The Codependent Roots Of Tourism And Billboards

Organizations dedicated to community-destination marketing (DMOs) date their emergence to 1895 during the Progressive Era even though towns and cross roads across New England had more loosely used nostalgia and pastoral views to draw tourists from industrialized cities as early as the 1830s the same period that villages and towns initiated the first urban tree planting and beautification.

So maybe it isn’t so coincidental that destination marketing began to formalize the effort to draw tourists to and between cities at about the same time reformers launched the City Beautiful movement to reform the approach cities took to architecture, parks, urban forest, boulevards etc.

City Beautiful was preceded by the mid-18th century village improvement societies and succeeded by movements such as the National Roadside Councils in the 20th century and they give root today to organizations like Scenic America and affiliates such as Scenic North Carolina.

It is puzzling to me then why so many community-destination marketing execs today seem so detached from their role as guardians and curators of sense of place.  In my now-concluded 40-year career in destination marketing I often used trees and outdoor billboards as a litmus test.

If a colleague defended the blight and destruction created by billboards, it is my opinion they didn’t have a grasp of sense of place and their role in shaping and preserving it.  But there is some history as well behind the ambivalence by some in tourism toward outdoor billboards.

The first DMO in Detroit was followed quickly by the emergence of one in Hawaii in 1902, St. Louis in 1904, Denver in 1909 until there were nearly 30 by 1920 when they met in association. To put that in perspective the number of cars in America grew from 8,000 in 1900 to 200,000 in 1908 and to 8 million in 1920.

But many early DMOs overlooked that new technology and remained fixated only on railroads and even more narrowly on the very small proportion (10%) of tourism which was then, as now, driven by conventions and meetings.

Railroads back then often partnered to create tourism such as when the Northern Pacific opened Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park in 1903 followed by an alternative route to that park by the combined Union Pacific – Oregon Short Line railroads in 1910, which passed four miles east of my great grandfather’s homestead-ranch, the year this very cool “Where Gush The Geysers” brochure was published.

That year the Great Northern Railway developed tourism facilities in the newly opened Glacier National Park.  Attendance to national parks rose from 356,000 in 1916 to 1.5 million in 1925 and 2 million in 1927.

As the population of America grew from 69 million, when the first DMO was created, to 76 million in 1900, to 92 million in 1910, to 106 million in 1920 and 123 million in 1930, the still relatively new technology of automobiles democratized tourism to cities, towns and regions.

As the population and the number of cars grew, the new roadways created for them expanded, outdoor billboard companies turned against the downtowns they had literally wallpapered until then and claimed the mobility of the great outdoors, dismissing technologies such as telephone, radio and magazines as being for “indoor people.”

As detailed in her 2004 book Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape, Dr. Catherine Gudis documents how the 1920s emerged as the “heyday of civic boosterism.”

During the post-WWI “real-estate speculation boom of the 1920s, enterprising communities,” across the nation, “sought to attract business and tourism dollars or to develop their rural areas by forming groups devoted to publicity” now called community-destination marketing organizations.

Today there are several thousand community-destination marketing organizations worldwide, more than 1100 in North America alone, all pursuing visitor-centric economic and cultural development for the places they represent.

Outdoor billboard companies were quick to publish articles such as one in 1922 entitled “A Few Tips On Selling A City” describing, according to Gudis, how “marketing a place as a commodity entailed selling a packaged identity to potential businesses, visitors and residents including the pleasures of nature, history, commerce and climate.”

As they are often now, DMOs then were easily seduced by seeing the name of their community “up in lights” so to speak and quickly a co-dependency with billboards was formed even as this soon-to-be-obsolete form of advertising was serving to dissolve the distinctiveness of communities, deliberately fueling sprawl and substituting stereotypes for unique sense of place.

Gudis writes, “tourism became a means by which drivers could be made into consumers and the landscape into consumable merchandise.”  She also notes that the dominant themes of auto tourism were always contradictory – embrace of technology [auto and billboards] and a quest for pastoral, non-commercial world of the great outdoors.”

But today community-destination marketers can no longer afford this codependency.  Savvy marketers increasing realized that billboards no longer serve a purpose.

