The Forgotten Towns of Upstate New York, is the third photography documentary project in our series, “Life After the Pandemic. Our goal is to explore various areas of New York: capturing the culture around it, as well as examining the effects of the pandemic.

Main Street boasts many up-and-running small businesses, as well as vacant buildings and perpetually closed stores. Is this the result of the Covid-19 pandemic? Or did the pandemic expedite an already looming economic crisis? As we researched later, the poverty rate in Oneonta was 22.2% in 2019, much higher than the average of New York State.