The New Old
Tourism gurus are coming up with revolutionary ways to promote our historic landmarks. Will their zeal for marketing homogenize our history’s unique appeal?
“I am Salem Towne Junior,” says the deep voice narrating a DVD about 1830s dairy farming. The sleek television monitor mounted just below the ceiling makes the antique churn and cheese-press nearby look even…antique-er. This is Towne’s House, built in 1796 and moved about a century and a half later from Charlton to the Old Sturbridge Village living-history museum. For a long time, Old Sturbridge’s version of early 19th-century country life was explained by costumed interpreters, like the one in the adjacent room who sings about cooking to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” But there are fewer of them here than there used to be. The “living” part of living history ain’t cheap, and the Village has had to find new ways to tell its old story. “Progress,” Junior intones over lilting music. “Better tools. New ways to farm…Some folks call this progressive farming. I call it good business.”
Business has actually been pretty bad at Old Sturbridge Village. In 2000, some 367,000 visitors strolled past the 1830s-era houses and shops clustered around its grassy common. Last year, that number was closer to 260,000. Fewer visitors, of course, has meant less revenue, which in turn has meant laying off interpreters and other staff, closing the tavern, and selling the motel complex. Not the best way to celebrate your 60th anniversary.
But “crisis is only opportunity riding on a high wind,” as the motivational speaker A.C. Ping wrote in his essay “If History Has Ended, Where to from Here?” Ping was citing a Chinese proverb, but he might as well have been quoting Bill Reid, Old Sturbridge Village’s vice president of external affairs.
“It’s a year of clearly showing so many of the new ways of learning, new ways of presentation. We’ve been developing it for some time now,” Reid says. “The 60th year, so many things will be going on in the Village. It’s a great opportunity. Great opportunity.”
THIS STORY BEGAN with the working title “The End of History,” the idea being that historical sites across the state were suffering, that the problems at Old Sturbridge Village and living-history museums in general—not to mention reports of Philadelphia carving into our tourism market share and the downscaling and relocation of Boston’s Dreams of Freedom Museum last year—all signaled some larger trend. But historical sites across the state aren’t suffering, not pervasively. Most of the landmarks that make up the Boston National Historical Park actually saw visitation increase last year, by as much as 11 percent, for example, at the USS Constitution. Attendance also rose at the Paul Revere House, the Old State House, and the Boston African American National Historic Site.
What is happening is that historical tourism officials are ripping a page out of the corporate sales manual, the one that reads “Repackage. Rebrand. Give it a kick. Make it sell.” Of course, when history is what you’re selling, repackaging is about all you can do. It’s not like the product is going to change.
According to its strategic plan, Old Sturbridge Village is being transformed into a “multifaceted history learning center” where live interpreters will be complemented by hands-on, high-tech exhibits. In the new History Gateway building is an area where children can dress up in pint-sized period clothes and play with fake firewood. Computer kiosks will soon be installed to let visitors peruse a virtual version of the Village’s collections. The Village has already launched a winter program about Christmas and a summer event with reenactors depicting soldiers from King Philip’s War all the way up to the Civil War. The kidcentric stuff is particularly important, say Village elders. Kids today live in a world so saturated with entertainment media that it’s hard to excite them with “Hey, here’s a house with a person in it.”
“Or how about a house without a person,” says former Old Sturbridge Village president Beverly K. Sheppard, who resigned back in March. “Whoa, that one’s really dull.” Sheppard presided over many of the new initiatives and intends to stay on as an adviser for some still pending. She says the changes would bother her if she felt she were tromping on history. But she doesn’t.
“What we’re trying to do is not reinvent history,” she says, “but reinvent the process of sharing that history.”
YOU HEAR THE same sentiment from the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, the state Office of Travel & Tourism, and the Freedom Trail Foundation, which oversees that red-brick line walked by around 3 million tourists last year. The foundation’s president, Mimi La Camera, used to work at the visitors bureau but moved over last fall to “put a fire under” Boston’s historical butt. This spring she began a marketing campaign that makes reference to no fewer than six TV shows. “American revolutionary history, but not the same old story,” reads the news release, “desperate housewives, survivors, extreme makeovers, a commander in chief, CSIs, and real American idols.” In the section about “desperate housewives,” Abigail Adams appears under the heading “Home alone.”
La Camera wants to tell stories that aren’t heard very often, like about how a Revolutionary War–era corpse was identified from dentures made by Paul Revere (hence the CSI reference). But she also wants to approach well-known historic events from a different angle.
