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Tourist Trappings

Category: Open Roads

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As summer arrives, more and more people map out their travel plans, which often include a weekend in a “tourist town.” Hailing from New England, I am all too familiar with these places. Along the coast, for instance, you’ll find one cozy seaport after another, each with its own array of curio shops, ice cream parlors, and salt-water taffy vendors. With the decline of the fishing industry, such towns have come to depend upon the tourist trade, and most locals have adjusted their attitudes regarding the summer invasions.

Across the Northeast, many cities and towns that once made tangible goods now seek to redefine their local economies in this post-industrial age by turning themselves into quasi-historical showcases. This tack has rankled my thoughts for a number of years, starting from an exchange I once had with residents of Great Barrington, Massachusetts (in the Berkshire hills; not a coastal town). This couple lamented the closing of the town’s last mill, but expressed their hope that then-current plans to attract tourists would soon bolster the local economy. I nodded sympathetically, but winced inwardly at the prospect of another mill town evolving into a retail center for future flea-market fodder.

Because I believe that a town’s true character springs from the work of its community, I wonder what future it faces as yet one more node on the tourist network. Already too many of these towns have become indistinguishable from one another. Once-thriving fishing communities such as Newburyport, Rockport, Mystic, Plymouth, Ogunquit, Camden, and others have replaced their fleets with the requisite ingredients of the standard boutique town: An espresso bar, a chowder stand, one or two ice cream shops, a cutely-monikered tavern, and at least a half-dozen bric-a-brac stores and overpriced antique shops, each with interchangeable inventory. If they still have a rusty scupper, it’s just a name on a bar.

Meanwhile, locales devoid of a natural attraction such as a water vista must resort to marketing. Dig up some interesting bit of pop-culture history, design a logo around it, and issue press releases. The list of once proud and distinctive wealth-creating industrial centers that pin revival hopes upon tourist dollars now include Springfield, Massachusetts with Dr. Seuss and basketball, Jamestown, New York, with Lucille Ball, and Easton, Pennsylvania with Crayola crayons (thankfully, still made there). Yet the tourist dollar doesn’t provide a means to an end – defined as a future rejoined with the American economic mainstream. Tourism is the end.

This civic devolution takes on various forms, with the worst examples involving some form of legalized gambling. Some schemes seem innocuous enough until you ponder the big picture. In Vermont, for instance, some farms are staving off obsolescence by inviting visitors to pay for the privilege of pitching hay and milking cows. Does the future of local agriculture mean turning our farms into theme parks?

Across America, older cities drained of population, talent, and imagination continue to push for the publicly financed construction of proven money losers like convention centers and sports arenas with the stated intention of attracting visitors – and rarely do proponents adequately quantify how these projects will improve the lives of residents. They can’t because such projects don’t.

The tourism economy works best where the attraction occurs naturally (the beach), or where nothing existed before (Las Vegas or Orlando). Given that I prefer to travel as the natives live, once-productive communities turned into movie sets fall toward the bottom of my travel priority list. I have to think that in an inherently creative economy such as ours, people can find a way to revive the traditional community without staging a show that cartoons their local history. These places give little back to the culture, and as a visitor, I couldn’t be less interested in towns that exist solely to sell me dust-bait.