and, well, it's almost like being in the old ballpark. Little wonder that everyone joins in the rousing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” finale. Visitors exit through the ultimate baseball gift shop.

(607) 547-9988 or (888) 425-5633. www.baseballhalloffame.org. Open daily, May-September 9 to 9; rest of year 9 to 5, to 8 on weekends except January-March. Adults, $9.50.

The Farmers' Museum, Lake Road , Cooperstown .

This, not the Hall of Fame, was the primary destination for our seventh-grade class trip back in upstate New York in the late 1940s. The museum, only five years old at the time, was already known among educators and made a worthwhile outing for a day's immersion in early New York State history. The main barn displays agricultural artifacts and early crafts. Nearby is the relocated resting spot of the memorable Cardiff Giant, originally foisted on an unsuspecting public as a petrified prehistoric man and looking mighty big to seventh-graders. Beyond is the 1845 Village, nearly twenty historic buildings assembled from within 100 miles of Cooperstown , nestled against the hillside with cows grazing and chickens wandering about nearby. Buildings are furnished and staffed for the period. The Toddsville Store has a cast-iron stove, a printing office issues leaflets and the old Bump Tavern offers occasional 19th-century dinners with period music. The Herder’s Cottage restaurant, which has picnic tables out front, offers a variety of country-style fare. On a gorgeous autumn day, strolling the grounds, admiring the old buildings and looking across the stone walls to the golf course, Otsego Lake and the flaming hillsides, we, now grown up, felt this was close to paradise.

(607) 547-1450 or (888) 547-1450. www.farmersmuseum.org. Open daily, June-September 10 to 5; rest of year, Tuesday-Sunday 10 to 4. Closed December-March. Adults, $9.

Fenimore Art Museum , Lake Road , Cooperstown .

Magnificent, yet somehow personal and homey, is the lakeside mansion built in 1932 on the site of novelist James Fenimore Cooper's farm. It's been the home of the New York State Historical Association since 1945. The stately portico leads to room after room of fine and decorative arts. A twelve-minute slide show provides a good orientation, and the descriptions throughout the galleries are unusually informative. The paintings in the ballroom include many from the Hudson River School . Thomas Cole's landscape scene from Cooper's Last of the Mohicans is especially appropriate in a gallery holding works associated with the novelist. Changing portions of the association's unsurpassed collection of folk art are displayed. The American Indian Wing exhibits the definitive Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of more than 500 works of American Indian art. A recent renovation reorganized the galleries of the original building to allow the museum to display more of its extensive collections. The museum’s Fenimore Café offers a light continental menu, with seating indoors and outside on a lakeview terrace.

(607) 547-1400 or (888) 547-1450. www.fenimoreartmuseum.org. Open daily, June-September 10 to 5; rest of year, Tuesday-Sunday 10 to 4. Closed January-March. Adults $9.

Hyde Hall, Mill Road off  County Route 31, Cooperstown .

Located in  Glimmerglass State Park , this National Historic Landmark country mansion dating to 1817 overlooks Otsego Lake from its northeastern tip. The 50-room house, a restoration in progress, surrounds an interior courtyard and is considered the finest example of a Neoclassic country mansion in America  It was built for George Clarke, whose great-grandfather and namesake was secretary and lieutenant governor for the British Crown’s government of the New York province for 42 years prior to the Revolution. Clarke purchased the site on a hillside terrace at the foot of Mount Wellington for its commanding view down the lake. The house was occupied by his family and descendants until 1963. Hyde Hall has been undergoing restoration by the Friends of Hyde Hall. Tours show the great rooms, wine cellar, chapel, kitchens and servants quarters.

(607) 547-5098 OR (888) 472-9002.  www.hydehall.org. Grounds open daily, 10 to 5, May-October.  Hourly tours, July and August, daily 10 to 5; fewer tours off-season; adults, $7.

Brewery Ommegang, 656 River Road ( County Hwy. 33), Cooperstown .

During the 1900s, most of the hops in America were grown within 40 miles of Cooperstown . This stunning new structure on a 136-acre former hops farm along the Susquehanna River is the first farmstead microbrewery to be built in America in more than a century. Opened by beer importers Don Feinberg and Wendy Littlefield in partnership with several Belgian brewers, it is the only domestic brewery devoted solely to producing Belgian beers, which are considered some of the world’s best. Guided tours show how this authentic, Belgian-style brewery open-ferments its beer and then bottle-conditions it in a warm cellar. Visitors smell the rare Styrian and Saaz hops and savory spices used in making ales and get a taste of the award-winning specialty Belgian ales. The fascinating Belgian shop is stocked with Belgian chocolates, cheeses, waffles, wearables, whimsical Tintin merchandise and, of course, beer. The brewery, which touts itself as “the Hall of Foam,” hosts special events from a Winter Dining Series featuring chefs cooking with beer to Belgium Comes to Cooperstown , the largest one-day celebration of Belgian culture in this country.

(607) 547-8184 or (800) 656-1212. www.ommegang.com. Open daily 11 to 6 , Memorial Day through Labor Day; rest of year, noon to 5.
 

Sightseeing. Catch the Cooperstown Trolley for a scenic ride between three free outlying parking lots and the village's major attractions. The trolley runs daily from 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. in summer and 8:30 to 6 on weekends in late spring and early fall. An all-day pass costs $2. This may be the best way to get around on busy days, when visitors outnumber the resident population. The Lake and Valley Garden Club publishes a brochure outlining a walking tour of 44 local sights. The restored Cooperstown & Charlotte Valley Railroad offers scenic diesel-powered train rides between Cooperstown and Milford four times daily in summer. The sixteen-mile trip takes about 90 minutes. Classic Boat Tours offers daily hour-long excursions on Otsego Lake aboard an all-wooden boat that cruised the lake at the turn of the century for the Clark and Busch families. Swimming and picnicking are available at Glimmerglass, Fairy Spring and Three Mile Point parks.

Extra-Special

Glimmerglass Opera Festival, Route 80, Cooperstown .

The high retractable walls roll down as the lights dim in the 900-seat Alice Busch Opera Theater on Thomas Goodyear's former turkey farm above the lake that James Fenimore Cooper called Glimmerglass. The sense of drama heightens as another performance by one of the nation's best regional companies begins. Founded in 1975, this has become a major attraction. The $5 million, semi-open-air theater funded in 1987 by the Busch family represents the first big opera house built from scratch in America in several decades. And a sophisticated place it is for so rural a setting. The gilded ceiling is staggered in a quilt pattern for acoustical purposes, lamps adorn the balconies and the European-opera-house look is elegant and intimate, remarkable for a building designed to resemble a hops barn. Catered picnics may be ordered ahead and consumed beside a reflecting pond or on the hillside across the road, overlooking Otsego Lake . Visitors also can stroll through the peaceful Goodyear Swamp Sanctuary behind the theater along the lake. “Opera previews,” free 35-minute programs, are scheduled one hour before performances.

(607) 547-2255. www.glimmerglass.org. Matinees, Sunday, Monday and occasionally Tuesday and Saturday at 2; evenings, Thursday-Saturday at 8. Tickets, $24 to $94.

Material excerpted from Inn Spots & Special Places / Mid-Atlantic, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2003.

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