Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area
Resort Point: Before National Parks, There Were Summer Hotels
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
Long before the National Park Service arrived, Delaware Water Gap was already a vacation brand.
Visitors rented rooms from local families in the early nineteenth century. A hotel opened in the 1830s. Railroads later made the Gap dramatically easier to reach from New York and Philadelphia.
By the 1890s, NPS research records as many as fifteen hotels and boarding houses in the Water Gap area.
Families came for mountain air, boating, walking, scenery and weeks away from the city.
This was tourism before the automobile made leisure mobile.
We often think national parks created American scenic tourism.
Here, the tourism economy came first.
Federal protection came much later.
The argument over how much development scenery can absorb is not new. We are still negotiating it, only now the problem may be a full trailhead rather than a crowded hotel veranda.
Those resort visitors also helped create the American habit of consuming scenery as health.
Mountain air, walking and distance from the city were marketed as physical and moral relief from urban life.
That is recognizably modern.
The weekend escape from New York or Philadelphia did not begin with the SUV.
It began with trains, trunks, long hotel stays and verandas.
The recreation area inherited a market for landscape that had already existed for generations.