Highway signs, navigation technology (now used by nearly 60% of drivers,) the general decline in the effectiveness of advertising, standardized roadside exit logo advertising and non-destructive and more effective out-of-home advertising alternatives have made huge outdoor billboards redundant.

Community-destination marketing organizations as well as tourism related businesses such as restaurants, retail stores, theaters, sports facilities and lodging businesses can no longer afford or tolerate the blight, tree cutting and view obstruction outdoor billboards create.

An Era Of Sprawl Mitigation

North Carolina prides itself on a diverse sense of place, but newcomers and visitors nearly always sum it up in one word – trees.

But trees and forestland aren’t a given in a state that is already 125% more densely populated then the national average.  Thanks to a study of urban trees in nearby Tennessee, we know that the replacement value of North Carolina’s 1.4 million acres of urban forest would be more than $86 billion.

More than $13 million of that is the replacement value for just those urban trees along transportation corridors through North Carolina’s cities and towns.

So why in this time of fiscal crisis were outdoor billboard allies permitted to sneak a bill through the last legislative session that sacrifices huge swaths of these publicly-owned roadside trees with no requirement for payment or replanting or respect for local values?

Why is it that the legislature is willing to sacrifice hundreds of urban roadside trees, each valued at $76.26 annually according to economists, just to increase already-adequate visibility for outdoor billboards which are valued at only $57 in annual property taxes, both in 2008 dollars?

Where is the fiscal sense in that?  Why aren’t outdoor billboard companies being required to not only pay for and replace these trees but the scenic easements they take without compensating the public?

In fact, why aren’t outdoor billboards assessed the cost of the roadways upon which they prey and the costs of sprawl for which they have gleefully taken credit since the 1920s?

The good news is that although North Carolina is 28% more densely populated than neighboring Tennessee, it has managed to retain or reforest 8% more urban forest.

The last few years during the economic slowdown represented a huge missed opportunity for urban forests and developers alike when during the economic slowdown, cities, towns, counties and states elected to slash planning budgets instead.

This would have been a perfect opportunity to take a breather to make or update “detailed, long-term projections of all development needs” and to conduct in-depth “inventories and assessments of current land-use patterns and development potential” as recommended by a 2004 study by the Brookings Institution.

It is good news that the authors projected that only 1/3rd to 1/2 as much of the new/replacement development taking place between 2000 and 2030 will be sprawl.  More interest in new urbanism and better infill or replacement development, as well as adaptive reuse of historic structures, is all positive but these trends require more planning, not less.

Cities like Durham, NC, where I live, have been asked to sacrifice developable land so down stream communities like Raleigh could grow; but now our community is also being asked to shoulder more than its share of improvements to that water quality without access to the assessed value it made possible there.

The good news is that it means a good proportion of Durham is set aside in natural area-watershed.  More good news is that one of the mitigation strategies will be to convert developed parcels into park-like and reforested pocket wetlands in neighborhoods.

More good sprawl-mitigating news is that much of the new growth/replacement development being forecast for the future can take place in parking lots.  The Urban Land Institute projects that America is one-third over-parked.  This means that not only can parking areas be reduced but there is an opportunity to greatly improve the parking that remains by requiring far better tree planting.

Judging from the lots around the places I shop in Durham, this community is one-half or more over-parked to use the Institute’s term.

But developers don’t like surprises.  A compact community like Durham (fourth or fifth largest city shoehorned into the 17th smallest county in terms of land area) City-County Planning must be more adequately funded and updating ordinances must be done with far more intensity.

The Brookings Institution report projects that by 2030, half of all existing development will have been built since 2000.  The proportion is even higher in the South.  Two-thirds of all of that development will be driven by growth and replacement – valued at $23 trillion – more than any other generation.

For example, 38.8 million units of residential will be needed to address new population growth but 20.1 million units will represent replacement of units lost for various reasons resulting in the need for 58.9 million new units of residential in America between 2000 and 2030.

Dr. Laura L Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in a recent TED talk said that “culture is that crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well being.”

One of her Center’s reports continued:

“The US Census Bureau projects that the over-sixty-five population in the United States will grow from thirty-five million in 2000 to seventy-two million in 2030 to eighty-nine million in 2050.

