Landscapes of Imagination Tourism in Southern California

Landscapes of Imagination: Tourism in Southern California
Author(s): Susan G. Davis

Source: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 2, Orange Empires (May, 1999), pp. 173-191
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3641983
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Landscapes of Imagination:
Tourism in Southern California
SUSAN G. DAVIS
The author is a member of the department of communications

at the University of California, San Diego.
From the late nineteenth century, tourism in Southern

California has been a place-building business, an interlockin
set of enterprises that has worked to construct a landscape o
sights and experiences. In their earliest forms, tourism bus
nesses grew out of the coordinated efforts of the coalition o
forces that Harvey Molotch and John Logan have called the
"growth machine": real estate developers and smaller proper
owners, transportation magnates and cultural entrepreneur
all of whom profited as directly from rising property values an
increased rents as they did from attractions.1 California tourism
has always had a dual nature. It has been part of the develo
ment of a physical infrastructure-the railroads, and lat
streetcar companies, are key examples, combining the mov
ment of goods, settlers, businessmen, and tourists with the e
ploitation of land. The railroad and streetcar magnates laid o
the first networks of sights to be seen and services to be co
sumed, while they simultaneously invented the mass me
of western promotion by founding magazines and suppor
ing writers, painters, and photographers.2 Rail tycoons, hot
builders, highway boosters, and early history preservers la
1. "The City as a Growth Machine," in Harvey Molotch and John Loga

eds., Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley, 1987), 50-98.
2. Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western Ameri
(New York, 1957); Hal K. Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentie
Century West (Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 29-112.
Pacific Historical Review ?1999 by the Pacific Coast Branch American Historical
174 Pacific Historical Review
down what might be called an infrastructure of sight

genre of attraction has a rich history, and some of the
of this early language of sightseeing has been traced.3
We know less about the development of late twent
century tourism. Yet close ties between place building
age building persist, and tourism plays an important part
ongoing process of reinventing the Southland's physic
scapes and social environments. The old web of resorts
tractions reaching from Los Angeles to Orange and Sa
counties has been extended further south to Tijuana a
to Las Vegas. The major economic players have change
the net of sites and services has become tighter and de
it has been reworked and reinvented. The innovations of
tourism entrepreneurs and the political forces of tour
motion have not only continued to build the industry
also been central to the reconfiguration of the Southe
fornia landscape.4
In the years after World War II, three innovation
been central. First, the dedication of large-scale public
for tourism development has been crucial in sustaining
panding the tourism industries. Second, the elaboratio
centrally planned and managed tourism district, mod
(and often built up around) the theme park and shopp
is one of Southern California's major conceptual contr
to tourism's development around the world. Third, f
1970s onward, the development of market research in
and the fragmentation of mass markets have reshaped
industries and their landscapes. These prosaic-soundin
cal, economic, conceptual, and technical changes h
wide-ranging effects. In Southern California, they ar
heart of a process of picking up cultural narratives la
early in the twentieth century and reweaving them into
environment.
After World War II, the dedication to tourism of state and
federal monies, public land, and other public resources gave
3. Rothman, Devil's Bargains, throughout; Marguerite S. Shaffer, "See Ame

ica First: Re-envisioning Nation and Region through Western Tourism," Pacific H
torical Review, 65 (1996), 559- 581.
4. On this phenomenon in the West generally, see Rothman, Devil's Bargain
202-377.
Tourism in Southern California 175
ficial imprimatur and authority to an industry that had pre

ously been privately coordinated. Los Angeles set the pace b
fore that war, supplanting private hotel, tour route, a
attraction development with significant public structures su
as Exposition Park (1910), county museums, and the Memor
Coliseum. But after 1946, with relaxed restrictions on travel, ri
ing prosperity, and increased geographic mobility, the entire re
gion from Anaheim and the coastal cities to San Diego saw
building boom. A rush of federal investment in infrastructu
including tourism-related facilities, paralleled the state's ex
panding economy and population. It opened up more rap
and individual forms of transportation in the form of freeways
and airports that interacted with pent-up demand for travel and
recreation to create a broad, mass-travel market.5 This gave d
velopers and their political coalitions reasons and resources
push for the expansion of hotels, parks, convention center
and theme parks, built either with public monies or indirec
subsidized with long-term land leases, deferred taxes, suppo
services, and zoning laws. In some cases, federal grants, mass
engineering programs, and redevelopment bonds were used t
revise older landscapes completely into attractions aimed at
expanding national market of tourists.
For example, San Diego transformed its urban downtow
during the period from 1950 to 1965 with moves directly cal
lated and publicly claimed to put the city on the nation
tourism map. Although San Diego's vacation business had al
most come to a halt during World War II, decades of work b
the promotion-oriented San Diego-California Club had se
pattern of municipal-private coordination. In the late 1940s
planners and developers began to discuss ways to channel ci
and county funds into the tourism economy.6 Their main ch
lenge was San Diego's unsavory Prohibition-era reputation as
"wide-open town." The city's heavy dependence on the Navy
5. On the development of airlines, see John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel

American Culture (Lincoln, Nebr., 1985), 176-184. In general, the rise of ma
vacation travel has been little explored, although it appears to have a more th
century-long history. See John Urry, "Mass Tourism and the Rise and Fall of th
Seaside Resort," in Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary So
eties (London, 1990), 16-39.
6. Richard Pourade, City of the Dream (La Jolla, Calif., 1977), 127-16
167-182.
and its international border with Mexico meant that, in

1930s and 1940s, gambling and prostitution ranked alo
the beaches, the Zoo, and Balboa Park as major attract
Postwar promotions stressed a cleaned-up and who
"family" profile in order to modify San Diego's sailor-
legacy. For example, a burst of publicity in the 1950s a
refresh the colorful Spanish image that had served the
well in earlier decades. A 1954 article in San Diego Magaz
plained that, "Eastern papers go for 'Spanish' type sho
turing San Diego and Old Mexico as romantic historica
still suffused with the gaiety and charm of the old Sp
dons." Postwar promoters picked up the strands of San
Spanish romance, inventing new "traditional" Spanish-t
public fiestas, such as the city-wide "Fiesta del Pacifico" th
moters hoped would become a yearly spectacle rivaling
Gras in New Orleans.8
The city's planners sought material as well as imagist

rehabilitation. They needed to build alternatives to the old com
mercial downtown of department stores, drummers' hotels, an
cheap shore-leave pleasures. The small downtown afforded lit
tle lodging space, and much of that was shabby. Working wit
property owners and entrepreneurs, city leaders pursued a do
ble revitalization strategy in which tourism was central. The
planned a downtown convention center and visitors' concours
using state and federal redevelopment monies in a thirty-ye
project to clean out the red-light and hotel district. And the
used redevelopment projects to shift the weight of commerci
life to the northern suburbs.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Mission Valley, a concentra-

tion of resort hotels, shopping malls, freeways, and a sports sta-
dium, was built in the once bucolic San Diego River Valley.
Mission Valley was linked to the construction, begun in 1945,
of Mission Bay Park on the site of an estuary long used for both
recreation and industrial dumping. Congressional funding, the
Army Corps of Engineers, and a massive bond-funded recre-
7. Richard Pourade, The Rising Tide (La Jolla, Calif., 1967), 139; and
Pourade, City of the Dream, 40.
8. Roberta Ridgely, "How Others See Us," San Diego Magazine, April 1954, pp.
23-24, quoted in Joy E. Hayes, "Tourism in San Diego," unpublished research pa-
per (1990), in author's possession.
ation plan turned these "unused" city lands into a new com
mercial and public playground close to the hotel corrido
From the mid-1950s onward, tourist attractions spread and
tensified around the newly dredged bay. By the mid-1960s n
freeways and a cloverleaf interchange tied the dredged-up
lands and beaches of Mission Bay to old beach neighborhood
replacing pedestrian and streetcar connections to the op
space of the estuary. A long-term lease on public land place
the new Sea World theme park at the center of a bayside zo
of high-rise hotels, vacation villas, marinas, yacht basins, an
restaurants.
Just south and inland of the bay, near the inters

Interstates 5 and 8, the State Parks and Recreation D
closed a small residential district to car traffic. Here, Sa
original Anglo town site sat atop a massive, ancient K
village and Spanish and Mexican ruins outside the wa
old presidio. The layered site was excavated and reco
into Old Town State Park and Heritage District, a co
American-period historic government buildings
churches, and restaurants surrounding Mexican-the
tiques.10 Within a fairly short time and within a small
ical area, bounded by Mission Bay on the north, Shel
at the south, and the famous Zoo in Balboa Park to the E
Diego had constructed a highway-linked network of t
tractions and accommodations. Meanwhile, much of old down-
town San Diego was simply razed, a debacle the Center City
Development Corporation is now trying to overcome as it ur-
gently seeks to revitalize the core for downtown businesses and
to historicize it for tourists.
The tourism forecasters were right: San Diego, and South-

ern California in general, entered a tourism boom, or rather a
series of booms, and each fed more hotel construction. Be-
tween 1950 and 1960, money spent by tourists in San Diego
9. Pourade, City of the Dream, 102, 145, 148; Mark Sauer, "The Changing
Tide," San Diego Union-Tribune, Aug. 13, 1995, D-1, D-2.
10. As Jorge Mariscal has recently emphasized, there is no representation of
indigenous Kumeyaay culture and almost no representation of Spanish or Mex-
ican period culture at Old Town, although the site contains very significant ar-
chaeological remains. "The Unfinished Conquest of Aztlan," paper presented to
the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Nov. 20, 1998, Seattle.
County more than doubled.11 The early 1960s saw a huge

