Tourists started visiting the American West in sizable numbers
after the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were
completed in 1869. Contemporary travel brochures and guidebooks of
the 1870s sold tourists on the spectacular scenery of the West, and
depicted its cities as extensions of the natural landscape--as well
as places where efficient business operations and architectural
grandeur prevailed--all now easily accessible thanks to the
relative comfort of transcontinental rail travel. Yet as people
flocked to western cities, it was the everyday life that captured
their interest--the new technologies, incessant clatter, and all
the upheaval of modern metropolises.
In "Manifest Destinations," J. Philip Gruen examines the ways in
which tourists experienced Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and San
Francisco between 1869 and 1893, a period of rapid urbanization and
accelerated modernity. Gruen pays particular attention to the
contrast between the way these cities were promoted and the way
visitors actually experienced them.
Guidebooks made Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco
seem like picturesque environments sprinkled with civilized
buildings and refined people. But Gruen's research in diaries,
letters, and traveler narratives shows that tourists were
interested--as tourists usually are--in the unexpected encounters
that characterize city life. Visitors relished the cities'
unfamiliar storefronts and advertising, public transit systems,
ethnic diversity, and multiple dwellings in all their urban
messiness. They thrust themselves into the noise, danger, and
cacophony. Western cities did not always live up to the marketing
strategies of guidebooks, but the western cities' fast pace and
many novelties held extraordinary appeal to visitors from the East
Coast and abroad.
In recounting lively anecdotes, and by focusing on tourist
perceptions of everyday life in western cities, Gruen shows how
these cities developed the economy of tourism to eventually
encompass both the urban and the natural West.
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