The Super Easy

Posted on February 3, 2013
Super Lights

Photo by Tom Pumphret on Flickr, Creative Commons license

The pageantry of New Orleans is on display for all the world as the Super Bowl returns to the Big Easy for the tenth time–tying the city with Miami as the most frequent host–and the first time since Hurricane Katrina. This year, with the game coinciding with the official twelve-day Carnival celebration (hence the nickname “Super Gras”), the city has pulled out all the stops in its savvy marketing of the New Orleans brand. The big show may be about the Ravens, the 49ers, and Beyonce’s halftime extravaganza, but tourism promoters have assured that the city will shine through it all and leave lasting impressions.

To an even greater degree than on the eve of the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition, Super Bowl XLVII preparations have exerted a tremendous stimulus in New Orleans, catalyzing hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements and frantic efforts to complete an overhaul of the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport terminal in time to roll out the red carpet for Super Bowl visitors. On their arrival, football fans found an airport filled with soulful serenades as bands filled the concourses and baggage claim areas with jazz and blues. The same firm that produces the city’s annual Jazz Fest has also transformed the French Quarter riverfront into the Verizon Super Bowl Boulevard, another musically driven venue. And the company that builds most of the city’s Mardi Gras floats has built the longest one ever just for the occasion. Indeed, the entire city is flush with opportunities to imbibe New Orleans culture.

The Super Gras scene represents a logical progression from the city’s longtime experience at wringing tourist dollars out of football’s biggest prize.   At one time, the Crescent City’s music took center stage at local football games.  In 1967, at the inaugural game of the city’s new Saints team, New Orleans’ Olympia Brass Band, one of its most important cultural ambassadors, high-stepped into Tulane Stadium (the Sugar Bowl), where it starred in the “Sights and Sounds of New Orleans” halftime show.  The brassy show, complete with umbrella-toting second-liners, conjured visions of Mardi Gras for spectators.  Staged just one year after Disneyland opened its miniaturized version of the New Orleans French Quarter, the show reflected the imagination of producer Tommy Walker, who had just left his post as entertainment director for Disneyland to produce nationally televised events.

New Orleans hosted Super Bowl IV–its first– in 1970.  Also played in Tulane Stadium, the game featured another Tommy Walker-produced halftime show titled “Way Down Yonder” and featured a mix of local and national musicians ranging from Al Hirt to Doc Severinson.  The show culminated with cavalry and cannon in a reenactment of the Battle of New Orleans, after which the Olympia Brass Band staged a mock jazz funeral.

Tonight’s buzz may be about Beyonce, Super Bowl commercials, and, yes, the Ravens vs. 49ers matchup, but New Orleans will make its most critical post-Katrina debut on the national stage.  With the city in the midst of an ambitious (and controversial) push to nearly double the number of annual visitors by its tricentennial in 2018, it is a reminder that the so-called “City That Care Forgot” has not forgotten how much it cares about attracting tourists.

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Ferraris and Swamp Buggies

Posted on August 20, 2012

Mention Naples, Florida, and images of ostentatious wealth quickly come to mind. On any given day, driving its residential streets requires dodging landscape company trailers for the hundreds whose buzzing equipment grooms banyan-lined, palm-studded green carpets of St. Augustine. Surely few places its size have more golf courses, gated “communities,” palatial homes, in-ground swimming pools, posh boutiques, and high-luxury cars (The town’s Ferrari Club is one of several local enthusiasts’ organizations). A trip down Fifth Avenue South conjures a vision that is one part Mediterranean seaside town and one part lifestyle center. It was not always so.

For much of the twentieth century, as American Tourism contributor Aaron Cowan of Slippery Rock University argues, Naples mixed downscale “old Florida” with upscale nods to Palm Beach. Perhaps nothing symbolized the enduring presence of old Florida more than Swamp Buggy Day. Created in 1949 by enthusiasts of swamp buggy racing (which involved the ultimate “sport utility vehicle, a balloon-tired amphibious craft), this civic celebration grew around the sport and included a swamp buggy parade down Fifth Avenue South.

Swamp Buggy Day Parade in the early 1950s. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

As Naples built its reputation as an upper-class winter destination, Swamp Buggy Day evolved into Swamp Buggy Days. Drawing larger crowds each year as a result of national TV coverage on ABC’s Wide World of Sports in the 1950s, eventually the downtown parade clashed with the town’s efforts to make downtown streets more appealing to well-heeled snowbirds.  According to an article in 1962 in the St. Petersburg Times, officials responsible for the Swamp Buggy Days parade “decided that beauty should prevail over tradition and the line of parade moved off the Fifth Avenue South business area for fear the crowd, lining the avenue, would ruin or damage extensively the $15,000 worth of planting recently installed there.” The decision prompted a furor, with some arguing that the parade would not be the same if moved to another route. Ultimately a compromise was reached whereby the route would be shifted four blocks down Fifth Avenue South so as not to “endanger the ornate plantings to the west.”