of building activity, especially at bayside and in the Mission
ley corridor. By 1964 San Diego had "more than twice as
rooms for visitors as the entire state of Hawaii," a close tourism
competitor.12 The San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau
(ConVis) was now the nation's second-largest tourist bureau in
both membership and investment (after Miami's), and, indeed,
San Diego explicitly saw itself "becoming sort of the Miami
Beach of the West Coast."13
In the 1950s and 1960s San Diego's relatively compact ur-
ban area made the process of constructing a coherent tourist
landscape straightforward, but similar stories can be told about
Orange County, particularly Anaheim, and many parts of Los
Angeles County.14 New tourist attractions marched hand in
hand with expanding urban nodes and suburbs. Some were lo-
cal projects, others investments by national corporations. Fol-
lowing the 1955 opening of Disneyland came a decades-long
theme park building boom. From a familiar roadside attraction,
Knott's Berry Farm gradually grew into a major theme park;
Marineland of the Pacific opened on the Palos Verdes Penin-
sula; Universal Studios turned its long-standing back-lot tour
into an elaborate attraction; Six Flags Magic Mountain opened
as a thrill-ride park in Valencia, and Lion Country Safari of-
fered a drive-through zoo in Irvine. On Mission Bay, Sea World
vigorously developed its marine mammals into celebrities and
worked hard at landing Hollywood tie-ins.15
The centrally planned, media-infused environment of the
modern theme park is one of Southern California's distinctive
contributions to the tourism industry. If Disneyland was the
forerunner and paradigmatic case, it was replicated many times,
11. Spending rose from approximately $60 million to over $150 million. San
Diego Union, Jan. 9, 1973 (supplement).
12. Ibid., Jan. 8, 1964, C-5.
13. Ibid., Oct. 8, 1968, B-1. In 1966 a survey of hotel consultants ranked the
city third among the leading American destination cities. San Diego Convention
and Visitors Bureau, Visitor Industry Report, 1966 (San Diego, 1966).
14. For a summary of postwar Los Angeles development, see Edward W. Soja,
"Los Angeles, 1965-1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-
Generated Crisis," in Edward W. Soja and Allen J. Scott, eds., The City: Los Angeles
and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 1996), 426-462.
15. Of these projects, Sea World and Knott's Berry Farm could be said to be
the work of largely local investors during this period.
until, by the mid-1970s, Southern California tourism watchers

spoke of saturation in the theme park market. These tourism-
focused projects played an important part in restructuring land-
scapes of everyday life at the same time that they tried to draw
a new mass market of regional and national tourists. Along with
malls, they became the centers of new towns, giving rise to new
places to go--indeed, they frequently became the place to go-
filled with commercial, cultural, and social activities.16
Like malls, theme parks were and are heavily researched
environments, representing enormous investment. As such,
they gave serious competition to the old seaside piers and plea-
sure zones, relics of early twentieth-century tourism. The parks
were often designed by eminent shopping mall architects (the
most famous, Victor Gruen, designed the original Sea World),
and they shared with malls meticulous attention to the effects
of architecture on customer behavior, as well as to the identi-
ties and lifestyles of potential customers. The goal was not only
to get people to come but to keep them there, as theme park
designers discovered the link between length of stay and spend-
ing. The theme park also marked a new kind of cultural prod-
uct, fusing proprietary mass-media content with the physical
environment. In this way, it went far beyond the old film-lot
tours to deliver astonishing promotional power. Disneyland, of
course, was early advertised through its ABC television connec-
tion, but Sea World and Marineland both followed suit, making
themselves into film sets and backdrops for network television
shows. In turn, they drew national attention to both their at-
tractions and the larger region.
Theme parks had profound effects on the environments
around them, kicking off new waves of urban and residential
development. John Findlay has written that in "large part be-
cause of Disneyland's presence, Anaheim acquired such assets
as a major convention center and hotel-motel complex, and a
big league stadium that attracted both professional baseball
16. Marineland failed in the mid-1980s, apparently in large part because of

bad freeway access. On theme park development as an extension of amusement
park history, see Judith Adams, The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of
Technology and Thrills (Boston, 1991), and Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Cor-
porate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley, 1997). For a brief discussion
of Las Vegas's history, see William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of
Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Point Arena, Calif., 1997), 313-332.
and professional football teams. These facilities mad

