{"id":75912,"date":"2021-01-22T20:37:58","date_gmt":"2021-01-23T01:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.tablethotels.com\/en\/?p=75912"},"modified":"2025-08-11T12:32:01","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T16:32:01","slug":"tourists-welcome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.tablethotels.com\/en\/2021\/01\/tourists-welcome\/","title":{"rendered":"Tourists Welcome"},"content":{"rendered":"

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North Adams, Massachusetts was an industrial town. Then it became a museum town. With the recent opening of Tourists, it can now call itself a cutting-edge boutique hotel town.<\/h4>\n

Book Tourists<\/a> on Tablet Hotels.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The first thing we wanted to ask Ben Svenson is why he named his hotel after the dirtiest word in travel. Tourists.<\/em> Mutter it under your breath and you evoke the image of a destructive cultural viking, rolling through town as part of an unconscious horde, erasing what feels special about the place. In an ideal world, we would never be rampaging tourists, and always enlightened visitors<\/em>. Interested travelers<\/em>. Or, as the mayor of one overrun Italian city requested, \u201ctemporary cultural inhabitants.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The founders of Tourists<\/a>, an exciting new hotel in the Berkshires, have no use for such euphemisms.<\/p>\n

Here in North Adams, Massachusetts, they\u2019ve reclaimed the word. On the site of what was once the \u201960s-era Redwood Motel, a group of partners came together with the goal of creating a self-contained 18-room clubhouse. But the project grew, and mutated, and drew in surrounding properties, and by the time it opened in 2018, this former motel on the banks of the Hoosic River featured all the ecological wonder of the Berkshires, coupled with high-end amenities and a visual sensibility inspired by the celebrated design oasis of Sea Ranch, California.<\/p>\n

20 years ago, this would not have been the hotel you\u2019d expect to find here. North Adams is a city that was long synonymous with the decline of American manufacturing. These days, it\u2019s better known for hosting the largest contemporary art museum in North America. Svenson\u2019s answer to the question \u2014 why Tourists<\/em>? \u2014 spans both of these realities.<\/p>\n

\"Tourists\"<\/p>\n

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But first, the literal answer. The history of tourism in the northern Berkshires goes back at least a hundred years, with the construction of the scenic Mohawk Trail in 1914. During the trend’s heyday in the 1940s and \u201950s, road signs sought to lure tourists from their scenic drives to restaurants and lodging. As he got to know the space that would become Tourists, Ben Svenson, part of an impressive group of founding partners, found one such old, faded wooden sign.<\/p>\n

It displayed a single word, and you can guess which one. \u201cThat was a convention from the Mohawk Trail,\u201d Svenson explains, \u201cto have this word Tourists with an arrow.\u201d And considering all the connotations of the word today \u2014 vikings, selfie sticks, etc. \u2014 \u201cit just felt so radical.\u201d<\/p>\n

They named their hotel Tourists (well, technically they named it Tourists Welcome), but the sign isn\u2019t the only reason why. North Adams is a city that\u2019s by all accounts still in the process of revival. In 1985, Sprague Electric \u2014 a massive complex of buildings that headquartered the city\u2019s major employer \u2014 closed, devastating a city where it employed, in some cases, multiple members of the same family. Just a year later, the community saw a path forward. The project, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), would take up residence in the abandoned buildings of Sprague Electric and, hopefully, provide a big enough draw to revive the city. After a grueling march through fundraising struggles and political courtship, MASS MoCA<\/a> finally opened in 1999.<\/p>\n

\"\u201cTourists\u201d\"<\/p>\n

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\"Tourists\"<\/p>\n

And while the museum wasn\u2019t, as some had hoped, a \u201csilver bullet\u201d to economic revival, it has, over time, made a significant difference. As Joseph Thompson, founding director of MASS MoCA, put it in an interview<\/a> last August, \u201cThe last five years, there’s a new vibe in town, and you can see it and feel it. Younger people are moving to town. There are new restaurants opening up all the time. There’s been probably twenty-five million dollars just in hotel investment.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we<\/em> put it when we first added Tourists to Tablet shortly after their opening: \u201cThe Berkshires are undergoing the sort of revival that travel trend pieces are made of.\u201d The pandemic has only illuminated the importance and the capability of cultural institutions to power an economy. Annual attendance numbers at MASS MoCA have reached 300,000 in the past, with gawkers and enthusiasts drawn by the biggest names in contemporary art, and the artists drawn perhaps by nothing so simple as the sheer quantity of space. In Building 5, home to one large gallery exhibit at a time, artists build giant, awe-inspiring pieces from scratch. See one of these pieces and you get a sense of the scale of this museum, and how it might anchor an economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe art and the way that we make it here in collaboration with artists is more akin to filmmaking \u2014 in which there are artistic directors and lighting and sound and there\u2019s obviously a creative director, the artist,\u201d said Thompson in the documentary about his institution, Museum Town<\/em>. \u201cThere\u2019s a whole slew of people who are coming together to make a very complicated work of art.\u201d<\/p>\n