Worth Avenue, Palm Beach, 1946. By the end of the twentieth century, Fifth Avenue South was converging aesthetically more and more with Palm Beach’s refined thoroughfare. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

Eventually the parade shifted over to the Tamiami Trail (U.S. 41), a multilane highway that skirts “Old Naples” to the east, ending two blocks to the north of the city’s prettified main drag. Then last year the City of Naples, seeking to trim its budget, voted to stop sponsoring the annual event, turning over responsibility to the Collier County Sheriff’s Department. In a sense the parade, still highly popular, reflects changes all along Florida’s coastline, where tastes–and incomes–skew toward the high end while “old Florida” recedes ever farther inland. If U.S. 41 once divided the pricey from the affordable, in the last decade, as more and more tourists have made the destination home, the boundary has marched eastward to I-75 and beyond, propelling the market for affordable housing far away from the Gulf.

Naples straddles two worlds: Ferraris centered on Fifth Avenue South and swamp buggies at Florida Sports Park, home of the Swamp Buggy Races, at the dead end of Rattlesnake Hammock Road–and, for a day, parading U.S. 41. As a New York Times reporter noted several years ago (Robert Andrew Powell, “On Florida’s West Coast, A Would-Be Palm Beach,” New York Times, March 12, 2004, F1), one ambivalent buggy racer and air conditioner installer who turned to selling high-end real estate mourned the gradual eclipse of old Florida. For now, though, the swamp buggies roll on in Naples.

Tropical landscaping added to the refined appeal of Fifth Avenue South by the 1960s. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

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Shutterbugs on Holiday

Posted on August 16, 2012

In Eric Fischer’s representation of Las Vegas, the Strip appears as a large red boomerang.  Fischer’s “Locals and Tourists” Flickr set, which expands upon his Geotaggers’ World Atlas, is a fascinating window into where tourists and locals spend their time in more than one hundred cities around the world. Based on public Flickr and Picasa APIs, Fischer’s maps graphically represent the so-called “tourist bubbles” that geographers have long described in cities.  As he explains in his methodological statement, there is room for interpretation of these geocoded representations of picture-taking activity, but his analysis lines up very well with what we know about these cities.

In the case of Las Vegas, it suggests the relative popularity of the Strip versus Fremont Street, Vegas’s much older downtown casino district, which appears as a small crosshatch to the north of the “red boomerang.” It also confirms the extent to which some cities manage to cultivate multiple tourist centers while others lean heavily on a single concentration. The map of San Francisco, for instance, reveals tourist bubbles in all the expected places. While Chinatown, the subject of an essay by California State University-Fullerton professor Raymond W. Rast in American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition, appears as a red honeycomb, it shares tourist dollars with many other “red” spots, among then Alcatraz, Fishermen’s Wharf, the Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, Cliff House, Golden Gate Bridge, Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, Union Square, Alamo Square, Haight-Ashbury, and Lombard Street. In fact, though, rather than a bubble, San Francisco seems more of a “tourist ring,” with tourists seemingly frequenting sites along the coast east of the Golden Gate Bridge to Fishermen’s Wharf, then southward through Chinatown to Market Street, then southwest and west along Market and in Golden Gate Park to the Pacific Ocean, and finally north along the coast back to the Golden Gate Bridge.

While a sea of red dots cannot in itself prove how tourists move about a city, it gives a pretty good idea. It also suggests that wherever one finds a sea of blue dots might well become a tourist destination. To the possible chagrin of guardians of local culture, these maps might function much as airline magazines’ articles on discovering hidden treasures “off the beaten path” in heavily touristed cities.

Locals and Tourists #123 (GTWA #17): Las Vegas

Locals and Tourists #123 (GTWA #17): Las Vegas. By Eric Fischer on Flickr

Locals and Tourists #3 (GTWA #4): San Francisco

Locals and Tourists #3 (GTWA #4): San Francisco. By Eric Fischer on Flickr

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Hope Springs Eternal for Riverfront Tourism

Posted on August 14, 2012

Countless cities have harnessed rivers as focal points for civic renaissance and tourism gambits. Memphis’s Mud Island and Minneapolis’s Mill District are but two of the nation’s riverside destinations. San Antonio’s River Walk, by dint of its age, is a more iconic example. First envisioned in the 1920s and constructed with federal funding under FDR’s New Deal, the River Walk became as much a handle for San Antonio as the famed Alamo. While creating a great riverine attraction on the surface may appear straightforward, it involves much more than meets the eye.

Maintaining San Antonio’s tourist and civic goldmine is not simply a matter of maintaining the infrastructure at water’s edge. Rather, at this time of year, especially in droughts, it is a matter of maintaining the existence of the river itself. With no natural flow in summertime, the River Walk, as journalist and water-issue expert Charles Fishman has observed, depends on the recycling of wastewater — not exactly a thought that meshes with images of a romantic Spanish fantasy. It is a reminder of how thoroughly constructed both tourist attractions and the environment of cities are.