the leading 'downtown' in Orange County."17 The sto
told that the Walt Disney Company learned a hard le
Anaheim. Distressed by the proliferation of nearby
that it could not profit from, the company made su
chase a vast swath of Orange and Osceola counties fo
Disney World and EPCOT Center in South Florida
was not only to dampen land speculation but also to
surrounding long-term opportunities. As a result,
ended up in charge of the surrounding profit cente
fine the tone of the huge Orlando area. Currently, i
process of recouping these missed opportunities in
building a new theme park and several new hotels
revised Disneyland. The entity in charge is the exp
ney Development Division, which builds mini-theme
sorts, and residential developments around the w
lesson Disney learned from its first theme park ha
recognized principle of corporate tourism: Create w
trollable districts so that profits are less likely to "leak
the pockets of others. This lesson is being applied a
wide United States tourism landscape today.'s
The celebrated attractions, with their own adve
marketing budgets, and links to the national media
closely with the local convention and visitors burea
tourism. As their name discloses, these bureaus focused
closely on the convention market and helped push for t
municipal construction of large meeting halls and redevelo
ment districts downtown. Again, although Los Angeles dev
oped a convention business in the 1930s, the conventio
center building surge for the other Southern California cit
took place in the 1960s.19 San Diego nearly tripled the num
ber of conventions it hosted annually between 1950 and 19
(from 152 to 410), and spending at conventions is estimate
17. John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture Aft
1940 (Berkeley, 1992), 54.
18. William Fulton, "From Making Dreams to Concocting Reality," Los Ang
les Times, June 22, 1997, M-1, M-6.
19. Kevin Starr suggests the earlier importance of conventions for
Angeles in Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (
York, 1990), 95-97.
to have grown by a factor of eight during the same period

Conventions deliver tourists prepackaged, so to speak,
an economy of scale. The proliferating theme parks and o
towns, though built in large part to appeal to families on v
tion, must also be seen as connected to the growing busines
corporate, municipal, trade union, trade show, and professi
association meetings. Scripted to historical romances and a
ventures familiar from mass culture, these clean, predictab
and self-contained worlds were and remain easy to sell, as a
cles in industry periodicals like Successful Meetings attest. The
provided resort hotels with a significant and well-understo
sight to offer their customers, which, in turn, helped supp
the expansion of tourist landscapes.
This tendency toward the packaging of visitors is a distinc
tive feature of modern tourism, and it supports the buildin
large-scale destinations. The district designed to "captu
large-scale flows of people is now central to all kinds of eff
in Southern California and throughout the United States t
make cities "livable" and "successful." Today, tourism-spar
construction of convention centers and other large venues
for example, San Diego, Los Angeles, Anaheim, and Ontari
is boosted as a rational way to rework urban and suburban f
tunes. As the shopping mall has been reinserted into the cit
a part of the process of "revitalization," the theme park is t
literally and metaphorically, to economic "progress." The
pansion of Disneyland, Disney's hotels, and the Anaheim C
vention Center now under way is a remarkable example of t
as is the wholesale reconstruction of the San Diego Cou
coastal town of Carlsbad into a resort focused on the Legol
theme park.21
Again, downtown San Diego provides a salient examp
Over the last decade, its lower end has begun to look like
Orlando-style "bubble" at the center of a dense patch of hi
rise luxury hotels and apartment buildings, interspersed w
20. By 1965 the aggregate daily spending averaged $675,879, an increase

more than 25 percent over 1960's figure of $533,000. San Diego Convention
Visitors Bureau, Visitor Industry Report, 1965 (San Diego, 1965).
21. Susan G. Davis, "From Legoland to Barrioland: Tourist Landscapes
North San Diego County," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Am
can Studies Association, Nov. 20, 1998, Seattle.
enormous blank parking lots. One central point is H

Plaza, an inward-facing, city-styled shopping center design
Jon Jerde and carefully patrolled to keep the homel
street people out. In addition, a few historic buildings,
and pricey restaurant district, and a new multiplex cin
sited to suck conventioneers up and out of the waterfro
ter a few blocks away. Plans for new high-rise hotels close
southern edge of the waterfront are well under way. In th
of 1998 voters approved a referendum to fund a new
stadium at the southern edge of the downtown, in
hopes that it would help draw even more "revitalizing"
to the slumping downtown economy.22
As a district to channel spending out of hotels, me
rooms, and cruise ships, downtown San Diego makes a
deal of sense. As at Carlsbad, the airport, theme parks,
parks, zoo, and a few small museums are a fairly short aut
away. There is no reason to go anywhere else, almost no
get anywhere without a car, and very little sense of a non
San Diego. Historical walking tours and plaque placeme
grams have recently been instituted by the Center City
opment Corporation, in an attempt to lay down some
over a cityscape that has been radically revised several t
the last century. In San Diego so much visible history was
erated so fast, first to get rid of the sailor town and t
build the towering hotels and the malls, that giving the
town a story is a daunting task. Simulation works bette
recently completed, 1940s-style cineplex makes extens
chitectural reference to the old picture palaces and, by a
to a convivial urban experience of movie-going, a nostal
ture toward the idea of nightlife and the festive crowd.
The fiscal need to pull tourists into controlled land
and to keep them circulating on fairly tight paths is givin
to more concentrated tourist districts. In a process inel
called "venue convergence;' property owners and develop
fusing the range of familiar attractions-shopping malls,
entertainment zones, cinemas, and theme parks-into
22. Roger M. Showley, "Still the One: 10 Years Later, Horton Plaza
versal Success' Story," San Diego Union-Tribune, Aug. 13, 1995, H-2; this is
case of the headline conflicting with the content of the article.
complexes of the kind already visible at the MGM Grand in L