The number of people eighty-five and over will grow from 4.2 million in 2000 to 9 million in 2030 to 19 million in 2050.

Dr. Sherwin Nuland tells us in his book, The Art of Aging, that today 64 percent of Americans can expect to live to seventy-five and 35 percent should plan to reach eighty-five.”

So obviously older Americans will have a lot to say about our ability to grow while minimizing if not reversing sprawl and protecting our nation’s life support system:

“… an interconnected network  of waterways, wetlands, woodlands, wildlife  habitats, and other natural  areas; greenways, parks and other conservation lands; working farms, ranches and forests; and wilderness and other open spaces that support  native species, maintain natural ecological  processes, sustain air and water resources and contribute  to the health and quality of life for America’s communities and people.”

New Realities of an Older America, a Stanford longevity center report published in 2010 notes that the “number of households in America grew from 63 million to 111 million since 1970 – of the 48 million increase, 30 million settled in the suburbs.”

Now the number of older suburban households has tripled, as have the number of single person households.  The nursing home population has hovered around 1.3 million since 1985.

But as the report notes, this will change.  “The number of 85+ Americans in nursing homes will double between 2030 and 2050.  The choices older Americans make about housing have the potential to re-shape our communities just as dramatically as their suburban choices and dramatically larger home sizes did since 1970.

We’ve come a long way since it emerged a hundred years ago but today there is no more critical investment we can make than in robust and reinvigorated urban planning.

Innovating Social Welfare

As I was growing up in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of the Book of Mormon belt that arched from southern Alberta, Canada to Mexico and sweeping over Las Vegas to San Bernardino, a claim was often heard among the million adherents at that time that the federal Government had copied the Mormon welfare system.

That has never been substantiated, but both systems did both tap into some common lineage before coming of age during the mid-1930s and the Great Depression.

While they may not have crossed paths, within a little more than a year the entrepreneurs behind each plan had volunteered at Chicago’s Hull House, a turn-of-the century outcome of the Progressive movement and were mentored by its founder Jane Addams.

Amy Brown Lyman, who would go on to lead the Relief Society, a Mormon women’s auxiliary, stopped in Chicago during the summer of 1902 on her way east during her husband’s sabbatical and not only took a class at the University of Chicago in the relatively new subject of sociology but also volunteered at Hull House.

After accepting a teaching position in 1904 in Lake Forest, Illinois, Frances Perkins volunteered for Addams at Hull House before becoming a cabinet officer through all four terms of the Roosevelt administration and championing the Social Security Act of 1935.

Thanks to written and oral histories left by a slightly younger contemporary, my great aunt Vera White Pohlman, the full story of Amy Brown Lyman’s contributions have re-emerged and informed scholarship such as that by Dr. David R. Hall of Cal State Fullerton.

The lifetime contributions of Lyman support a claim often made today by Dr. Mathew B. Bowman (no relation), a professor at Hampden-Sydney College north of Durham where I now live, that Mormonism is as much a “community” as a church and that while it is the most conservative of all faiths today, its members have a “surprisingly deep affinity for Progressive politics.”

When she returned to Utah from that sabbatical, Lyman lobbied passionately for creation of a social welfare department in the Mormon Church which she led for many years after its creation in 1919.

She even won election to the state legislature in 1922 to champion Utah’s participation in a nationwide program to promote infant and maternity care as well as establishing a hospital and a training school for the mentally disabled.

The common struggle shared by Perkins and Lyman was how to scale up social welfare to the size needed to truly address the magnitude of the challenges.  Republicans then as now opposed any role of government, hoping instead that disparate private agencies would somehow suffice.

Lyman was famous for reaching out to both non-profit agencies as well as local and state agencies to leverage efforts by the Mormon Church until behind-the-scenes lobbying among male leaders finally forbid it.  The mastermind behind that move was a former Hoover administration official, J. Rueben Clark.

Perkins succeeded and so did Lyman in a way.  Mormon leaders who disparaged Roosevelt programs as the “dole” when they were launched in 1935, created an “inversed projection” by creating a “dole” of their own in 1936 by gathering, standardizing, centralizing and reinventing a number of programs including Lyman’s while freezing her out of the process.