“We’ve started a funky tour called the Historic Pub Crawl,” La Camera tells me.
I can’t help laughing.
“Yes. There you go. That’s exactly the reaction I want.”
The pub crawl makes stops at four historic taverns: the Bell-in-Hand, the Union Oyster House, the Green Dragon, and the Point. Each bar treats tour-goers to snacks and miniature glasses of beer. La Camera has also created a Sundowner Tour that ends with a prix fixe dinner ($17.76 for kids) at one of more than 30 restaurants. “Our competition is within the city and also Philadelphia and Washington and the other historic sites,” she says. “We have to keep repackaging because our competitors are repackaging.”
WHILE PHILADELPHIA isn’t exactly eating our 18th-century lunch, there are reasons to worry. Boston was the 10th-favorite destination for international visitors in 2004, just as it was in 1999. But during that same five-year span, Philly rose from 21st place to 12th. Today, Pennsylvania comes in third in the Travel Industry Association of America’s ranking of how much money each state puts into tourism. Massachusetts comes in 31st. We’re behind South Dakota.
Paul J. Sacco of the Office of Travel & Tourism—who likes to use the word “edu-tainment” when talking about historic tourism—says one survey has put history tourists at 15.1 percent of the state’s total visitors. But if you add in the 16.1 percent doing “urban sightseeing,” which might include historic sites … well, you can see where this is going. Pat Moscaritolo, president of the visitors bureau, says 25 percent of overnight leisure visitors to Boston come purely for the history, which translates into $2.25 billion in revenues. Factor in tourists drawn here by museums and national parks, which often have some historical connection, and the estimate hits 57 percent. “Boston owns the brand on history,” Moscaritolo says. Still, he says, “maybe it’s time to broaden the approach in the way that historical tourism is presented. Maybe you have to figure out a way to get this into people’s hands, or into their iPods, as they all seem to be walking around with iPods.”
Mimi La Camera is way ahead of him. She’s arranged it so that tourists can download a Freedom Trail audio tour to their MP3 players. “Teachers will tell you that what you have to compete with is Game Boys, Nintendo, and TV and movies,” La Camera says. “That’s a reality. But I think that you can approach all this as an interesting way to repackage. And I’m just going to keep saying it again and again—it’s just repackaging.”
Not to be outdone, Philadelphia plans to launch a cell-phone tour of its historic sites this summer. Thankfully (or not) Boston beat Philly to the punch in 2004, when a private company released Boston: City of Rebels and Dreamers. (Full disclosure: I did some sound work for this tour. I never got paid.) Walk to a point of interest, dial 617-262-TOUR, and hear Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler say things like “Ah, Beacon Hill…it makes ya’ wanna moo.” He goes on to explain that the area used to be a cow pasture. This costs $5.95.
SOMETIMES, people in her business “make things too cute,” says Nina Zannieri, director of the Paul Revere House. “We shouldn’t despair of losing out to video games,” she says. Then again, Zannieri has dabbled in some repackaging of her own. Last summer, she did a promotion with the Lowell Spinners, a Red Sox farm team, featuring a Paul Revere bobble-head doll. To the suggestion that history purists would gasp at the idea of a Paul Revere bobble-head doll, she says: “Sure, but we spent a lot of time making sure he was dressed in the right outfit. And it was a little bit of fun.”
If you Google the words “making history fun” one of the links you come up with says “History Is Fun!” It’s an essay by the Concord Review’s Will Fitzhugh, whose journal publishes history papers by high schoolers. To Fitzhugh, history doesn’t have to be made fun—or compelling or snazzy or anything else—because it already is. He fears history teachers are trying to entertain their students rather than educate them. “To me, a pub crawl, it’s kind of pandering and saying, ‘We have to compete with MTV, so let’s go drink beer,’” he says. Which, of course, is exactly what the Freedom Trail is saying.
The night I went on the crawl, history was competing with Jethro Tull and coming up short. At the Bell-in-Hand, “Bungle in the Jungle” boomed as a costumed Captain Silas Talbot told me and 23 paying adults that the bar was founded in 1795 by town crier Jimmy Wilson.
“Think about the 50 years leading up to 1795,” the captain said as the group was handed shot glasses of ale. “The world turned upside down. The revolt against the tea tax, the Boston Massacre, the shot heard ’round the world. And Bostonians heard about those events from the very loud mouth of one Jimmy Wilson!”
“We can’t hear you!” a visitor said.
