Limestone, Tennessee:
Greeneville, Tennessee:
Helsingør, Denmark, thanks to a certain Shakespeare play.
There doesn’t have to be “one reason” to go there. There just has to be one reason anybody started to visit in the first place that wasn’t always there.
And Dallas doesn’t count. Major metropolitan cities don’t get visitors just because one event happened there. They get tourists because they’re interesting place to visit with much to see and do.
Speaking of Texas cities, an argument could be made for San Antonio and the Alamo.
Gravenhurst, Ontario is in the middle of Ontario’s “cottage country”, but it gets a great deal of Chinese tourists visiting the birthplace of Dr. Norman Bethune.
I agree that Tombstone AZ fits the criteria, although the “no tourists before” was some time ago. As to the t-shirts, Tombstone also has the characteristic that you can buy a bunch of Branson t-shirts there as well (???).
In keeping with AZ, I think Winslow AZ, a certain corner to be exact, would also fit this criteria. People did “pass through” as it did have a train stop, but I don’t think “tourists” sought it out as a destination until the Eagles song came out. And the gift/t-shirt shops definitely followed.
I was going to propose Roswell NM, but I’m not sure to what extent the “nobody decided to invent a reason” criteria holds up. “Something” interesting did happen in that area, though.
Roslyn, Washington, is a small town, east of Seattle; it became a tourist destination when the television series Northern Exposure was filmed there in the early '90s, and used Roslyn and a number of its buildings as stand-ins for the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, and locations in that town.
Now I’m uncertain if my original response of Delphi fits your criteria or not. I mean, it didn’t have tourists (in modern times at least), then archeologists excavated the site, then tourists started going there. Or do you consider excavating the archeological site (and later building a museum) to be inventing a reason for it to be a destination?
Football (soccer) fans would be familiar with Liverpool football club and Everton before the Beatles. Liverpool was bombed heavily in WWII, so there wouldn’t have been a ton of pre Beatles tourism post Works War II but before Beatles
Also, post Beatles, Liverpool has definitely reinvented itself. It has more museums than any other U.K. cities besides London.
I could give you a series of examples of roads (rather than cities or towns) where this has happened. There are climbs made famous by their inclusion in The Tour De France (or other bike races) which have become meccas for cyclotourism as a result - Alpe d’Huez, (of Tour De France fame) for example. That’s adjacent to the town of Huez; but some of these climbs are actually in towns - the Kapelmuur (Tour of Flanders), for example, is in Geraardsbergen.
j
Uh… San Antonio IS a major metropolitan city. It’s actually larger than Dallas. Both of them have tourist industries that center around major events that happened there- in San Antonio’s case, the Battle of the Alamo in 1835, and in Dallas’ case, JFK’s assassination in 1963.
I also think you dramatically overestimate the level of tourist attractiveness that Dallas holds for people who aren’t here for the JFK stuff or who aren’t here for specific events. Nobody plans a trip to Dallas for their vacation, because there is just about nothing here to actually visit that isn’t also in every other large city.
As far as cities that wouldn’t be famous but for one thing, Salem, Massachusetts is one. The whole city’s tourist business centers around witch trial related stuff, and based on having visited on about October 24th one year, I suspect that it’s seasonal and centered around Halloween.
Hah! I’ve actually been there. It’s less wretched than the book makes it sound; I don’t get the impression that it was ever really intended to be a big tourist attraction- the towns nearby are so tiny that I don’t think there’s a gas station in the nearest town (Lebanon, KS). And I’m pretty sure the reason that Gaiman would have chosen it for the book is because it’s a very eerie kind of place. It’s super-quiet and peaceful, which would seem like a good thing, but it’s so quiet and still that it becomes unnerving after a little while.
Cooperstown, NY
Canton, OH
Billund, Denmark (Legoland).
Weeeell - roundabout, I admit, but the two climbs I suggested are respectively attached to and included within towns. They bring tourists to the towns - it’s a big thing. Check out the first attraction that the town of Geraardsbergen lists.
De Iconische Muur
I tried to find an equivalent page for Huez - failed. Everything is about the Alpe. I suspect the town lives on that. Never been, but I’d love to.
j
ETA: Oops - didn’t realise that in your post “here” was a link. Sorry. I guess I could delete this post as I was justifying something that (I realise now) I didn’t need to justify. But I’ll leave it, because I think it’s interesting to see how important the Muur is to Geraardsbergen.
And while in Washington, don’t miss your chance for a romantic interlude in the same motel room as Richard Gere & Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman, and be among the thousands of couples who’ve said “like Hell I’m having sex in this dump!”
Apart from being a charming small town you pass through on the way to the Sonoma County cost, there wasn’t much of a reason for tourists to stop in Bodega, California, a few miles inland from the similarly named Bodega Bay. Then Alfred Hitchcock decide to prominently feature their historic schoolhouse in his film The Birds.
TIL that The Scream isn’t set on a seaside pier as I’d always presumed. 
Roswell is probably the best bet in the US for meeting those specific criteria.
Deadwood, SD because Wild Bill and Calamity Jane both decided to die there, as did Seth Bullock.
Lexington and Concord for kicking off the American Revolution.
Plymouth Plantation because a bunch of folks on a boat landed there.
Astoria, Oregon (and some other Oregon Coast locales) because of The Goonies.
It’s kinda scary how many of the places mentioned in this thread I’ve been to. In one case, even before the touristy thing happened.
I’ve heard that it’s a tradition in the U.S. Navy for a ship to stop at the Equator or the Date Line so that crew members can have the honor of swimming across the line. A rare few go to 0 latitude / 180 longitude and get to swim across both at the same time.