River Walk, San Antonio, Texas

River Walk, San Antonio, Texas. Image by Morten Skogly on Flickr

“Natural” or not, the River Walk prompts not only millions of tourist pilgrimages annually but also plenty of observational junkets by economic development officials from other cities ever in pursuit of downtown revitalization and tourism. Recently, as reported in the Lexington Herald-Leader, officers of Commerce Lexington in Lexington, Kentucky, made such a trip and returned heartened by the fact that Lexington’s culverted Town Branch offers something even the San Antonio River doesn’t–uninterrupted flow. If Scottsdale, Arizona, can create a “waterfront” from a desert drainage ditch, Lexington’s buried brook seems as good a place as any to engineer a riverfront renaissance.

Downtown Scottsdale - Waterfront

Scottsdale Waterfront, Scottsdale, Arizona. Image by Dru Bloomfield on Flickr

Hartford, Connecticut’s experience too suggests that cities need not imitate the River Walk or any other noteworthy riverfront success. While tourism development often involves conscious mimicry, as we have noted repeatedly on this blog and as our contributors demonstrate in American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition, the wide-ranging diversity of the nation’s rivers offers the possibility of tailoring promotional efforts to local conditions. Hartford has no need for a River Walk knockoff. With the recent designation of the Connecticut River as the first National Blueway, Hartford will do well to emphasize its many recreational uses of the river. As the Hartford Courant points out, Hartford visitors are more likely to come for bass fishing and kayaking than anything like San Antonio’s annual rubber duck race.

River-oriented tourism promotion requires placemaking work but also an appreciation for what makes a waterway unique, the cultivation of activities that draw people closer to the water, and–most important–a willingness to work tirelessly to safeguard the natural resource itself.

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Fun Las Vegas Infographic

Posted on July 31, 2012

Would you believe that all the hotel rooms in San Francisco would fit inside just four Las Vegas resorts? Or that the 15,000 miles of neon tubing that illuminate the Strip would, if connected end to end, result in a continuous neon tube framing the outline of the Lower 48? These are just a couple of the fascinating pieces of trivia in the following infographic, titled “7 Reasons Nothing Leaves Las Vegas” by Frugal Dad. Taken together, the graphically represented factoids really hammer home the impact of one of the nation’s preeminent tourist destinations.


7 Reasons Nothing Leaves Las Vegas

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I (Heart) Moscow?

Posted on July 17, 2012

Moscow city officials are searching for their own version of Milton Glaser’s “I Love New York” campaign. Through an open competition they hope to encourage the creation of an “original and organic logo to project Moscow as a global tourism center.” New York’s famous campaign, as Art Blake describes in his essay on New York City in American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition, is credited with rebranding New York City as a tourist-friendly destination after decades of urban decline. It is understandable that Moscow, with its many connections to New York in terms of immigration and cultural outlook, would seek to imitate New York’s success. The right combination of design talent, urban management, and timing must, however, come together for places to truly reposition their global images. An open competition, moreover, is also a risky move for city officials. Would Glaser’s simple “I Love New York” campaign have necessarily won in an open competition?

Image

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Sincerest Flattery in Tourist “Lands”

Posted on July 14, 2012

Although tourist destinations often trade on their distinctive visual presence, often there is no lack of imitation to go along with the unique.  Replicas of other places have long been a hallmark of tourism.  Well before its renown for country music, Nashville, Tennessee, styled itself as the “Athens of the South” and even built a full-size Parthenon for its Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897.  In more recent years, Las Vegas has borrowed architecture unabashedly from places as far-flung as New York and Venice.

Few places have inspired more imitations than the New Orleans French Quarter, one of the featured destinations in American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition.  Much enamored of the Vieux Carré, Walt Disney added New Orleans Square, a miniaturized version of the famed district, to Disneyland in 1966.  Twenty-five years later, Walt Disney World added Disney’s Port Orleans, a themed resort with one “region” loosely patterned after Vieux Carré architecture.   Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort features an even more realistic assemblage of Vieux Carré buildings beneath its gigantic glass atrium.  Even apartment complexes (French Quarter Apartments in Tuscaloosa, Alabama), motels (Holiday Inn–French Quarter near Toledo, Ohio), and mixed-use developments (River Ranch in Lafayette, Louisiana) have copied the trademark iron-lace balconies found in the French Quarter.  Perhaps our favorite example is the extremely miniaturized (1:20 scale) French Quarter model in the MiniLand USA section of Legoland California in San Diego, where a large swath of the Quarter from Jackson Square and St. Louis Cemetery #1 is recreated in loving detail with millions of Lego bricks!

Have you discovered examples of French Quarter replicas or replicas of other famous places in your travels? Tell us about them!

Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center

Opryland’s French Quarter replica in Nashville. Photo by Cliff on Flickr

The French Quarter of New Orleans area of MiniLand USA.

The French Quarter replica in MiniLand USA section of Legoland in San Diego, California. Photo by lori05871 on Flickr

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