Asklemmy

Sending someone upstate means sending them to prison

Ive heard it used to mean going to jail

It refers to the northern part of whatever state the speaker happens to be in. It's mostly used by New Yorkers to refer to the more rural part of New York State which is North of New York City.

Downstate is a thing, I guess, but neither upstate nor downstate are used much outside of New York in my experience.

this really only applies to New York, as New York City is in the bottom little bit of the state’s southern nubbin and the rest of the state is commonly called “Upstate New York” since when people outside the northeast refer to New York, they’re talking about New York City, rather than the state of New York. thus Upstate New York was shortened to Upstate. (it seems to hold that most people i know who grew up in the northeast call New York City “NYC” rather than what i used growing up which was “New York.”

I am an american, I grew up in a state in the south west, no one ever used the term “going upstate” for anything because there was no such place to go.

I guarantee you only see dialog such as this in media set in NYC.

It refers to a rural area of the state. Usually with a higher income bracket.

I live in Southern California and we don’t really use that phrase around here. I think it’s almost entirely used to refer to basically any area of New York north of NYC.

I'd bet a dollar OP just watched the Friends Porsche episode.

A place where people use the phrase steamed hams.

It's common in states that have a lower population center, geographically. I'm in Minnesota, and our Twin Cities are in the southern third of the state.

"Going up north (to the cabin)" is our spin on "upstate", because (for most people) there isn't much of a reason to go much more north than we already do.

Def depends where you’re at. In Virginia we call upstate Nova (northern VA). In NJ it’s North Jersey (I’m originally from South Jersey) PA is more east west oriented since Philly and Pittsburgh are east and west ends of the state.

It works just like updog

Since a lot of people have upstate, there are some places that have a downstate in the southern part of the state, the best examples I can think of being Illinois and Maine.

It just happens to be that you've heard upstate more because New York City is a lot more depicted in American media.