Even if the Revolution was partially plotted in these bars, they’re still bars, and loud ones, and you can go to a loud bar anywhere. And if we really do own the brand on history in this city—if ours is the richest, oldest, purest, most historical history—do we need to serve it with beer and Jethro Tull and Steven Tyler?
Nonetheless, the pub crawl is so popular that, the night I took it, a second was added to meet demand. Interestingly, there were teachers in both groups, including one who said she was going to put it on her list of fun pub crawls. “I’m learning something,” she said.
Business has actually been pretty bad at Old Sturbridge Village. In 2000, some 367,000 visitors strolled past the 1830s-era houses and shops clustered around its grassy common. Last year, that number was closer to 260,000. Fewer visitors, of course, has meant less revenue, which in turn has meant laying off interpreters and other staff, closing the tavern, and selling the motel complex. Not the best way to celebrate your 60th anniversary.
But “crisis is only opportunity riding on a high wind,” as the motivational speaker A.C. Ping wrote in his essay “If History Has Ended, Where to from Here?” Ping was citing a Chinese proverb, but he might as well have been quoting Bill Reid, Old Sturbridge Village’s vice president of external affairs.
“It’s a year of clearly showing so many of the new ways of learning, new ways of presentation. We’ve been developing it for some time now,” Reid says. “The 60th year, so many things will be going on in the Village. It’s a great opportunity. Great opportunity.”
THIS STORY BEGAN with the working title “The End of History,” the idea being that historical sites across the state were suffering, that the problems at Old Sturbridge Village and living-history museums in general—not to mention reports of Philadelphia carving into our tourism market share and the downscaling and relocation of Boston’s Dreams of Freedom Museum last year—all signaled some larger trend. But historical sites across the state aren’t suffering, not pervasively. Most of the landmarks that make up the Boston National Historical Park actually saw visitation increase last year, by as much as 11 percent, for example, at the USS Constitution. Attendance also rose at the Paul Revere House, the Old State House, and the Boston African American National Historic Site.
What is happening is that historical tourism officials are ripping a page out of the corporate sales manual, the one that reads “Repackage. Rebrand. Give it a kick. Make it sell.” Of course, when history is what you’re selling, repackaging is about all you can do. It’s not like the product is going to change.
According to its strategic plan, Old Sturbridge Village is being transformed into a “multifaceted history learning center” where live interpreters will be complemented by hands-on, high-tech exhibits. In the new History Gateway building is an area where children can dress up in pint-sized period clothes and play with fake firewood. Computer kiosks will soon be installed to let visitors peruse a virtual version of the Village’s collections. The Village has already launched a winter program about Christmas and a summer event with reenactors depicting soldiers from King Philip’s War all the way up to the Civil War. The kidcentric stuff is particularly important, say Village elders. Kids today live in a world so saturated with entertainment media that it’s hard to excite them with “Hey, here’s a house with a person in it.”
“Or how about a house without a person,” says former Old Sturbridge Village president Beverly K. Sheppard, who resigned back in March. “Whoa, that one’s really dull.” Sheppard presided over many of the new initiatives and intends to stay on as an adviser for some still pending. She says the changes would bother her if she felt she were tromping on history. But she doesn’t.
“What we’re trying to do is not reinvent history,” she says, “but reinvent the process of sharing that history.”
YOU HEAR THE same sentiment from the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, the state Office of Travel & Tourism, and the Freedom Trail Foundation, which oversees that red-brick line walked by around 3 million tourists last year. The foundation’s president, Mimi La Camera, used to work at the visitors bureau but moved over last fall to “put a fire under” Boston’s historical butt. This spring she began a marketing campaign that makes reference to no fewer than six TV shows. “American revolutionary history, but not the same old story,” reads the news release, “desperate housewives, survivors, extreme makeovers, a commander in chief, CSIs, and real American idols.” In the section about “desperate housewives,” Abigail Adams appears under the heading “Home alone.”
La Camera wants to tell stories that aren’t heard very often, like about how a Revolutionary War–era corpse was identified from dentures made by Paul Revere (hence the CSI reference). But she also wants to approach well-known historic events from a different angle.
“We’ve started a funky tour called the Historic Pub Crawl,” La Camera tells me.
I can’t help laughing.
“Yes. There you go. That’s exactly the reaction I want.”
The pub crawl makes stops at four historic taverns: the Bell-in-Hand, the Union Oyster House, the Green Dragon, and the Point. Each bar treats tour-goers to snacks and miniature glasses of beer. La Camera has also created a Sundowner Tour that ends with a prix fixe dinner ($17.76 for kids) at one of more than 30 restaurants. “Our competition is within the city and also Philadelphia and Washington and the other historic sites,” she says. “We have to keep repackaging because our competitors are repackaging.”
