From Niagara Falls to the shopping malls, there has been nothing accidental about the American tourist, argues John F. Sears in his new book,
”Sacred Places” (Oxford University Press, $24.95).
Goaded by a cultural inferiority complex, egged on by romantic landscape painters and guidebook writers and liberated by prosperity, Americans took to the turnpike early in the 19th Century.
Just as we do, they visited natural wonders, such as Niagara Falls and Kentucky`s Mammoth Cave. But they also visited places with more human connotations. They were drawn to the site of an avalanche disaster in New Hampshire as eagerly as we are drawn to, say, Graceland.
And just as we do, they went not only to see, but also to shop.
”I wouldn`t call (shopping malls) a place of pilgrimage,” said Sears from his office at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y., ”but they`re connected closely with the way tourist attractions are structured commercially, beginning with Niagara Falls in the 19th Century. It was broken up into parts to be consumed, including the shops and museums that surrounded the falls.”
Malls add nature
In the same way, he said, huge malls often incorporate elements of nature-trees, fountains, atriums soaring to the sky-as well as bite-size chunks of shopping heaven.
”Some of the malls now incorporate museums into them,” such as the one in Woodbridge, Va., that contains an Elvis museum with the King`s blue pajamas and hair-dryer, among other relics. ”And Graceland itself has a shopping mall attached to it. . . .”
Ah, yes, Graceland. When Merle Haggard wrote a tune called ”From Graceland to the Promised Land” shortly after the death of Elvis Presley, he wasn`t just whistling ”Dixie.”
”When I visited Graceland,” Sears said, ”I had a very strong sense that people were going there for quasi-religious reasons. They went to put flowers. . . . They left messages there, the sort of thing that you would do at the grave of a saint-you leave votive offerings. . . .
”The Vietnam Memorial is a more serious example of this. People go there and they leave offerings, they leave not just flowers but other things-combat boots, a teddy bear that belonged to one of the soldiers who was killed, messages, poems. . . . And those have all been saved. There`s an archive.”
Something significant
This quasi-religious aspect-the sense that one is visiting not merely something interesting, but something significant-is deeply rooted in our tourist history.
”The romantic attitude toward the landscape contained a strong religious element,” Sears said. ”Nature was seen as sacred by many people.”
But there were secular reasons for traveling, too: ”A chance to get away, to get out of the usual routines, visit a strange and exotic place, buy things not available at home. . . .
”Tourism as pilgrimage has probably existed in all cultures. But I think the difference in 19th Century America was that we didn`t have a long history, from a European point of view anyway.
”Tourism had a role to play at a time when we were searching for an identity and trying to create a national literature and national art, in a very self-conscious way.
”I don`t think Americans worry about that today. . . . People imitate us.”
Sears, a former professor of literature who runs the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, came by his fascination with travel honestly: As a child he shuttled between school in New Orleans and summers in Massachusetts, at a time-he is 48-before the interstates standardized the American landscape.
At Harvard, he studied what he calls the ”cultural landscape.” That is, ”the lands as modified by man, as interpreted by man, as invested with meaning by man.”
Travelers-as the more high-toned sort of tourist liked to be called, even then-read Edmund Burke`s 1757 ”Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” a seminal work in the romantic revolution, or else they read travel writers who had clearly read Burke. In either case, off they went in search of the sublime and beautiful.
They still do.
”I think people do go in search of experiences which are transcendent, which lift them up, inspire them, make them feel a sense of awe,” Sears said. The Space Center is one such experience: ”The size of the missiles and the awe of these enormous machines being launched into space. And space itself-not a lot of Earth still has mystery, but space does.”
What`s the next great tourist attraction going to be?
Watch New York
”It`s hard to predict,” Sears said, but he`s keeping a weather eye on New York.
”It`ll be interesting to see what happens to Times Square now that they`re renovating it,” he said. ”The initial designs . . . were rejected because they lacked any reference to what Times Square had always been. So now they have added on, to incorporate some of the flashier elements.”
Guides dressed as hookers? Shops selling candy ”drugs”?
”They`ll have an allusion to Times Square, just as Quincy Market in Boston alludes to an earlier Quincy Market, which was a real place. The real Times Square will move somewhere else.” –
