Placards on the outskirts of this small central New York town are like a beacon for seekers of Americana:
“Home of Baseball,” they blare. “Village of Museums.”
It’s true. Even if baseball wasn’t invented here in 1839 by Abner Doubleday, as some still insist, Cooperstown is synonymous with the national pastime.
It’s home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, whose red brick facade fronts on Main Street, and whatever baseball paraphernalia you can’t find in the Hall’s gift shop is most likely available elsewhere in the three-block downtown area.
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The Hall features backlit boards listing the all-time leaders and the currently active leaders in virtually every hitting and pitching category. There’s a women-in-baseball exhibit and a display on the Negro Leagues.
Another room is equipped with uniforms of every major league team and a plethora of caps, gloves, shirts and balls used at key moments in the game’s history.
But the center of the Hall is still the ground floor gallery of bronze plaques where the achievements of every Hall of Famer are permanently spelled out.
Visitors often comment on the size of the plaques: They are small, no more than 24 inches high and a foot or so wide.
But the room is unique in sports, the achievements spelled out covering more than a century and thousands of games.
But the best news about Cooperstown, also home of the Fenimore Museum of New York State folk art, the Farmers Museum and the Corvette Americana Hall of Fame, is that the town manages to avoid being overwhelmed by the summer tourism its attractions and the lovely Lake Otsego (known as Glimmerglass in James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Deerslayer”) generate.
Traffic on Main Street a few years ago was rapidly becoming an unmanageable Manhattan-like crush, with horns honking and tempers flaring outside the Hall.
Neighboring streets lined with Victorian and Grecian revival homes also were inundated, with townsfolk often unable to park their own cars on their own streets.
Cooperstown-with its dozens of stores, inns and hotels-didn’t want to drive away the tourists.
The solution: Strictly enforced two-hour parking zones virtually everywhere in walking distance of the Hall of Fame and nearby Doubleday Field, combined with low-cost shuttle service from a pair of large gravel parking lots just outside the village limits.
Crowds packing into the Hall and its surrounding stores still top 375,000 yearly, but there’s little worry today about parking spaces.
Instead, shuttle buses, made up to look like San Francisco cable cars, offer a breezy, open-air ride to the shopping district and the museums.
This leaves visitors free to concentrate on baseball, starting with the lifelike, full-size figures of Babe Ruth and a young Ted Williams that stand just to the right of the Hall of Fame entrance.
Cooperstown has plenty of inns and hotels to accommodate all the visitors.
Largest is the Otesaga, a grand hotel in the European style fronting on the lake. It’s five stories of red brick and concrete with plantation-like pillars through which guests enter a large, plush lobby filled with deep armchairs and sofas.
Rooms start at $140 for a single in the fall, $220 for a double in the fall, with golf packages available offering unlimited use of the hotel’s par-72 lakeside Leatherstocking course. Rates are a bit higher in summer, but golf privileges add only about $10 to the nightly tab in all seasons.
Motels also pepper the roadsides outside Cooperstown, with rates varying from $50 to $80 a night.
There is plenty of camping space available, starting with the Glimmerglass State Park about 12 miles northeast of town. This park fronts the north shore of Lake Otsego, the opposite end from where Cooperstown sits.
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The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is fully wheelchair accessible. For more information, call 607-547-9988.