In a North Pole State of Mind; or, Other North Poles, Part 3

Hello! Have you voted to send my wife to the North Pole? Please do so! The North Pole in question is the real North Pole, not the Faux Poles in Alaska or Idaho that I've discussed previously.

I'd like to discuss yet another town that bills itself as "North Pole," which is accurate if you meant north of Albany:

Who knew that Santa was a New Yorker? North Pole, New York, is slightly west of I-87, that stretch of barren nothingness that delivers you from the state capital to Plattsburgh and Canada by plowing through the Adirondack Mountains. We made the trip to Plattsburgh last summer for my wife's brother's wedding, and I can tell you that driving on that part of I-87 is like being in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon with the wraparound background with the same pattern of tree-rock-sign-car looping every 10 seconds.

Consider that North Pole is 25 miles west of I-87, and the fact that driving in the mountains takes about three times longer than if you drove the same distance in the suburbs, and you'll conclude that the New York North Pole is probably more remote than the real North Pole.

It should come as no surprise that the New York North Pole tries to lure tourists with the Santa's Workshop theme. I suppose if the kids buy into the idea, and they're not so precocious that they carry a globe or a compass or a sextant, it beats going to the real deal, unless you're me and there's a chance you can send my wife there.

Lest you think the village was created by cynical modern marketers, it actually pre-dates the Disney parks, having been built in 1949. Do you have anything to add, Wikipedia?

Originally built on the road to Whiteface Mountain by a Lake Placid businessman whose daughter had desperately wanted to see Santa's house...

I don't mean to cut you off, Wikipedia, but if it were 1949 and my daughter wanted to see Santa's house (if it were this year, I would just fire up a photo of any large house on the Internet and say, "Look! Santa's house!"), I would have made some excuse like:

• "Santa's house is so secret that if you see it, you'll never get any presents."
• "Santa lives way, way at the North Pole, and the Boeing 747 required to make the trip won't be invented for another 20 years."

This guy builds her a town. That must have made all the other dads pretty happy. After that, my kid would have demanded to find out whether the moon is made of cheese, and I'd have to buy a million-pound ball of Swiss.

If you go to the official website of North Pole, New York, you'll notice there's not much going on, now that Christmas is over. There is a link on the site for employment but, sadly, it returns a "Sorry, the page you’re looking for can’t be found" page. Looks like hard times for everyone. Maybe the new Governor Cuomo can turn things around.

I also learned from the website that Maurices (no apostrophe), a clothing chain I've never heard of but which looks like a small-town Kohl's, had a little photoshoot at North Pole, and I found a link to a video. I expected to get a better look at the town, but instead I got this:

Would I send my wife to the New York North Pole? Probably not. She'd be bored pretty quickly, and it's only a six-hour drive, so she'd come home pretty quickly. Too quickly. Unless she had to share a room with the model in the video above and then they got snowed in and the heat went out and they had to stay warm by...

...where was I? Oh yeah. So, no New York North Pole for my wife. Send her to the real deal.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.