“Just go away,” added the Worcester Telegram. “The basic strategy is flawed,” opined the local Berkshire Eagle. The idea that museums might stimulate economic growth was I guess not totally unheard of in 1988 - Massachusetts did approve that $35 million bond issue, after all - but it was pretty controversial. In the new(ish) book that I picked up during my visit to the museum, “From Mill to Museum: Twenty Years of Making Art at Mass MoCA,” there’s a page of choice quotes from skeptical newspaper accounts in the late 1980s and early 1990s: “Kill this costly pipedream,” demanded the Boston Herald. And that is an interesting economic development story! I think we can all come to agree, though, that Tourists wouldn’t exist and marketing firms wouldn’t be holding offsites there in early December but for a strange thing that happened three decades ago, when Massachusetts lawmakers voted to pump $35 million into converting the gigantic abandoned factory complex at the heart of North Adams into what has become the 530,000-square-foot (including outdoor spaces) Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. You may find all this appealing you may find it barf-inducing (I kind of liked it, especially at off-season rates). When we asked a bartender if by any chance the second group worked in marketing or advertising, she told us that they were from a “global marketing and innovation” firm. The place has of course already been written up by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, Wallpaper, Dezeen, Afar, Surface … am I forgetting anybody? The other guests when we were there - these were weeknights in far-from-prime season - consisted mainly of two different groups of informally but stylishly dressed young people who appeared to be on company offsites. The lead investor is a Boston developer who oversaw the mostly minimalist design, with as minority partners the co-founder of a local brewery the founder of Brooklyn Magazine Wilco’s bassist, who created the playlist for the in-house radio station (which you can also listen to on Spotify) and a James Beard Award-winning chef from San Francisco who will be opening a restaurant across the river next year (accessible by a new and charmingly wobbly pedestrian bridge) and has already devised a menu for the hotel lodge that includes fish stew, braised chicken thighs and infused-spirit-based drinks. What was once an unprepossessing small motel across from the Stop & Shop on Route 2 reopened last summer as a 48-room “hotel and riverside retreat,” still across from the Stop & Shop but now oriented toward the Hoosic River behind it. My wife and I recently spent two nights in North Adams, an old industrial city in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts, at a lodging place called Tourists.
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