Vegas. The planning of several mega-complexes is under way
Los Angeles at the Staples Center (close to the Los Angeles Co
vention Center), the Howard Hughes Entertainment Cent
(near Los Angeles International Airport), at the IMAX and ci
ema complex in Irvine, at the DeBartolo Group's Candlestick
Mills project in San Francisco, and the new San Diego baseb
stadium complex, to name only a few examples. Venue conve
gence takes the Orlando principle to its extreme by making "
offerings so convenient to access [that] a guest wouldn't ha
to leave the property to satisfy a wide range of interests an
needs."23
Tourist districts are thus becoming larger and more care
fully designed, and attractions are converging. The reasons
both demographic and economic. Since the 1970s developers
and marketers have faced the fragmentation of the mass co
sumer market. In the 1990s the old mass market has been bro-
ken into high-end and less affluent niches, into the desirable
market and everyone else. While the high-consumption land-
scapes of tourism and shopping continue to be built far past
the point of saturation, the targeted customers are different.
They are no longer the broad spectrum of middle-class travel-
ers that ranged across California in the 1950s and 1960s, and as
a result, the tactics of creating place are changing.24 At least
two of the conditions that created widespread travel for a large
part of the American population in the 1950s and 1960s are no
longer present: rising wages and increased leisure time. Ac-
cording to one interpretation of recent Bureau of Labor Sta-
tistics (BLS) figures, Americans are now working longer hours
(many at more than one job), for wages not much higher than
those prevailing in the 1970s.25 A recent BLS study showed that
the total number of annual hours put in by the average em-
23. James Zoltak, "Mega-Complexes Becoming Popular; Venue Convergence

Should Continue," Amusement Business, Jan. 5, 1998, pp. 10, 15.
24. John Urry, Consuming Places (London, 1995).
25. "Since 1969, full-time employees in the United States have increased by a
full workday the hours they put in each week, and in the past two decades, the
number of people working over 50 hours a week has increased by a third." Suck
(webzine), Jan. 1997 (http://www.suck.com), cited in Douglas Henwood, "Talk-
ing about Work," Monthly Review (July-Aug. 1997), 24.
ployed male "increased by one hundred hours between

and 1993, or two and a half full work weeks... the numb
hours] clocked by the average working woman increased
hours, or nearly six full work weeks." As Douglas Henwo
it, "overwork is at least as characteristic of the U.S. lab
ket now as is underwork.""26 While the leisure crunch is dis-
puted among scholars, tourism planners concur that most
Americans are taking shorter vacations than in past decades
and that vacations are more difficult for consumers to plan.
Continued, steady expansion of tourist spending across the
broad national population is no longer assured, despite the
magical resilience attributed to the industry.
This sheds a cool light on the current expansion of South-
ern California tourism facilities. Tourism is now a worldwide in-
dustry of great importance, with enormous facilities devoted to

it, but it is less and less a mass industry of democratic consump-
tion. It may be that convention travel is even more important to
the industry than before, and it is certain that business and cor-
porate incentive travel are fusing with tourism.27 At the sam
time, tourism's physical and spatial infrastructure-the mean
to move, lodge, and entertain people-is driven by nonloc
speculation in real estate and increasingly must answer t
vast pools of investors, such as Real Estate Investment Trus
(REITS). The speculative market in real estate shares push
tourism planners further toward viewing their customers a
niched markets. Tourism planners therefore aggressively chas
smaller numbers of people with money and time to spend o
travel.28 Agency reports from San Diego and Los Angeles frankly
state that if business travelers are not the numerically dominant
tourists, they are the crucial ones, so bureau marketing is aimed
26. Henwood, "Talking about Work," 24-25.