Unfortunately, the program was hampered by politics, both gender and ideological, including a condition that can lead “individuals or groups to subconsciously rationalize a contradiction in their own self-conception by painting themselves as the victim instead,” something hardly unique to Mormons and often witnessed in news stories today.

But as effective as the 1936 Mormon welfare program was back then and as remarkable as it has evolved into today, it was no match for the scale of hardship during the Great Depression.

Statistical reports by federal officials at the time document that the by-then isolationist Mormon welfare program didn’t come anywhere close to making Mormons along the Rockies self sufficient from the federal programs nor were pioneers such as Lyman unaware of the problems associated with the inevitability of increased government involvement.

Overwhelmingly Mormon back then, Utah had among the highest per capita use of federal welfare programs during the Great Depression, yet, the church program stubbornly insisted it was “taking care of our own.”

Church members weren’t officially reauthorized to leverage efforts with those of other public and non-profit agencies until approximately 1991.

What is increasingly apparent to many experts today is that far too many social welfare programs are not cost/effective.  They have lost the nimble and innovative characteristics with which they were inaugurated and long ago it became too expensive to provide recipients to work volunteer in return.

Too much time is wasted on attacking or defending rather than just cutting ineffective programs, trimming waste, eliminating fraud while also increasing funding for innovation and research for those programs that are effective.

All of this should be informed by the growing scientific evidence about human interactions with incentives including sense of entitlement.

A Nexus Of Roadside

The first day of my most recent 6,000 mile cross country trip included a drive north up the spectacular 105-mile Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

In stark contrast to that parkway, my drive that day was punctuated by a 26 mile spur of West Virginia, which links Virginia to Maryland via I 81, where the forests of that state were blighted by huge back-to-back double-decked outdoor billboards towering above the forest.

While that may be marginally better than allowing billboard companies to clear cut huge swaths in either direction, like North Carolina recently has, it is still a jolting violation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 revelation that no one owns the landscape or the “public right to view” nature.

Both stretches of that drive crossed my mind again last week on the anniversary of the warning given 109 years ago by a Republican President of the United States:

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children.

Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.

The world and the future and your very children shall judge you according as you deal with this sacred trust.”

Although dedicated and then replicated across the country during the 1930s by a Democratic President, the Skyline Drive parkway down the Shenandoah was initiated under another Republican President, Herbert Hoover, who had a cabin retreat in the valley below.

Although the first parkway had been launched only a decade earlier, the concept and the term had been coined 63 years earlier by the landscape architects Olmstead and Vaux of Central Park fame according to the book Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape, by Dr. Catherine Gudis. 

The Parkways concept envisioned much that was carried over into the Interstate Highways System such as:

• “widely spaced and carefully controlled entrance and exit points”
• alternate routes for trucks,
• bridges and overpasses to avoid cross traffic
• screening of “objectionable sights”
• planting of “tens of thousands of trees and shrubs”
• integration of roadways with “surrounding landscape.”

But soon a war broke out within transportation agencies that persists today.  Some engineers couldn’t be bothered with roadsides, let alone treat them as parkland, preferring only the utility and function and efficiency of the roadbed.

Even today, engineers who champion the aesthetic, environmental and economic benefits of unfettered roadsides are either siloed away within these agencies or exiled completely to other agencies altogether.

Fortunately some highway engineers joined the roadside reform movement that arose in defense of the parkway movement even as the first federal-state efforts to fund motor vehicle roadways were launched before and after World War I.

While roadside reformers in the 1920s and 1930s didn’t have today’s data documenting the value of roadside trees to control water and air pollution, thanks to audits of roadways back then done in nearly two dozen states including North Carolina, they were armed with data that:

“transformed nature into scenery and codified it as a way to help audiences appreciate and savor experiences and, as Dr. Gudis notes, supported the view that …. ‘landscape offered lessons in national heritage, spiritual uplift and civic virtue,’ all selling points for tourism.”

The reformers were also beginning to understand something that research is only now documenting.  Trees and landscape in urban and non-urban areas alike can transform “the roadside into a domestic enclave where one learned, through nature and beauty, moral rectitude and civility.”

