 |
The platform for cultural tourism is here:
Time to build some bridges
By Donna Evans-Deyermond; photos by kc kratt
 |
|
Eddie Friel
|
This past Easter Sunday I found myself one of the more than one million tourists in Paris. Count ’em: one million. Of course Paris has everything a cultural tourist looks for: great architecture, museums, art galleries, theater ... Hold the phone! Don’t we have all of that here in Buffalo? Not on as grand a scale, of course, but we do have it all. So why aren’t we getting our share of cultural tourists?
The platform
“There’s an outstanding cluster of organizations right here, for example, within a few minutes’ drive of the Albright-Knox,” says Louis Grachos, executive director of the gallery. “There’s the Burchfield-Penney, the Historical Society, the Science Museum, Kleinhans.” Additionally, he points out, from our historic architecture to young, vibrant, exciting, and edgy assets like Hallwalls and CEPA, and the Distinguished Speaker Series at the University of Buffalo, WNY can appeal to a wide range of tastes. “We have the platform, now it’s time to start putting our resources into doing the marketing,” Grachos says.
Eddie Friel, OBE, visiting professor at Niagara University, denies that he’s a guru of cultural tourism, but anyone who is appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for services to tourism in Scotland has to know a bit more than the rest of us about this topic. Freil agrees with Grachos that we have the potential here, but says what we don’t have are the necessary bridges to take WNY further.
Don’t do it for others, do it for yourself
“Cultural tourism isn’t going to generate great numbers of people. It’s a niche market,” Friel says. “What’s important is that what you are marketing speaks to the nature of the place. You need to be careful about being seduced by ‘art for tourists’—the arts here are not for tourists, they are for the community.”
And as a community the first goals should be to continue to invest in art forms that appeal to the people who live here and to develop new local audiences for those arts. “You can’t keep offering the same narrow line-up to the same narrow audience. You need to go beyond the gray hairs—that audience is dying!,” Friel says.
Young people should have access to the arts at as young an age as possible and should be encouraged to be creative themselves and to communicate that creativity to the rest of the world. Meg Quinn, executive director of the Theatre of Youth and member of the Buffalo Theatre Alliance, agrees. “Buffalo has a huge creative heritage,” she says. “The grain elevators were invented here. We have gargantuan examples of industrial development. That’s our history. We’ve been such an adventurous group. The new age is about people and communities that can generate new ways of doing things.”
And that’s where Buffalo is failing on a grand scale, Friel says. Buffalo needs to create bridges of opportunity for the significant numbers of people who aren’t currently participating—not just in the arts, but in the economy—because they don’t have access to quality education. “The scale of poverty in Western New York is an affront to any human being,” he says. “Education is unquestionably the route out of poverty. If education is poor, we’re condemning the next generation to poverty.”
The cheese doesn’t stand alone
Tourism cannot exist in a vacuum. We need to ask two questions: what role can it play in our economy, and how much significance should that industry assume in relation to the rest of our economy? Only then can we develop the infrastructure necessary to support tourism. “You have to be customer-focused instead of supply-driven,” Friel says. “You need to expand hotels, have an appealing convention center, a range of dining out options and nightlife.”
There have to be partnerships between the public and private sectors with the result that the public sector creates the infrastructure to support the private sector in creating jobs and wealth. “I’m amazed at the dependence [here] on government to make all the decisions. It doesn’t work,” Friel says.
To really establish a new “brand” Buffalo can communicate to the world, in the way Friel branded Glasgow, Scotland, there has to be single-unit accountability. “You don’t set up five organizations to do the same thing—then no one organization is responsible for the brand,” the tourism expert adds.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
It’s also time to take a new perspective on entry-level service industry jobs, according to Friel. We need to recognize that these jobs are equivalent to the entry-level manufacturing jobs of the past. They are one of the “bridges of opportunity” Friel speaks of. “The politicians here don’t get that. These jobs are a beginning, a stepping stone to upper-level positions.”
Change has to come from within and from the ground up, he insists. We need only look to New Orleans for a perfect example. Although devastated by Katrina, the city still preserves its identity as a center of jazz, a particular style of architecture, and food. It’s the residents who recognize that identity who are doing the work to restore their heritage.
We must answer the question, “What do we have that no one else has?” and build from that foundation. And many would agree with Friel’s conclusion:
“Buffalo has to stop seeing itself as a Rust Belt city.”
Donna Evans-Deyermond is a freelance writer and public relations professional who is getting weary of dispelling the Rust Belt, snow-bound myth of what’s here in WNY to the people she meets when she travels.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
Back to the Table of Contents
Back to Top
|
|
|
