Amazingly, despite all the upheavals in 2020, new hotels continued to open, while developments at some established properties proceeded, albeit at a more leisurely pace than might have been expected in a usual year. In late summer, I read of the impending debut of The Lake House on Canandaigua in the Finger Lakes region of New York and immediately decided to escape from my unwonted hermitlike existence. Besides, I reasoned, a trip would enable me to stay at another property nearby, the Aurora Inn, that had long been on my list of promising places to visit.

A five-hour drive northwest of New York City, close to the southern shore of Lake Ontario, the 11 Finger Lakes are narrow, parallel, north-south slashes through a green and rolling landscape. The largest of them (by area), Seneca Lake, is 38 miles long, while its neighbor to the east, Cayuga Lake, is 40 miles long, but only an average of 1.7 miles wide. The area rose to prominence and economic prosperity with the opening of the nearby Erie Canal in 1825, which joined the Great Lakes at Buffalo to the Hudson River at Albany. Today, the Finger Lakes region is a center of tourism, as well as a major wine-producing region with more than 100 wineries and vineyards. (Because they reach depths of more than 600 feet, the lakes create a local microclimate, and the grapes are protected from spring frost during growing season and early frost before the harvest.) Visitors come to enjoy boating and fishing — Seneca Lake is the self-described “Lake Trout Capital of the World” — as well as attractions such as the famous Corning Museum of Glass and the I.M. Pei-designed Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca.

Aurora Inn

With a population of fewer than 1,000, the village of Aurora on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake is a pretty and peaceful place. Its Main Street is lined by elm and ginkgo trees, and stretches of well-tended lawn extend down a gentle slope to the water’s edge. Back in the 19th century, however, at the height of the boom created by the Erie Canal, Aurora was a place of rather more consequence. Newly prosperous business people built sizable wooden mansions overlooking the lake. One of them was constructed for the then eye-watering sum of $50,000 by Colonel E.B. Morgan, entrepreneur and co-founder of The New York Times. In 1833, Morgan also built the Aurora Inn, a handsome, classically proportioned brick structure. His local business associates included William Fargo and Henry Wells, the two founders of American Express, as well as Wells Fargo & Co. And it was Wells who in 1868 established Wells College, a liberal arts institution for women, whose campus (now coeducational) dominates the village of Aurora to this day.