73 Best Sights in The Finger Lakes, New York

Why did reform movements flourish in the Finger Lakes? Many of the answers are at this museum, where narratives of water power, transportation, industry, and cultural history are interwoven to tell the story of 19th-century Seneca Falls. The museum has interactive exhibits for kids, who are urged to ask questions of tour guides.

Exhibits at this zoo along the Genesee River include Rocky Coasts, providing aboveground and underwater viewing of a polar bear, penguins, and sea lions; A Step Into Africa, a re-creation of Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater with African elephants and olive baboons; and a cougar exhibit in which you can crawl through a tunnel to see the cats up close. During your day in the wild, you might also spot Bornean orangutans, white rhinos, Arctic wolves, and meerkats, among other beasts.

William H. Seward (1801–72), a governor of New York, U.S. senator, and secretary of state under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, lived in this distinguished Federal-style home. The Seward family occupied the house (built in 1816–17) until 1951, and virtually every object here—the furnishings, the library, the tableware—was theirs.

Enter Warwickshire, a 1585 English village spread across a wooded hillside, and spend the day as an Elizabethan. Costumed improvisational troupes beckon you to join them for a rollicking round at the dunking pond, courtly dancing, discourse at the village "well," or cheering at the jousting field, where men astride strong steeds play medieval games. Artisan booths feature Elizabethan-style caps and clothing, handmade musical instruments, and jewelry. The festival, about an hour north of the city, is held for seven summer weekends starting in early July.

A number of lectures and music performances are open to the public, as is the SUArt Galleries, in the Shaffer Art Building.

The west-side street where suffragist Susan B. Anthony lived from 1866 until her death in 1906 looks much like it did in her day. The tree out has been replaced by two smaller chestnuts, but many of the neighboring houses still look the same. You can tour the three-story redbrick Victorian and picture Anthony working to get women the right to vote. The visitor center next door was the home of a sister. A park one block north has a statue of Anthony and friend Frederick Douglass having tea.

The school, founded in 1870 as a private coeducational institution, enrolls more than 19,000 students in its undergraduate and graduate programs. Two centuries of building styles can be seen on the compact campus, which is crossed by city streets and includes a traditional collegiate quadrangle. Get campus maps online or at the Schine Student Center, at 303 University Place.

At the corner of Mt. Hope and Reservoir avenues, a block west of the Lamberton Conservatory, is the squat Warner Castle. Headquarters of the Rochester Civic Garden Center, it has art exhibits and educational materials about gardening.

"New York's Thunder Road" rumbles from June to September. The season's highlight is the NASCAR Series, in mid-August. On a Thunder Road Tour ($25; May–October, most days at noon), you drive the track in your own vehicle behind a pace car. Call for schedules and prices. You can get tickets, souvenirs, and merchandise at The Shop, at 4 North Franklin Street, downtown.

The gathering of 300 women and men at the Wesleyan Chapel in 1848 produced the Declaration of Sentiments, the bedrock document of the modern women's rights movement. It proclaimed—audaciously, at the time—"that all men and women are created equal." Today the document's words are etched on a 140-foot-long wall between the national park's visitor center and the adjacent Wesleyan Chapel Declaration Park, which encompasses a steel structure housing remnants of the chapel. Tours are given daily at 10:30 and 1:30 and more frequently in summer.

Fourteen brilliant stained-glass windows are the centerpiece of the chapel interior, a Louis Comfort Tiffany creation with mosaic-inlay floors and nine leaded-glass chandeliers. It's the only known Tiffany-designed chapel interior still intact. A lunchtime music series is held here in July and August.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and a handful of other pioneers in the women's rights movement organized the first Women's Rights Convention in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls in 1848. Today, the park incorporates the site of the convention (the Wesleyan Chapel Declaration Park), a visitor center, and several off-site historic homes of key convention participants. Exhibits and an orientation film at the visitor center explore the development of the women's rights movement in the United States.

Mark Twain rests in the Langdon family plot, with his daughter Clara and son-in-law, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, at his feet. A 12-foot-tall monument marks the spot (12 feet, in river terminology, is 2 fathoms, or "mark twain," the derivation of Clemens' pen name).