Skaneateles Lake village pier
— — water so clear it forgets to be water.
Not only on a wall.
“The pier runs out from Clift Park at the top of the lake, in the village of Skaneateles. The water beneath it is famous for clarity, clear enough that Syracuse, twenty miles north, draws its drinking water unfiltered from the lake. Mailboats run all summer; sailboats lie at moorings off the breakwater. In late afternoon the light on the limestone bottom is the colour the lake gives the village back.
Skaneateles Lake village pier, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Skaneateles Lake is the easternmost of the eleven major Finger Lakes, running about fifteen miles north-south through Onondaga and Cayuga counties in central New York. The village of Skaneateles sits at the north end, where Clift Park and its public pier reach into the water. The lake surface sits at roughly 860 feet above sea level and reaches depths over 290 feet, making it the second-deepest of the Finger Lakes after Seneca. The City of Syracuse has drawn its drinking water from Skaneateles Lake since 1894, treated only by chlorination.
Skaneateles Lake holds some of the clearest water in the eastern United States. Researchers at Syracuse University and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation have recorded Secchi-disc readings above twenty feet in late summer, well beyond what the state's other large lakes register. The clarity owes to a small, lightly developed watershed, slow flushing rates, and the limestone-rich glacial geology that limits sediment runoff. The lake remains one of only a handful of unfiltered public water supplies in the United States, alongside New York City's Catskill-Delaware system upstate.
Clift Park, on the village green, is open free of charge from sunrise to sunset; the public pier, the Mid-Lakes Navigation mailboat dock, and the bandstand all sit within a two-minute walk of each other. The mailboat itself, the Judge Ben Wiles, runs daily three-hour cruises from late May through Columbus Day, delivering mail to lakeside docks the old way. Parking along Genesee Street is metered. Winter ice-up is partial in most years; the lake rarely freezes fully because its depth holds too much thermal mass.