Tourists Rule, Locals Drool

It’s the last day of 2024! Which means it’s the last day to ask, nag, and wheedle your friends and family into subscribing to Trying! so you can earn a free copy of the print edition. Get your referral code below! (You can also upgrade to a paid sub and earn a copy that way.)

There are worse ways to spend a winter’s afternoon than at the Lyndhurst Mansion, a Gothic Revival estate right on the Hudson River in Tarrytown, N.Y. This place is neat! Originally built in 1838, and expanded in 1864–5, it has an opulence that feels more intimate than you might see in a home built a few decades later, in the Gilded Age proper: The dining room, the library, even the stairways show a deep attention to detail and luxurious furnishing—especially the crisp, vibrant colors of the Tiffany windows—but don’t overwhelm you with their scale. You could imagine living here.

Our friends N. and L. do live there. Well, not there precisely, but more or less around the corner and down the street. They’ve been in the Tarrytown–Irvington–Sleepy Hollow area for at least 13 years, ever since they abandoned Brooklyn for the wide-open, marginally more affordable spaces of Westchester County. But in all that time, although they’d visited the Lyndhurst estate for sunset jazz performances in the summer, they’d never been inside the mansion on a tour until my wife and I decided to pay them and their kids a visit a couple of weekends ago¹.

Nor had they met our other friends, S. and J., who moved to the exact same area in 2017 and now live very much right around the corner from N. and L. Until, again, that visit a couple of weeks ago, when we finally introduced them to one another over drinks, mac and cheese, and excellent oxtail stew at N. and L.’s house. Will they all become BFFs? Sure, why not? Who knows?

The point of telling you this very exciting anecdote is that this is normal for me: I hit the road at home or abroad, meet friends old or new, and introduce them, whether literally or merely by providing the opportunity, to people, places, and phenomena they had never before encountered, but maybe should have. I’ve done this in Japan and Taiwan, in France and Italy, and innumerable villages, cities, and countries in between. I’m the tourist, they’re the locals, and yet I’m the one showing them facets of their homes they’d never explored.

This is not how travel media suggests it works. For the last decade or more, the big travel publications have exalted locals as the ultimate fonts of intel. They live where we want to go, goes the argument, so surely they know the coolest, newest restaurants, shops, hotels, and activities. They can help us fulfill our fantasy of imagining a permanent life in a new land. They are who we should turn to, who we should emulate. The time of the experienced travel journalist, able to parachute into a new destination and explore and explain it in a handful of days, is at an end: Who’d trust such a person?

(Travel publications tend not to mention that locals cost less. They don’t need to reimbursed for airfare or hotels, and they’ve already been to the restaurants and the activities they’re telling us about. Hell, they might even own visit-worthy businesses in the destination, and so might not even ask to be paid for their intel, since they know any coverage will be good for them.)

This is not (necessarily) to denigrate local knowledge. If you’ve got a friend of a friend, or a distant cousin, in a far-flung or lesser-visited locale, that person may be key to helping you find your way. Which of the two bars in their Abruzzese hilltop village has the working pinball machine? And which is frequented by fascists? (I really hope they’re not the same!) Which of the canoeing outfitters on the Nahanni River is owned by the town drunk? Where in Boiro, Galicia, can you find the best pulpo ala gallega you’ll ever taste?

More after the jump…

But local knowledge has its limits, and the limit is the locals themselves. To take myself as an example: The things I know about my neighborhood are pretty boring. The restaurants and bars I frequent—Black Forest, Botan, Brooklyn Inn, and even one or two places that do not start with the letter B—are fine, but I like them because they’re easy and reliable and inexpensive. That may be valuable to some tourists, but I can hardly imagine going out of your way to visit any of them. My neighborhood has lots of sports possibilities, from rock climbing and Crossfit to archery and fencing; you can even go canoeing on the Gowanus Canal. The strip of neat boutiques on Atlantic Avenue has gotten a lot of press lately, but I only wander through those once or twice a year. Mostly, I know butcher shops and playgrounds, and where to mail a package or get a decent haircut. Unless you are deeply interested in the Matt Gross Experience (book your excursion today!), I can’t imagine you, a tourist, going out of your way to visit my neighborhood.

