Places that became tourist attractions for one reason

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think I need narrow my OP. I’m looking for cities or towns where

  1. At one time they did not have tourists.
  2. Nobody decided to invent a reason for it to be a destination.
  3. Something interesting happened. Maybe somebody from there became famous. Maybe a best-selling book or series of books took place there or was the inspiration.
  4. Now people visit from around the world and spend money in the gift shops that now line Main Street and buy t-shirts to show they’d been there.
22

I blame Auto-Correct. Yeah, that…

23

I’ve been to Lakehurst, New Jersey.

24

Four Corners? Not sure if that fits the OP requirements, tho.

25

Good points. That was my point with the Disneyland post, to distinguish against artificial tourist destinations.

26

Based on point 3, it sounds like you don’t feel that places like Niagara Falls, in which “something interesting” is a natural feature, not a person or event, don’t meet what you are looking for?

27

For some reason I can’t stop mentally looping back to a scene in the book “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman. There’s a spot in KS that someone tried to make into a tourist spot because by one definition it was the geographic center of the US. But nobody came, and the place was largely forgotten.

But the gods in this book consider it a holy gathering place. Which is a little strange, because these gods exist only because there’s someone out there who believes in them. So why they’d choose a spot nobody believes in, is a little confusing, in retrospect. (I should reread the book.)

Maybe it’s because the location is one that “everybody” thinks should be significant, even if they won’t bother to go visit it. Meanwhile, there’s this spot in the ocean at 0 latitude / 0 longitude, does anyone ever think of that spot?!

28

Isn’t that the sort of place where hapless visitors fall into an infinite chronosynclastic vortex and are never seen again? The kind of place that tourists visit only once? Kurt Vonnegut warned us about places like that!

29

Fatima, Portugal.

30

Always be careful when dividing by zero!

31

I don’t know enough about Wales to state with authority, but I know Cardiff underwent a huge urban renewal movement a decade or so ago, and one of the subsequent changes was the BBC turning it into the U.K.'s Vancouver, basically, making the capital a production hub for their shows.

There’s an old joke “A hurricane hit Cardiff and did ten pounds’ worth of damage.” Speaking as someone who loves the place to the point where I have y ddraig goch tattooed on my back, aside from the coastal holiday camps, south Wales wasn’t really a destination of choice (north Wales and the west coast have a lot of faded Victorian resort towns…Llandudno is my favorite). The civic renewal and a huge TV show revival definitely brought in new visitors, I’d say. Hopefully that fulfils the theoretical of the OP.

32

Believe it fits perfectly. My Wife and I did a little diversion on a trip to visit. As a GIS guy, it was kinda interesting, (surveying can get a bit strange, especially with historical stuff) but otherwise, umm… no.

33

That is correct. The existence of the falls predates the existence of tourists.

34

Not for the city obviously, which has a lot of tourists, but for a very specific spot in that city:
The pedestrian crossing on Abbey Road.

You can bet that no one ever knew it existed , and nobody had ever walked it barefoot.before September 26 1969.

35

Never mind, ninjaed

36

A friend took me to Frankenmuth. I was there for the chicken — yum! That and the clock tower.

My answer was Lourdes (before I saw the Fatima post above).

37

Sleepy Hollow, New York.

38

It’s been mentioned above, but it would have been my fourth example. Similar places would be Monroeville AL (To Kill a Mockingbird) or Mt. Airy NC (The Andy Griffith Show)

39

Forks, Washington was a nondescript logging town on the Olympic peninsula until the Twilight books came out.
Similarly, nobody went to Aberdeen prior to Nirvana’s fame. Apparently a bridge Cobain hung out under as a teen has become a draw.

40

How "one reason’ does it have to be? I mean, there are lots of places with say…“third tier” touristy stuff, but only one actual attraction.

Take for example Waco, Texas. Some third-tier stuff like the Dr. Pepper museum, Mammoth site, and Texas Ranger Museum is there, but AFAIK nobody goes to Waco specifically to see that stuff. But they do go for the Chip & Joanna Gaines stuff (Magnolia).

Would that count? If so, then Dallas definitely counts- there’s only really one large tourist attraction, and that’s Dealey Plaza (where JFK got shot).