Ease up - tourists are people, too

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

It's late July and time, it seems, for tourist-bashing. Last week in this paper, Joe Sciacca got all a-flutter over the Old Town Trolley and Beantown Trolley and the new Duck Tours, which he says are the reason you can't get from point A to point B anywhere in this city. Congestion and gridlock are the fault of trolleys and "lard butts from Nebraska," don't you know?

This week, in Boston's other major daily, columnist Patricia Smith wrote that tourists "clog the Artery, babble over maps in restaurants, snap endless pictures of sunbleached gravestones" (why this would bother anyone puzzles me), and continues on to bemoan their "maddening practice of standing directly in the middle of a downtown sidewalk at 5 p.m., their heads upturned and mouths open, gazing reverently at 'Look, another old building!' while juggling camcorder, bottles of Evian, and several hot squiggling children." Huh?

Right after reading Smith's column I went out in search of all these people and what do you know? They were everywhere! I found a group of teens strolling along the Freedom Trail and yes indeedy, they did have a camcorder. But they were from Don Bosco High - not from out of state - and they were doing a history project for a summer course, not taking home videos.

I walked the city from Harrison Avenue to the Aquarium, over the Freedom Trail through Boston Common right into the Public Garden, and I saw not even one person drinking Evian. It was a hot, sunny day and folks were sipping sodas in paper cups or eating ice cream or, if they were under 12, slurping slushes. But many of these people were locals, too. Actually, I had a hard time differentiating the visitors from the natives.

"So where're you from?" I asked a young couple headed into the Aquarium with their two kids. "Stoughton," they said. Jean O'Neil certainly looked like a tourist, sun hat and all, and there she was sitting on a bench waiting for the Duck Tour to start. But guess what? She was from Watertown. Barb Jablonski didn't look like a "lard butt" though she and her two boys were from Nebraska (Lincoln, actually). "There are a lot of nice people here except when they're driving," she said, oblivious to the nasty things that had been said about those of her ilk.

But back to the tourist trolleys. First, full disclosure: My daughter works for one of the companies. That aside, all day I never saw a trolley hog the road or double-park or go backward when everyone else was going forward, though I saw cars and trucks with Massachusetts plates do all these things. I did hear an Old Town Trolley on Kneeland Street, not huffing and puffing and grinding its wheels like all the trucks around it, but singing. Its driver was belting out "There's No Business Like Show Business" as the trolley passed by Boston's theater district. And 42 people were smiling. If they had been driving themselves, they'd have been scowling.

There are more concrete barriers and orange construction barrels and cordoned-off areas and bulldozers and jackhammers and forklifts around this town than there are historic sites or tourists combined. The city smells like cement and hot tar. But the tourists aren't complaining. Theresa Kirwin and her friend Cathy Kelly all the way from Ireland had spent less than a day in Boston. They had already seen Jacksonville, Orlando and New York. "It is more beautiful here than all of them," both agreed. James Tibbe is just a kid, but he's into history and sunbleached gravestones. "I like it here," he said, looking, I suppose you could say "reverently," around the Old Granary Burial Ground. His mother, Becky, wasn't quite so enthralled. She and her husband and five young children along with another couple and their kids are from Michigan. They'd spent a perfect week in Bar Harbor, Maine, and had just arrived in Boston the night before, checked into a motel on the outskirts of the city. And what do you know, when they awakened their van was gone. Tourists didn't steal it. Natives did.

Tourists aren't criminals. They're sightseers, though to read columnists in both Boston dailies you'd think that sightseeing was a crime.

It's late July. Time to quit tourist bashing. Time to be nice to all the visitors who are spending their money here, keeping hotels, restaurants, T-shirt shops and tour operators in business for another year. Sciacca and Smith? Lighten up. Take a vacation. But avoid Nebraska, Joe. The welcome mat won't be out for you there.