27. Incentive travel involves trips and excursions as rewards for productivity
usually to management-level workers.
28. While some scholars draw a distinction between "modern" and "post
modern" tourism, where modern means massified, standardized, and rigid
guided, and postmodern means flexible and individually customized, it may b
more accurate to see the emphasis on choice and experimentation in tourism a
an effect of the urgent need to identify smaller but more profitable groups
tourists. In any case, labor statistics suggest a very different picture of tourism than
that presented in postmodern and postindustrial theses of the cultural and ec
nomic effects of rising leisure time; see, for example, Urry, The Tourist Gaze.
at corporate travelers, incentive travelers, members of

scale package tours, trade shows, conventions, and visitors f
countries with strong currencies. These people are a sma
portion of all tourists to Southern California, but they a
portant because they spend disproportionately and tend t
in the relatively small and coherent tourist zones, the resor
downtowns that the growth coalitions have been building
the 1960s.
International tourists are a relatively important part of this

market. In Los Angeles in 1995, for example, it was estimated
that foreign visitors totaled 22.6 percent of all arrivals but con-
tributed 33 percent of the total tourism revenues.29 In 1996 in-
ternational tourism revenues increased faster than monies from
domestic tourists, and international visitors in particular are
busier than Americans: In Los Angeles in 1997 they were squeez-
ing in visits to eight major attractions in less than seven days,
while Americans were seeing fewer than five attractions in five
days.30
Among American tourists, the style of travel and lodging
and the reason for the trip are strong indicators of spending.
In Los Angeles in 1997 all tourists who stayed in hotels and mo-
tels had higher per capita incomes, spent more per capita, and
increased their spending faster than did guests who stayed in
private homes, with friends or family.31 San Diego's figures look
similar. A 1993 report by the San Diego Convention and Visi-
tors Bureau (ConVis) shows that 40 percent of visitors to San
Diego came to visit family or friends, and another 43 percent
were making a discretionary pleasure trip; many of these visi-
tors stayed with family and friends, or camped. But the 16 per-
29. Here "foreign" means tourists from overseas (from outside North Amer-
ica) and from Mexico and Canada. "Overseas" tourists made up 14.8 percent of
all tourists. Los Angeles Convention and Tourism Bureau, "Quick Tourism Facts
for Los Angeles County" (flier, 1997).
30. Ibid.
31. For several decades marketers have known that tourists who visit family
and friends, staying in the guest room or parking their Winnebago at the curb,
are by far the most numerous visitors to Southern California. They are also the
most likely to return. But they spend less, buy fewer souvenirs, visit fewer attrac-
tions, use less costly services, and eat out less. In Los Angeles in 1996, average daily
spending by visitors using commercial lodging was four times greater than spend-
ing by guests in private homes. Ibid.
cent to 17 percent (or 2.1 million visitors) who c

Diego to attend a convention or conduct business sta
entirely in hotels, and, ConVis noted, they accounte
of the visitor expenditures," not quite twice their repr
among tourists. ConVis further stated, "these visitor
target market for the entire San Diego region, and
of [our] marketing efforts." These business and c
tourists stayed a shorter time, came in smaller parti
much higher median annual household incomes ($63
sus $55,000), but they spent more than twice per c
other tourists.32
Despite San Diego's reputation as a family destin
percent of its visitors come without children. Anoth
facet of San Diego's tourism market is its age: 82 per
visitors are between thirty-five and fifty-four years. W
in San Diego is an older, but not elderly, affluent
leisure tourists, most without impedimenta. They are a
sirable economic and demographic group, and th
this rich crop are the business and convention trave
The focus on premium travelers provides a way
stand tourism as a place business in the 1990s, as a
inventing profitable landscapes in an economy that
soaring wealth and leisure at the very top but cont
stagnation for nearly everyone else. The public lan
tourist-dominated districts directly reflects the mar
vestors', and builders' perceptions of their most de
tomers, as well as their understanding of what these
will find mildly exotic but reassuring and familiar a
time. With this minority in mind-not the cousins f
mento who park their camper at the curb--the down
tourist districts of San Diego, Los Angeles, and Ora
ties are being fought over, reorganized, and expand
The new downtown must be structured to deliver tourists
reliably in a steady flow and on a large scale. On the one han
there must be adequate infrastructure to bring in the afflue
32. San Diego Convention and Visitors' Bureau, 1993 San Diego Profile (S
Diego, 1994), 10. Their total per capita spending was $435 as against $204
leisure tourists. Even with lodging costs factored out, conventioneers still sp
considerably more on eating out and transportation, and almost as much on sho
ping, as vacationers. Ibid., 22.
ones; hence, the political, electoral, and public relations batt

