COLIN MCENROE
State should pitch legacy of pizza, traitors and spies
Let’s be clear, almost every state has a stupid tourism slogan. Michigan’s is “Pure Michigan” (What else would Michigan be — 10 percent Iowa?) which was launched in a commercial using the music from “Cider House Rules,” which was set in Maine.
Many states don’t use their slogans on their tourism websites. Idaho, Kentucky and Maryland don’t feature a slogan. Kentucky’s actual slogan, “Unbridled Spirit,” is currently being reviewed by a three-referee panel and may be changed to “Horsing Around” due to a rules infraction.
Connecticut has now joined the club of states that don’t use their slogans. “Still Revolutionary” has been dropped from the tourism website, even though tourism revenues have gone up.
Mucking with the slogan is the lazy man’s approach to tourism. First, some numbers. Our state spends $4.1 million on generating tourism, which makes us incredible cheapskates. The average state tourism budget according to the travel website Skift is $19.6 million. The amount of Connecticut spending has dropped significantly in each of the last four years after a high of $12 million in 2014.
But it’s probably the slogan that’s killing us, right?
Connecticut’s tourism problem, if there is one, could be fixed with more money, a little imagination and a willingness to pick winning ideas over losing ideas.
Let’s start with that American Revolution.
You could put together a kickass tourism pitch for Connecticut in the Revolution, but first you’d have to come to grips with what our real strength is: espionage and treachery. Our two big names are Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold. One of our big attractions could be Fort Griswold, but we really have to emphasize the massacre of the outgunned, outmanned militia force, there as the dastardly Arnold helped the British burn the City of New London. (Lafayette supposedly shouted “Remember Fort Griswold” at the Battle of Yorktown.)
You create a tourism trail that winds through these stories, and at every stop you make these stories sizzle. They’re not nice stories nor are they particularly related to American successes. But they’ve got darkness and flames and cunning and valor. You know, like “Game of Thrones.”
Our current approach is to ... yawn ... list a bunch of sites ... and ... yawn ... let people figure it out. No story arc. No throughline.
Let’s try another one. What does Hartford have? Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Noah Webster, Wallace Stevens. Maybe that last name doesn’t ring quite as loud, but — and this is just one example — in 2011 a University of San Francisco English professor decided to make a list of the greatest poets of all time. He used the San Francisco Chronicle’s website to solicit public input. Hundreds wrote in.
The final list had Neruda at No. 1 and Rumi at No. 10. Stevens was No. 5. The professor wrote, “I was surprised how many people included Stevens on their list. I think he’s the great poet of the 20th century, but I feared few share my high opinion of the Hartford lawyer.”
Hartford does essentially nothing with its Stevens asset. There are markers that commemorate his daily walk to work and his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but they are hard to spot and traverse a neighborhood that would scare many tourists.
What you want to do is tie together Twain, Stowe, Webster, Stevens, the city’s role as typewriter capital of America in the first half of the 20th century, the prestigious Sunken Garden Poetry Festival and possibly even Lydia Sigourney, a Victorian era Hartford poet so popular that “Sigournean Societies” popped up all over the nation.
Ideally, you create a Museum of the Printed Word, but if not, you at least put all that stuff under one brand and target conventions of people who do crossword puzzles, compete in Scrabble tournament, love literature or teach humanities.
Last example. When Frank Sinatra wanted really good pizza, he sent his driver from Hoboken to New Haven. Steven Spielberg flew 50 New Haven pizzas to his son’s wedding by private jet. New Haven pizza is a thing.
You know where there’s a really big pizza festival? Long Island. New Haven should have one that sprawls from Wooster Square through the 9th Square to the Green.
Tourism officials: please watch “Pizza — A Love Story,” the documentary by New Haven-based filmmaker (and pizza snob) Gorman Bechard. Food tourism is also a thing.
None of the above is featured on the Connecticut Tourism website main page. If you’re going to do tourism well, you have to pick the areas where we punch above our weight.
Be honest. Our beaches don’t compare to Rhode Island’s, let alone Cape Cod’s. There are better waterfalls and hiking trails in other places. Casinos get less special every year, and the Mystic Aquarium is nowhere near one of the nation’s 10 best. (Tennessee, which has no coastline, has two that are far more acclaimed.)
We love our state, but you can’t expect people to come here for Southington Classic Car Night or an exhibit at the Seymour public library, both of which I saw featured this week on the rinky-dink community calendar that takes up the bottom third of our tourism office’s main page.
Spies, traitors, writers, publishers, and pizza. That’s what we’re good at.