The Chautauqua Institution

Chautauqua, NY -- I'm in Ohio now, but I didn't get out of New York State without one last interesting stopover. About mid-morning on Monday, I rode past The Chautauqua Institution, and stopped in at the visitor's center to try to figure out what it was. And, well, I'm not sure I can explain it. The woman selling postcards may have put it best when she said, "It's like a resort kind of place, but with learning." The website probably explains it best, but it runs lectures, classes, and performances all summer and people come for a week or more to go to them and hang out. It's also a sort of village with houses, a hotel, and its own post office and library. Interesting, I thought, and rode on.

A few miles down the road I saw a hand-lettered rainbow sign next to a dirt driveway that read, "PFLAG Picnic." (PFLAG, for those of you who don't know, is Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.) This sign was the only remotely queer thing I'd run into since Western Massachusetts when I thought I saw a lesbian, but she turned out to be a twelve year-old Mennonite boy. I figured I'd stop in and that if I was lucky, I might get a sandwich out of it before I went on my way. I found a whole lot of friendly people, though who were quite interested in my trip and filled me up with food and drink. Some were from the town of Chautauqua, but the majority were spending at least part of the summer at the Chautauqua Institution. A lovely bicycle enthusiast invited me to come share her house with her and her grandsons and I ended up spending the next day there.

I went to a lecture about public school reform and a book discussion at lunch time, and spent plenty of time wandering around the grounds looking at the architecture and all the different buildings. It certainly is a remarkable place. The schedule of events was impressive -- lectures on all sorts of topics, musical performances and religious services for various Christian sects, classes on all sorts of topics, and programs for kids all day, every day. It's also home to the country's oldest continually running book group, which started as a correspondence course when the club had to print its own books. "It's like a little slice of heaven," said one person I met, who was there for the first time.

And I think it's because of its utopian leanings that my good ol' Wesleyan education made me suspicious of it from the start, despite how cool I thought the "intellectual summer camp for all ages" concept was. Where there are gates, people are being kept out, and there has to be something fishy going on, right? Unsurprisingly, money is an issue. To get through the gates you have to buy a gate pass for the day, the week, or the whole summer, and that's one expense, but I was interested to find that real estate is an even bigger expense. Apparently, Chautauqua privatized the land within its grounds when it was going through financial trouble in the 1930's, and in the 1990's the value of property within the gates skyrocketed. According to the Century 21 office near the drug store, a 40 foot by 50 foot undeveloped lot on the grounds starts at $279,000. Five acres of undeveloped land are available elsewhere in the county for $30,000. At the picnic, I talked to someone in the town (not Institution) government, and he said that the property taxes generated by the tiny institution grounds make up almost three quarters of the funding for the local schools. This means property taxes are becoming a major burden for people who have lived there for some time (a couple hundred live there year round) and it also means that people who buy or rent there these days are, to put it bluntly, loaded. Oh well. Still an awfully cool kind of place, though.

I had been planning to pick up one of these Adventure Cycling routes soon, but I'm having a lot of fun talking to people and being the one of the first touring cyclists they've seen, rather than part of a regular phenomenon of bicyclists passing through. So I've pulled out some maps, done some internet research, and I'm just going to head west from here and see how things go. Wish me luck...