WHILE PHILADELPHIA isn’t exactly eating our 18th-century lunch, there are reasons to worry. Boston was the 10th-favorite destination for international visitors in 2004, just as it was in 1999. But during that same five-year span, Philly rose from 21st place to 12th. Today, Pennsylvania comes in third in the Travel Industry Association of America’s ranking of how much money each state puts into tourism. Massachusetts comes in 31st. We’re behind South Dakota.
Paul J. Sacco of the Office of Travel & Tourism—who likes to use the word “edu-tainment” when talking about historic tourism—says one survey has put history tourists at 15.1 percent of the state’s total visitors. But if you add in the 16.1 percent doing “urban sightseeing,” which might include historic sites … well, you can see where this is going. Pat Moscaritolo, president of the visitors bureau, says 25 percent of overnight leisure visitors to Boston come purely for the history, which translates into $2.25 billion in revenues. Factor in tourists drawn here by museums and national parks, which often have some historical connection, and the estimate hits 57 percent. “Boston owns the brand on history,” Moscaritolo says. Still, he says, “maybe it’s time to broaden the approach in the way that historical tourism is presented. Maybe you have to figure out a way to get this into people’s hands, or into their iPods, as they all seem to be walking around with iPods.”
Mimi La Camera is way ahead of him. She’s arranged it so that tourists can download a Freedom Trail audio tour to their MP3 players. “Teachers will tell you that what you have to compete with is Game Boys, Nintendo, and TV and movies,” La Camera says. “That’s a reality. But I think that you can approach all this as an interesting way to repackage. And I’m just going to keep saying it again and again—it’s just repackaging.”
Not to be outdone, Philadelphia plans to launch a cell-phone tour of its historic sites this summer. Thankfully (or not) Boston beat Philly to the punch in 2004, when a private company released Boston: City of Rebels and Dreamers. (Full disclosure: I did some sound work for this tour. I never got paid.) Walk to a point of interest, dial 617-262-TOUR, and hear Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler say things like “Ah, Beacon Hill…it makes ya’ wanna moo.” He goes on to explain that the area used to be a cow pasture. This costs $5.95.
SOMETIMES, people in her business “make things too cute,” says Nina Zannieri, director of the Paul Revere House. “We shouldn’t despair of losing out to video games,” she says. Then again, Zannieri has dabbled in some repackaging of her own. Last summer, she did a promotion with the Lowell Spinners, a Red Sox farm team, featuring a Paul Revere bobble-head doll. To the suggestion that history purists would gasp at the idea of a Paul Revere bobble-head doll, she says: “Sure, but we spent a lot of time making sure he was dressed in the right outfit. And it was a little bit of fun.”
If you Google the words “making history fun” one of the links you come up with says “History Is Fun!” It’s an essay by the Concord Review’s Will Fitzhugh, whose journal publishes history papers by high schoolers. To Fitzhugh, history doesn’t have to be made fun—or compelling or snazzy or anything else—because it already is. He fears history teachers are trying to entertain their students rather than educate them. “To me, a pub crawl, it’s kind of pandering and saying, ‘We have to compete with MTV, so let’s go drink beer,’” he says. Which, of course, is exactly what the Freedom Trail is saying.
The night I went on the crawl, history was competing with Jethro Tull and coming up short. At the Bell-in-Hand, “Bungle in the Jungle” boomed as a costumed Captain Silas Talbot told me and 23 paying adults that the bar was founded in 1795 by town crier Jimmy Wilson.
“Think about the 50 years leading up to 1795,” the captain said as the group was handed shot glasses of ale. “The world turned upside down. The revolt against the tea tax, the Boston Massacre, the shot heard ’round the world. And Bostonians heard about those events from the very loud mouth of one Jimmy Wilson!”
“We can’t hear you!” a visitor said.
Even if the Revolution was partially plotted in these bars, they’re still bars, and loud ones, and you can go to a loud bar anywhere. And if we really do own the brand on history in this city—if ours is the richest, oldest, purest, most historical history—do we need to serve it with beer and Jethro Tull and Steven Tyler?
Nonetheless, the pub crawl is so popular that, the night I took it, a second was added to meet demand. Interestingly, there were teachers in both groups, including one who said she was going to put it on her list of fun pub crawls. “I’m learning something,” she said.
Originally published in Boston magazine, June 2006
