Rockport, Mass. immediately came to mind. The downtown is all gift shops and galleries. You can get some good seafood there, however (except after 8 p.m. when they roll up the sidewalks).
If it were down there, I think it would be 95% tourist trap. South Street Seaport qualifies, I think.
Another example kind of like Times Square. When we lived in Princeton in 1980 - 1982 Palmer Square was full of locally owned businesses. It expanded and got chains, and I consider it far more a tourist trap now than it was then. We went back a few years ago, and my wife had the idea that living in Princeton again would be fun. The place was full of tourist buses, so no thanks. But perhaps the chain stores are an indicator of tourist trap status, not the cause.
I was thinking the same thing. In fact, Times Square serves no useful purpose other than to BE a tourist trap. It’s literally just billboards and Elmos and stores hocking I 
NY shirts and other trinkets. Yes, there are worthwhile destinations nearby (like Broadway theatres and Restaurant Row in Hells Kitchen), but Times Square itself is just there to attract tourists to Times Square.
I’ve also been to Venice and I would agree. More like a large historic district than a tourist trap. Similar maybe to Mystic CT. Yes, a lot of tourists go there and it has its fair share of gift shops and touristy restaurants (how many people would give a crap about Mystic Pizza the movie or restaurant if both didn’t exist?). But also a lot of museums and decent eateries.
Roman Coliseum and The Vatican, kind of tourist-trappy. Still worth seeing IMHO.
I always thought of tourist traps as a one-off destination run by a single operator, not a neighborhood or city, with the possible exception of some ghost towns and wild west type attractions. They entice you with some fanciful attraction, billboards, etc., and when you get there it’s a lame shadow of what you thought it would be, and everything is just geared towards parting you from your money. The one that comes to my mind is South of the Border. It’s a rest area, truck stop, and restaurant with mini golf, go-carts, and even a small amusement park. Much more involved than the world’s largest ball of mud or whatever, but still a seedy venue with questionable faux-Mexican theming. There’s also billboards hyping it up and down every highway for miles in all directions.
This is a good (and disappointing) example. My mom loved taking us to Princeton for lazy weekend shopping trips. I remember lots of cool shops, good food, and taking naps in the park.
In a very 1970s book of humor cartoons about Oregon, there’s one that probably applies to many beach towns:
“Want to get away from seedy tourist traps and tacky souvenir stands? Come to Seaside!”
“Anywhere you go from here will be away from seedy tourist traps and tacky souvenir stands.”
We were in ABQ, NM & thought about going to Roswell as we had all day; realized it was 3 hrs….each way to look at what was most likely a barbed wire fence with signs that said “US Government Property - NO Trespassing” & what I’m sure were a bunch of t-shirt shops in town selling all sorts of alien tchotchkes. It’s not like I was expecting the MP would stop me & say, “You’re the 10/50/100 millionth visitor, we’re gonna let you in to see 'em…but only if you promise to keep it a secret.”
I’m not exactly sure because it wasn’t worth 7 hours of my life (including walking around time) to find out for certain.
Are the walruses still there? That was interesting to see them so close.
We made the drive, and it’s exactly what you think. The most interesting part of the drive was going through Lincoln county, of billy the kid days.
Well if Billy the Joel is accurate in his ballads, I’ve been to the Kid’s beginning
I lived in the town of Oyster Bay but only visited the hamlet of Oyster Bay& the village of Oyster Bay Cove (many times)
Walruses? No. Sea lions? Yes.
Ha, whatever they were! But thanks for the correction.
I think a tourist trap is a place where people deliberately try to sell people chintzy, generic, and/or unauthentic things. The price doesn’t matter, and the original intent of the place doesn’t matter, either. However, if you’re a place that attracts tourists, it doesn’t matter how kitsch you are if you are not trying to sell them crap.
For instance, although it ticks off most of the boxes, I would almost not count the Abbey Road crossing as a tourist trap since the vast majority of people are just there to take pictures. But when I went, to look at the people taking pictures, there was some hawker handing out pamphlets to what I assume was a cheap souvenir shop. I’m still on the fence as to the tourist-trapness of Abbey Road, because you couldn’t see the shop from the crossing and it was otherwise not money-oriented.
No carpenters either.
South of the Border was exactly what I thought of too, that is what I would call a gaudy tourist trap but you pay nothing to get in. Now granted it may be difficult to leave without buying a drink or silly souvenir of some sort, but you could just stop and look and use the bathroom and get back on I-95.
At least in the 00s when I went to Roswell they had a really nice UFO museum in town that was both about the Roswell incident as well as UFOs in general. It was worth the hour or so I spent in the museum.
That’s what we did, just needed to pee, didn’t need gas yet.
Strictly speaking, parts of Route 1 in southeast Maine continue being a tourist trap even when I’m not there to see it.*
*including that place boasting “10,000 souvenirs”.
compared to MSNBC with useless clickbaits, Google is a library