Look for projects that have benefits for residents and businesses and tourists because they are the ones that are going to have the biggest payback. This site has a number of interesting angles for the economic development folks. The aspect of tourism that they like the best are the meetings, market, and business travel because they spend the most and because it’s an opportunity to showcase the community to people who make business location decisions that create high impact jobs.

It’s also a wonderful excuse for spiffing things up. How many of you have ever sold a house where you lived with dingy woodwork for ten years, but it was time to sell the house so you finally got around to painting it? (laughter) Been there. And, it’s the same type of thing. People will clean up a community for tourists when they won’t necessarily clean it up for themselves. So, if you want to use the tourism rationale to make things nicer for all of you and your neighbors? Great! Knock yourself out. I’m all for using that rationale.

But, there’s also an important conservation viewpoint and I want to tell you a quick story and make sure that we leave a lot of time for questions here. I went to Katmandu once and I was waiting for a friend at the square and I watched this guy making this beautiful knife. The handle was carved out of horn and he was inlaying carnelian and little bits of brass and I pretty much made up my mind that the cost of having watched him work on it for like 45 minutes was that I was going to buy it.

I was okay with that because I’d had this great experience of watching this ancient craftsman make this fabulous thing and so, as I was about to make the transaction — it looked done to me, he’s finished buffing it out — all of a sudden he takes the knife by the blade and he jams this beautiful handle right into the fire and he grabs his mallet and he starts whaling away on it and just pounding the living daylights out of this thing. He pulls it out and it’s not messed up yet and he puts it back in and, you know, he pounds away at it some more and finally, he’s got the whole thing looking horrible.

He hands it to me, proudly. I was baffled and I said, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” His English wasn’t that great, but his communication skills were fabulous. And he looked right at me and he said, “Oh, new is old-making.” (laughter)

At the time, I thought, “Oh, great! I have an inauthentic antique here and you know, I’m going to be stuck with this thing anyway and maybe it’s not such a fabulous letter opener for my fancy new job as a real estate consultant.” But I bought it because I was supposed to and I schlepped it home and got it through security and on and on and on, and eventually I came to appreciate it for the story.

So, years go by and I’m at somebody else’s office and he’s got a very similar knife. (laughter) So, I told that story to the guy and I get to the punch line, “new is old-making,” and I’m waiting for the pay-off, the big laugh. And he looks at me and his face just fell! He was completely crestfallen. I had totally busted this guy’s bubble because, on some level, he knew he didn’t buy an old knife. (laughter) But, I had forced him to confront it and I had burst the bubble of authenticity for this guy. And, so I slunk away. (laughter)

But, it’s a problem, because the people who make the mass-produced goods and the ersatz experiences can fool you for a little while, but they don’t satisfy you. But the problem is, from a real estate standpoint, they can always outbid the real thing. Imitations can always outbid the authentic for the premier real estate.

And that gets us to the unhappy topic of subsidization, because no matter where you alight in the spectrum of interpretive solutions, whether you cheap-out and do a $500 plaque or you go all the way and create a fully immersive environment that celebrates the Canal story, somebody’s going to have to figure out how to make that run and it isn’t necessarily going to be easy because you can’t necessarily depend on the other uses to pay for it.

You can’t necessarily depend on there being enough tourists. “If you build it they will come” is naïve, as I know you all appreciate. Because tourists are fundamentally unpredictable and fickle and you’ve got to avoid creating expectations through marketing that your experience can’t deliver or else you get bad word of mouth. And that goes, by the way, for the hospitality services as well as the experience.

How many of you have had friends come back from vacation and you ask “How was Paris?” And, instead of telling all about the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower or whatever, they launch into some litany about the rude waiter or the crummy hotel. People think about those things and it creates the driving force behind their word of mouth recommendations. So, you can package Buffalo in new ways that make it more interesting, but you may not get the tourists that lend all the economic impact if the hospitality is below par.

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