7 Cutest Small Towns In the Finger Lakes To Visit

Naples is the kind of small town that paints its fire hydrants purple and means it, the self-declared Grape Pie Capital of the World, where the pies still come out of home kitchens. It is a fitting introduction to the Finger Lakes, eleven long, narrow lakes in west-central New York ringed by small towns made for wandering on foot. The Finger Lakes villages run to brick main streets, lakefront parks, old inns, and a winery or a diner at the end of the block. Some, like Watkins Glen, sit right beside a waterfall gorge; others, like Aurora, are restored 19th-century villages on the water. These are seven of the cutest small towns in the region, and what to see in each.

Aurora

Aurora is a one-road village on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake, and most of what you see has been brought back from disrepair by one person. Pleasant Rowland, a Wells College graduate who went on to create the American Girl doll, spent two decades restoring the village's historic buildings into what is now the Inns of Aurora, a set of 19th-century homes turned into a lakeside resort. The flagship Aurora Inn dates to 1833. Across the street, the Fargo Bar and Grill has been the village tavern since the 1830s, and Dorie's, in an old drugstore, still runs a soda fountain with milkshakes made from local ice cream.

Wells College, which anchored the village for more than 150 years, closed in 2024, and its lakeside campus remains part of a National Register historic district. A half-mile up the road, MacKenzie-Childs, the hand-painted ceramics maker Rowland once owned, opens its hilltop farm for tours. The Morgan Opera House, upstairs in one of the old commercial blocks, still hosts performances. It is a small place, but a well-kept one, and the lake is right there.

Bath

Bath sits just south of Keuka Lake on the Cohocton River and throws the oldest continuously running county fair in the country. The Steuben County Fair has gone off every August since 1819, tractor pulls, livestock, racing pigs and all. The town was laid out in 1793 for the British landowner Sir William Pulteney, and it kept the county-seat bones: a courthouse, an old hotel, and Pulteney Square, where there is free music on summer evenings.

The town's quiet showpiece is the First Presbyterian Church, one of the few churches in the country with a sanctuary designed corner to corner by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The circular south window, in Tiffany's Favrile glass, is considered one of his finest, and it does its best work in the afternoon sun. For a longer view, Mossy Bank Park sits about 500 feet above town with an overlook across the valley.

Geneseo

Geneseo is a college town in the Genesee Valley, about 30 miles south of Rochester, and a designated National Historic Landmark Village, one of only a handful in the state. Main Street still has the iron bear fountain at its center and a clean run of 19th-century storefronts. SUNY Geneseo keeps the place busy in term time, and in summer the banks of nearby Conesus Lake fill in.

The historic Riviera Theatre downtown still runs movies and live shows. Out by the airport, the National Warplane Museum keeps a hangar of vintage military aircraft and, on the right day, will take you up in one. Long Point Park on Conesus Lake is the spot for a picnic and a walk, with a big migratory-bird population to watch for.

Naples

Naples sits in a valley at the south end of Canandaigua Lake and calls itself the Grape Pie Capital of the World, a title it can back up. Grape pies started here in home kitchens in the 1950s, and Monica's Pies still sells them year round alongside two dozen other kinds. The whole town celebrates at the Naples Grape Festival each September. Just up Vine Street, Grimes Glen has two 60-foot waterfalls a short walk in, along a creek bed that held the oldest fossilized tree ever found in New York.

There is more green close by. The 900-acre Cumming Nature Center has quiet trails and a boardwalk over a beaver pond, and West Hill Preserve links into the Finger Lakes Trail. In town, the Bristol Valley Theater runs professional plays through the warm months, Inspire Moore pours sustainable wines with a John Lennon portrait in the tasting room, and Roots Cafe handles dinner. The Naples Hotel, said to be haunted, has been putting up guests for well over a century.

Penn Yan

Penn Yan sits at the north end of Keuka Lake, and the name is exactly what it sounds like, a mash-up of Pennsylvania and Yankee for the settlers who arrived from both directions. Yates County has a sizable Mennonite community, so you will share the road with the occasional horse and buggy. Start the morning at Amity Coffee or the Penn Yan Diner, then walk the Keuka Outlet Trail, which follows an old mill stream past two waterfalls between Keuka and Seneca lakes.

Downtown has the Laurentide Inn, an 1820 home that is now a bed-and-breakfast with a brewery in its carriage house and the True Roots Kitchen on site. The Windmill Farm and Craft Market, just outside town, runs Saturdays spring through fall with Mennonite baked goods, produce, and crafts from nearly 200 vendors. Indian Pines Park has a swimming beach on Keuka Lake, and Seneca Farms, open in season, makes the kind of ice cream that justifies the line.

Skaneateles

Skaneateles sits at the north tip of Skaneateles Lake, which is clean enough that Syracuse draws its drinking water from it, unfiltered. The village grew up as a stagecoach stop in the late 1700s, and it has aged well, a walkable Genesee Street of brick storefronts and Victorian homes facing the water. The Sherwood Inn has been taking in travelers since 1807.

Most of the day here happens by the lake. Clift Park gives you a lawn, a gazebo, and a swimming spot right downtown, and the clear water draws sailboats all summer. When you are ready to sit down, the Krebs has served dinner in Skaneateles for generations, and the Mirbeau Inn keeps a spa if you want to make a weekend of it. It is an easy place to lose an afternoon.

Watkins Glen

Watkins Glen is the busiest name on this list, for one good reason. Watkins Glen State Park runs right up out of downtown. The Gorge Trail climbs about a mile and a half past nineteen waterfalls, over and under the water on stone bridges and more than 800 steps, with the spray of Cavern Cascade along the way. It is the most famous of the Finger Lakes gorges, so on a summer weekend you will not have it to yourself; come early or on a weekday.

The town's other claim is speed. Watkins Glen International, one of the country's best-known road courses, sits just up the hill, and the Finger Lakes Wine Festival fills it each July. The village itself is on the south end of Seneca Lake, with the Harbour Hotel and Clute Park on the water and Wagner Vineyards a short drive up the east shore. Sunset over the harbor is the usual finish.

What These Towns Share

What makes these seven stand out is not any single attraction but a shared scale. Each is small enough to cover on foot in an afternoon, old enough to have kept its 19th-century main street, and close enough to the water that the lake is part of everyday life. A pie shop, a village inn, one good diner, a gorge or a harbor at the edge of town, these are the pieces that turn up again and again, arranged a little differently in each place. That mix, more than any one sight, is what makes a Finger Lakes town the kind you remember long after you have left.