But if you did want the Matt Gross Experience, hoo boy! I would walk you around the ‘hood, pointing out Dog Shit Alley and the house Paul Manafort once owned; I’d list the celebrities who live around here (Ethan, Bobby, Maggie, Keri, Lily, and so on); I’d kvetch about the construction on the canal; I’d show you which housing project represented Moscow on The Americans, and which was Philadelphia; I’d know if it was Open Studios weekend or if the vintage sale was happening on Pacific or if the family portrait photographer was working the FAD Market. We’d pick up $2 baguettes from La Bicyclette and a chabichou from Lea’s Fromagerie, and go back home to drink Northern Italian wine I bought from my neighbor Jeff. It would be a pretty satisfying day, but it would only work because you know me and want to see my world through my eyes.

For me, this is what I want when I travel—to be with people I love and experience their world, to imagine us as neighbors who could hang out whenever we wanted. My family and I do this in Matsumoto, Japan, when we visit J. and A. We did it in Paris a couple of years back with C., who walked us across the 13th, discussing the history of the city and the arrondissement, then at her apartment served us transcendent pastries from Carl Marletti while we talked with her family about movies and books. I think of the world not as points on a map but as a collage of faces I can’t wait to see again.

None of this translates easily into relatable content for travel media. Most people—most readers of big travel magazines—don’t know me or care about me, let alone about my friends in Paris and Matsumoto, and they probably shouldn’t. We may be locals, but we’re not that special. We’re hardly universal.

Let’s Reclaim the ‘Tourist’ Label

There’s a fundamental difference between what locals appreciate and what tourists crave. Locals like me want ease and accessibility, with a dollop of quality and novelty: a solid bistro, a cheerful laundromat, a well-tended park, a bookstore that runs regular author events. Tourists—let’s say most tourists—want an experience that justifies the effort and expense. They are on vacation and they want to be impressed; there’s only a limited number of days in this place, and they can’t be wasted on merely decent cafés in out-of-the-way neighborhoods. They may want to feel like locals—that is, they don’t want to be surrounded by tourists like themselves everywhere they go—but actual, everyday local life is rarely extraordinary. It’s not a party. In fact, when the locals want a party, they usually leave town and become tourists themselves.

But maybe you are the type of traveler who simply wants to check out a second- or third-tier neighborhood in a top-tier city like New York. If so, great! Also: You still don’t need my so-called “local knowledge.” Intrepid visitors have their own ways of finding gems. They can simply show up, walk around, and give things a shot—an art gallery, a library, a community garden, a thrift store, a stoop sale. They do research, reading local media for intel. (That’s how I learn about new restaurants, via newsletters like The Strong Buzz.) They talk to people, in whatever language they can muster, and maybe they even make new friends. Normal, local friends. This requires no special ability, just a willingness to take chances². Because you might be bored! Or disappointed! Or rejected! Not every park is lovely; not every patisserie is Carl Marletti; not every balding, mustachioed, dashing gentleman sipping a Manhattan at the bar is Matt Gross. But they might be—you never know unless you try.

To me, this is what a tourist can and should be: someone who recognizes they are an outsider and makes the best of it. When we travel, we are always just passing through. Even if we’ve been there a dozen times before, even if we’ll return dozens more times over the course of our lives, we are temporary. We will leave. We have no roots there. Our departure may be noted, possibly even mourned, but it will not alter the place itself. Good tourists can take note of all this and experience a place and time for what they are—a magical confluence we get to witness—rather than lying to themselves that cosplaying as a local counts for something real. When you free yourself from the expectations set by travel media, you free yourself to enjoy everything.

I am a tourist. I don’t say this lightly. I spent a good chunk of my youth hating on tourists—tourons, we called the hordes who descended on Colonial Williamsburg—and I still resent having to weave through the flocks that lazily wander through New York City. But I’m trying to be more charitable, more accepting. They are doing what they want to be doing, after all, and seem to be enjoying themselves. Who am I to dictate how they get their kicks, especially when, the moment I leave my city, I become a version of them myself? We’re all tourists at one point or another, and that’s okay. As long as they don’t come to my neighborhood, which they won’t, because—take it from me, a local—there’s nothing to see here. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Shōwa Guide Tokyo

In my excitement yesterday, I forgot to link out to W. David Marx’s work, but when I went to check him out, I saw he has a new book forthcoming, a guide to Shōwa-era Tokyo, co-written with Roni Xu, that looks so damn cool. You want local, insider knowledge? Here it is!

Notes

1. To be clear, it was their idea to go there, not ours. We just provided the excuse to make it happen.

2. This paragraph also accurately describes how I did my job as a travel writer: research, risk, serendipity.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt