I hear it in movies so the time. We’re going upstate. I went upstate. Etc
I never hear downstate, or similar. Does it just mean going north?
I hear it in movies so the time. We’re going upstate. I went upstate. Etc
I never hear downstate, or similar. Does it just mean going north?
It means the Northern part of the state, typically when the state has a North-South cultural divide. It’s not exclusive to the US though, I’ve seen it used in places like Sao Paulo and Lagos before. Anywhere where one locality serves as a drain on the rest will get people to refer to different halves of the place, I guess nobody learned from Athens and Sparta.
Similarly the small town I grew up in had “the other side of the tracks”