Durham, where I live, is an ironic nexus of sorts on this issue of roadside reform. It is the:

• headquarters of Scenic North Carolina, a statewide group dedicated to scenic preservation and current-day roadside reform
• home to The Forest History Society
• place that banned outdoor billboards in early in 1984 and then created a best practice overlay to protect the scenic character of I 40 along where it passes through but also,
• birthplace to the Bull Durham tobacco company  which in the 1880s famously hired four sets of painters to decorate rocks and barns along roadsides with outdoor advertising and now,
• home of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing Research and an archive of 16,000 digitalized images of outdoor billboard advertising at Duke University.

Durham is also home to several generations of a family central to the parkway movement.  Honored at Durham’s Annual Tribute Luncheon last month, the Teers began building roadways shortly after the founding of the Nello L. Teer Company in 1909 and the Federal Highway Act in 1921.

The Durham-based company was also awarded the first contract for the Blue Ridge Parkway to connect Skyline Drive and the Shenandoah down through North Carolina to the Great Smoky National Park.  The company completed an astonishing 17 segments of the 77 year old Parkway.

Now in his 90s, the son of the founder, Dillard Teer is still able to point out the locations of old WPA camps which served as an “employer of last resort” along the roadway during the Great Depression as the Blue Ridge Parkway was built.

Fittingly, what is called “America’s Favorite Drive” was only completed in 1987 when the spectacular Linn Cove Viaduct resolved a significant conservation issue related to the final segment.

Robb Teer continues his grandfather’s legacy by serving with me on the Durham Appearance Advocacy Group and as a member and former chair of the RDU Airport Authority, he is a strong advocate for appearance around the airport his grandfather help construct in 1939.

Maybe it is time to revisit that notion of roadsides as parkland!

The Full Circle of Smoke Jump Dreams

As Mugs and I, joined briefly by a friend, dropped down from Lolo Pass into Missoula, Montana on a cross-country road trip last summer, I glanced across the valley and over the Clark Fork to see if the Smokejumper Base was still there.

It was but the Missoula base with 85 smokejumpers now has been joined by nearly 10 others across the intermountain and coastal west including Alaska, all but two operated by the National Forest Service.

As we had tracked the 75-mile Clearwater River up across the north-central Idaho Rockies that day, I recalled how often I had dreamed of fighting forest fires, as I was growing up yet another day’s drive to the southeast along the Continental Divide in the shadow of the 1.6 million acre Targhee National Forest established in 1908.

More specifically I dreamed then of becoming a “smokejumper” and I could think of nothing more worthy in those early years than risking my life to save trees.  It seemed as noble as the work of any of the super-heroes evolving at that time such as Captain Comet, The Fly and Flash.

Growing up just west of the Ashton/Island Park Ranger District,  I had often heard the tragic story of how 13 jumpers died in another national forest two hundred miles north of that nook where the Centennial and Grand Teton ranges meet.

Much later, just a few years after I moved to Durham in 1989, where I now live and home to The Forest History Society, a 1978 forensic analysis of the Mann Gulch tragedy was published entitled Young Men and Fire.

The book’s posthumous publication was spurred by the huge popularity a year earlier of the movie A River Runs Through It, adapted from an autobiographical novella by author Norman Maclean and starring actor Brad Pitt in one of his breakout roles and directed by Robert Redford.

Growing up, as I did, in the Mormon culture of homesteaders along the famed Henry’s Fork of the Snake River where it drops out of the Targhee gave special resonance to a memorable line from the book and the movie:

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”

While I didn’t grow up to be a smokejumper or to fight forest fires, I did spend nearly 40 years as a community-destination marketing exec which involves putting out fires far more frequently than people might think.

And now as if to come full circle to that dream of my youth, one of my issue-based passions in retirement involves “saving trees” not from fire but from the blight of roadside billboards and the careless disregard and indifference of a few state legislators.

Author and screenplay writer William Hjortsberg, a friend of Maclean’s once described A River Runs Through It as reaching “into that dark area where you don’t know how to help somebody you love until it’s too late.”

I hope it isn’t too dramatic to think about saving North Carolina’s signature tree canopy and what better place to start than along its roadsides.