On Wednesday, the Common Council Tourism Committee meets for the first time to review applications for the $50,000 earmarked for distribution this year to events and initiatives that support tourism and perhaps also to decide the fate of Warren Street Seasonal Usage in 2022. The meeting comes just hours after Mayor Kamal Johnson holds a public hearing on the amended lodging tax law that does away with the controversial Tourism Board.
Given the attention to tourism this week, it is a coincidence that, a hundred years ago today, on March 28, 1922, the Columbia Republican published this opinion piece, advocating for what was then a cutting edge concept.
An internet search did not uncover any clue about a motorists' camp in Newburgh, but we know there was one just outside Hudson, on Fairview Avenue in Greenport, run by Enos Hamm. The Grey Goose Diner was a part of that camp. The piece in the Columbia Republican may be evidence that Hamm had not yet established his tourist camp in March 1922.
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| Desoto Park in 1920 |
After the completion of the Dixie Highway from Montreal to Miami in 1915, the number of automobile tourists to Florida increased dramatically every year, and Florida's rural areas and small towns began to change as well. The 1920s featured a faith in the material growth of the nation and with Florida's natural allure, caused much of the state to seemingly mushroom overnight. According to one local historian, "It seemed that all the people of the Midwest and farming regions of the North were coming to Florida to spend the winter in their trailers." Lured by the accounts of friends who had visited the area, intrigued by Florida sunshine and sand, and spurred in the 1920s by the mobility of Henry Ford's inexpensive cars, the number of immigrants to the state steadily increased. . . . The winter of 1919-1920 marked the arrival of the so-called Tin Can Tourists; visitors driving homemade trailers and eating out of tin cans. Cars from all over the North headed to Florida piled high with bedding, tents, and boxes of canned food.
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| Gateway to Osceola County on the Dixie Highway, 1920s |
In 1921, there were approximately 17,000 members of Tin Can Tourists through the United States and Canada. (By 1935, during the Great Depression, there were 100,000 members.) Their touring wasn't restricted to winter trips to Florida. They also held summer gatherings in northern locations, most often in Traverse City, Michigan. Tin Can Tourists ceased to exist in the 1970s, but the group was revived in 1998. Tin Can Tourists now describes itself as "an organization committed to the celebration of classic trailers and motor coaches through annual gatherings of owners and friends."
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| Photo: MyNorth.com |
In June 2019, Tin Can Tourists celebrated their centennial at Interlochen State Park, fifteen miles southwest of Traverse City. This year, Tin Can Tourists plan a fall gathering at Camp Dearborn in Milford, Michigan.
COPYRIGHT 2022 CAROLE OSTERINK
Carole, this has probably been discussed before, but why is the Mayor abolishing the tourism board/committee? My casual observations is that tourism (including hotels, restaurants, bnb's, etc) has got to be bringing in millions of dollars of direct and indirect benefits to the City. thanks. --peter meyer
ReplyDeleteGoodness. You haven’t been paying attention, have you? Here’s a summary of what has happened since the creation of the Tourism Board, which will expose my personal biases on the topic.
DeleteThe original Tourism Board, chaired by Rich Volo and including some savvy people like Ted Gramkow and Tammy Dillon, saw its role as trying to make tourism a sustainable industry for Hudson. After a year of discussion, they decided what they needed to do was develop a strategic plan to market Hudson in a way that respected the integrity and the character of the city, didn’t relinquish telling Hudson’s story to the whims of travel writers, and made Hudson’s popularity as a destination dependable and sustainable. Lofty goals. They made the mistake of wanting to hire someone from Nashville to engage the community and help craft the plan. It wasn’t unreasonable to think an outsider with some demonstrated skills and no preconceived notions about Hudson might be a good choice, but some members of the community thought otherwise. The term “branding” got bandied about at this time, which trivialized the endeavor. It enraged people that the person the Tourism Board wanted to hire was from Tennessee and had never worked with a city as cool as Hudson, as did the notion that the Tourism Board was proposing to spend $70,000 on this exercise.
Up until this point, the Tourism Board was getting a percentage of the revenue from the lodging tax, never to exceed $250,000 a year, to support, as defined by the law, “all reasonable steps it determines desirable, necessary and proper to market the City of Hudson as a destination.” The Tourism Board’s first effort to spend some of that money caused such a hue and cry that the Common Council decided to amend the law to defund the Tourism Board. At the beginning of 2020, after the terms of all the original members of the Tourism Board expired, a whole new batch of members was appointed, many of them the very people who protested most vehemently the proposed actions of the original Tourism Board. Because the law defunding the Tourism Board didn’t take effect immediately, the money was still accumulating, and the new Tourism Board had close to a half million dollars to spend—which they did in two years’ time. They essentially saw their task as doling out money to projects they believed would bring regional visitors to Hudson and bolster the city’s economy in the midst of a pandemic. They undertook to redefine tourism and invested in a number of projects whose tourism connection wasn’t immediately clear (for example, $14,700 to improve curbside pickup at Rolling Grocer) and projects that had connections to members of the Tourism Board. Over the course of two years, several members resigned and were replaced. Toward the end, some resigned and were not replaced.
At the beginning of this year, it was decided, it seemed by Tom DePietro, that making decisions about how taxpayer money should be used to support tourism should be the responsibility of elected officials and not people appointed for that task. As a consequence, the Tourism Board has now been replaced by a committee of the Common Council--the Tourism Committee.
Thanks so much Carole for this wonderful summary--makes me glad that I missed it :) It also makes my current work -- teaching journalism to Hudson 5th- and 6th-graders -- seem so much more important. I invite your readers to check it out: https://www.schoollifemedia.org/sln peter meyer
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