“It’s so clean. Not like New York.”
Unfortunately for the city’s hospitality industry, Chicago promotes tourism like it inspects tunnels. Its efforts are famous for their infighting and factionalism; the Office of Special Events spars with the Convention and Visitors Bureau, which feuds with the Tourism Council. The business tourist is well catered to, but if anyone is going to use the new playground at Navy Pier or Mayor Daley’s proposed midway of sanitized vice, it will be the pleasure traveler.
“Don’t Miss It!” was not greeted with the scorn it deserves, of course. The initial run of TV spots reportedly drew nearly five times the usual number of calls to the state tourism bureau’s 800 information line. In spite of its success, though, the promotion suffers from more fundamental faults. Like the old campaigns, it mistakes the nature of the city’s appeal to the out-of-towner. And it reflects a larger failure to distinguish between tourism promotion and tourism development.
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Worse, while the Loop may be the deadest part of the city on weekends, it’s hard for casual tourists to escape from once they’re there. Everything from street signs to transit maps to the standards for taxicab operators are lacking or hard to use for the out-of-towner. Putting the maps showing el routes on the station platforms rather than at the foot of the stairs leading to them is the equivalent of putting product labels on the inside of the box.
The one famous Chicagoan these ads never mentioned was Al Capone. Thanks to Scarface, Chicago already enjoys a marketing identity other cities would kill for. The native is accustomed to people going “rat-a-tat-tat” when he is introduced as being from Chicago. Just recently on American Public Radio’s nightly “Marketplace” program, a commentator, noting the extraordinary popularity abroad of American popular culture, proposed turning the whole country into a theme park; Chicago would be the site of “Gangsterland.”
Rubery is a state of mind, not an address, and because of that fact “downstate” begins where the els end. The suburban tourist potential is underdeveloped. Many of these four million souls never venture into the city, perhaps because they don’t know how to get here; the Ameritech telephone directories distributed by Illinois Bell in the near west suburbs, for example, show Metra route maps and detailed PACE schedules in their “InfoPages” under “transportation” but no mention of CTA service (bus or rail) into the city even though several CTA lines penetrate Oak Park and Forest Park.
