I used to think winter was winter. It gets dark early. It’s cold. Sometimes it snows. Sometimes that snow melts. Sometimes that melted snow freezes into ice. It’s charming at first but then you get sick of it and you want it to be over. You know, winter.

But my last trip to Rochester confirmed something that I’ve known for a while, that a Rochester winter is a special kind of dark.

I most recently said this while holding forth in my friends’ kitchen in the evening, glass of wine in hand, after spending all day in a Fairport bar. It appears that Rochester Gray is another subject that I should add to the list of things that, if you hear me speak of them, it’s time to put me to bed. These are my pet topics, theories, things that I’ve blathered on about without, unfortunately for the listener, edited or refined over time. The classics are how good an album, movie, or show is and my all time favorite, how strange British classicism is. But we can get to those on New Year’s Eve if you catch me late enough.

It didn’t really occur to me that Western Upstate New York has especially bleak winters until I saw it in movies. Both Buffalo ’66 and the trailer for the movie Adult World, which takes place in Syracuse, are prime examples (see both below).

It’s not that it’s a dark gray, though it is. It’s not just that it’s overcast and threatening to snow at any minute, though, again, it is. It’s that it’s a deep, rich, visceral gray. You can feel it in your bones. It’s a gray that let’s you know that spring is a long time off and you will be dealing with winter for a while. Oh, it’ll tease you a bit with a nice week in March but then it’ll come right back in April and snow or sleet on you. Sometimes, if it’s feeling saucy, Rochester Gray will sneak up on you in May.

And for me, somehow, Rochester Gray is linked to parking lots. It’s the parking lot of Nick Tahou’s, or the Tim Horton’s by Kodak, or the parking lot next to Lipman’s Kosher Market next to my house. It’s like the gravel and the sky are in it together.

And when the snow gets plowed in a parking lot, they leave it in a huge pile that starts off white but, as winter goes on, it melts, shrinks, and hardens, melts, shrinks, and hardens, melts, shrinks, and hardens turning grayer and grayer until at the end of March you have a small mound of black, like someone left a frozen smoker’s lung in the parking lot of Wegmans for some reason.

I know it sounds like I’m getting down on Rochester.* Maybe. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t love it. It’s part of my childhood. Seeing it represented in a movie didn’t make me cringe, it gave me a sense of recognition. That was my childhood. That’s what downtown by the Strong Museum and the bus station and Midtown Mall and the YMCA looked like.

* Confession, the above pics are of Syracuse. I took them from the Adult World trailer. I could have taken actual pics of this stuff while I was in Rochester but, first, my phone has crap memory, second, I already know it too intimately so why the hell would I take a picture?

I’m glad to be back in New York, though. It gets crappy here, there’s a lot of slush and there’s a terrible wind tunnel effect through the buildings of Manhattan and down 4th Avenue in Brooklyn. But the gray is just a regular old bad weather gray. Nothing special.