Corning is a one-industry town in the best possible way, and the industry is glass. The Radisson Hotel Corning sits on Denison Parkway at the edge of the Gaffer District, which means Market Street’s restaurants, bars and glass studios are two blocks from the door and the Corning Museum of Glass, home to the most important glass collection in the world, is a flat walk of about ten minutes. In a town this compact, position is nearly everything, and this hotel has the best of it.
The property itself is small-town full-service: just over 200 rooms kept in decent order, an indoor pool for the long Southern Tier winter, free parking, and Grill 1-2-5 downstairs doing steaks and a respectable bar list so you need not move the car after a day on your feet. Rooms are conservative and comfortable rather than fashionable, and the courtyard-facing ones are the quiet pick. Nothing about it will surprise you; equally, nothing about it let us down.
The reason to be here at all is the region. Give the glass museum most of a day, the live glassblowing demonstrations alone justify it, then walk five minutes to the Rockwell Museum’s collection of American Western and Native American art. Watkins Glen State Park and its gorge of nineteen waterfalls is half an hour north, and the Riesling producers along Seneca and Keuka lakes fill out any weekend. As a base for all of it, walkable to dinner and fairly priced, the Radisson is the obvious and correct choice in Corning.