over whether airports, cruise ship terminals, and enormou
convention facilities are adequate. And there must be mo
than adequate hotel space located near the convention sit
lest potential profits drain away. But there must also be thin
to do, see, and buy--usually within a very short walk in what ar
almost completely car-dominated cities. On the other hand
while packaging and standardization make for predictable pr
its, they raise a problem. From the tourists' perspective, the sit
they are drawn to must feel real-they must not seem too ca
fully managed.33
An unevenly developing understanding of high-end tour
ists' desire for authenticity may help explain tourism planne
interest in culture, nature, and heritage as attractions-intere
that have been invented over and over in Southern California
history. Nature, with its ties to American national history and
identity, is more synthesizable and simulatable than ever be-
fore, and so Southern California is witnessing a mini-boom in
transparently visible nature attractions. For example, in San
Bernardino County, the Ontario Mills Mall houses the American
Wilderness Experience, a theme-park ride and living diorama
attraction representing five California ecosystems with their typ-
ical species. Ontario Mills is a regional destination, aiming at an
audience of regional, national, and international tourists visit-
ing Los Angeles and Las Vegas. (The mall runs a special bus ser-
vice to and from Los Angeles International Airport to serve
Japanese tourists.) The Wilderness Experience sums up, with in-
tense visual realism, a much longer and more time-consuming
trip through California's national parks, forests, and state lands
(and through some landscapes that no longer really exist). A
private business, it is an official San Bernardino County museum
and interpretive site.34
Tourism surveys also show that corporate travelers, their
spouses, and foreign tourists are powerfully interested in Amer-
ican culture, but in different ways.35 European and Japanese
33. Rothman, Devil's Bargains, 338-370.

34. Susan G. Davis, "Going Wild at the Mall," paper presented to "Learning
from the Mall of America," the Frederic R. Weissman Museum, Minneapolis, Nov.
20, 1997.
35. Edwin McDowell, "Tourists Respond to Lure of Culture," New York Times,
tourists take a strong interest in American indigen

and vernacular processes of cultural production
"back stage" tours that range from Broadway theaters
American gospel choir rehearsals.36 By contrast, Am
porate travelers are increasingly interested in wh
used to call "high culture"-art museums, great lib
lets, symphonies, and theater. But outside Los A
places where high cultural infrastructure is under
this has caused a scramble. San Diego, for example
been a "branch office city," and here political le
need to build up high cultural identity but have lit
tional depth or base to draw on. Instead, they wor
bring to town such prepackaged and heavily ma
blockbuster spectacles and exhibits as the Super Bow
sures of the Tsar." They stake their reputations an
capital on the construction of landmark buildings,
give tourists something to see as to give corporatio
to relocate.
Again, the irony is that the pace of Southern California's

growth, including its tourism growth, has been so rapid and re-
lentless that historical, cultural, and natural-feeling places can
be hard to come by on the scale now demanded. As the case of
American Wilderness Experience shows, one solution is to
synthesize them. Explaining the nature and history theme of
Disney's new "California Adventure" attraction, a company ex-
ecutive said recently, "The California that everyone comes to see
doesn't exist anymore." How to uncover or rediscover sights de
manded by the familiar narratives of tourism can be a problem
for both archaeologists and imagineers. Another solution is to
try to mine previously untold stories. In response to a perceived
lack of richness and racial diversity in interpretations of history
for tourists (another irony in the largest and most populous
state in the nation), a consortium of hotel chains (Hyatt), trave
and service conglomerates (American Express), promotiona
April 24, 1997, C-1 (national edition); Dinitia Smith, "Cashing in on Gotham'
Culture-hungry Guests," ibid., April 15, 1996, B-1 (national edition); Nancy Rivera
Brooks, "Show Me the Culture," Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1997, D-1; Nancy
Rivera Brooks, "City of... Culture? L.A. Officials Tackle Identity Crisis," ibid., June
12, 1996, D-2.
36. McDowell, "Tourists Respond."
agencies (California State Tourism Board), and arts and cu

agencies (California Council for the Humanities) has laun
a cultural tourism initiative. The project will develop and
new narratives, texts, and itineraries for a multicultural land-
scape. Its plan is to elaborate African American, Asian Ameri-
can, Mexican American, and gay and lesbian themes, among
others, and to build a larger network of tourism entrepreneurs.
This can be seen as an attempt to work nonwhite, non-
mainstream histories and communities into the tourism indus-
try, as well as to work around the well-established dominance of
the networks of large facilities, big attractions, and tourism bro-
kers. But it may also suggest the desire on the part of hotel and
travel conglomerates and convention and visitors bureaus to
capture more affluent markets by satisfying multicultural inter-
national tourists and minority travelers.37 At any rate, the cul-
tural tourism initiative suggests what might be called a narrative
shortage, a crisis of touristically appropriate materials that
should tease scholars as much as it intrigues entrepreneurs.
Although I have placed the emphasis here on tourism as
an industry embedded in the economic and political process,
it is not ajuggernaut dominating all of life in Southern Cali-
fornia. There are cracks in the edifice. The growth coalition in
Southern California faces an anxious future, for conflict and
dispute are part of tourism's contemporary history. As new
tourism public works such as stadiums and convention centers
are proposed, they inevitably become entangled in Southern
California's briarpatch of arguments about the social role of
government. For decades, one way around the need for public
approval of bond funding and tax increases has been the use
of redevelopment districts, in which the control of funding and
the acquisition of property have been largely outside public
scrutiny. Today, critics argue that, since redevelopment projects
do not require ballot approval, acquisition and redevelopment
of land for tourism development privilege a narrow segment of
private interests over the public's, or even the interests of com-
peting entrepreneurs.38 Less often do critics note that funds
37. James Quay, "Cultural Tourism and the Humanities," Humanities Network
(California Council for the Humanities newsletter), 19 (Spring 1997), 1, 6.
38. Municipal Officials for Redevelopment Reform, Redevelopment: The Un-
known Government: A Report to the People of California (n.p., May 1997).
spent for stadiums and convention centers are fun

