Lost Resorts
Lavish photos, lackluster text document the grand seaside hotels of nineteenth-century Maine and New England.
Review by Colin Woodard
Summer tourism is so embedded in the economic and cultural fabric of our coast that it’s hard to imagine life without it. But until the middle decades of the nineteenth century, tourism and the summer vacation didn’t even exist. Most people had neither the time nor resources for recreational travel, and those who did — particularly in Puritan New England — were restrained by cultural taboos equating leisure with sloth and immorality. [For the rest of this story, see the July 2008 issue of Down East.]
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