not go to other, very pressing needs, such as public
schools, or housing. From this perspective, tax incr
nancing, redevelopment's perpetual motion engine,
regressive, since it funnels tax monies exclusively back
ther redevelopment projects and not into general fu
ects like San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter were work
these bases and represent a massive transfer of resou
a general, urban public to private businesses, as well
ing away of noncommercial possibilities for downto
Rarely is tourism expansion questioned as a key
tainable and high-wage economy, although this doe
Occasionally, a forthright public servant breaks
tourism wing of the growth coalition. For example,
port by the San Diego Association of Governments
argued powerfully that city and county efforts to
tourism had far outstripped efforts to bring more man
ing to the county and that San Diego was putting all
a frail basket. Marney Cox, chief economist for SA
ported that tourism in San Diego in fact created pred
low-wage jobs, with wages as much as 60 percent lo
might be expected from entry-level manufacturing
ment. He argued that this was especially undesi
county with a very high cost of living. Although he wa
guing that manufacturers had a lot to learn from to
moters, Cox was roundly denounced for his honesty
have made a stronger statement, pointing out that i
twentieth century, tourism is absolutely typical of the
low-wage economy. It generally creates "fill-in" service
seasonal, temporary, and part-time pattern, as any th
hotel, or resort employee can testify. Organizing cam
service worker unions, such as the Service Employee
tional Union, increasingly focus on wages and worki
tions in hotels and tourist attractions.
Because of federal, state, municipal, and private decisions
taken decades ago and reenforced over recent years, tourism
ties Southern California as much as any region to the culture
of hyper-consumption and the world of mass-mediated specta-
cle. It is a powerful, though not all-powerful, economic sector.
Its profit imperatives play a large role in land use and planning
decisions, which in turn have a long-lasting impact on loca

economies, natural resources, and the everyday life and wo
of millions of people. Never entirely separate from the hard
more physical exploitation of the environment, it is also
process of imagistic and narrative exploitation that knits cu
ture to commerce in tight and ordinary webs of work, con
sumption, and dreams.

Landscapes of Imagination Tourism in Southern California

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Landscapes of Imagination: Tourism in Southern California

Author(s): Susan G. Davis

The author is a member of the department of communications

From the late nineteenth century, tourism in Southern

1. "The City as a Growth Machine," in Harvey Molotch and John Loga

down what might be called an infrastructure of sight

3. Rothman, Devil's Bargains, throughout; Marguerite S. Shaffer, "See Ame

ficial imprimatur and authority to an industry that had pre

5. On the development of airlines, see John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel

and its international border with Mexico meant that, in

The city's planners sought material as well as imagist

Beginning in the late 1950s, Mission Valley, a concentra-

Just south and inland of the bay, near the inters

The tourism forecasters were right: San Diego, and South-

County more than doubled.11 The early 1960s saw a huge

until, by the mid-1970s, Southern California tourism watchers

16. Marineland failed in the mid-1980s, apparently in large part because of

and professional football teams. These facilities mad

to have grown by a factor of eight during the same period

20. By 1965 the aggregate daily spending averaged $675,879, an increase

enormous blank parking lots. One central point is H

complexes of the kind already visible at the MGM Grand in L

23. James Zoltak, "Mega-Complexes Becoming Popular; Venue Convergence

ployed male "increased by one hundred hours between

dustry of great importance, with enormous facilities devoted to

26. Henwood, "Talking about Work," 24-25.

at corporate travelers, incentive travelers, members of

International tourists are a relatively important part of this

cent to 17 percent (or 2.1 million visitors) who c

ones; hence, the political, electoral, and public relations batt

33. Rothman, Devil's Bargains, 338-370.

tourists take a strong interest in American indigen

Again, the irony is that the pace of Southern California's

agencies (California State Tourism Board), and arts and cu

spent for stadiums and convention centers are fun

decisions, which in turn have a long-lasting impact on loca

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