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I have several Jersey Shore friends who use that term. I’d never had the derivation of it explained before. From context, I thought it was an anti Semitic slur.
In my coastal New England town, the wealthy summer home and yacht people are called “skukes” though I’ve never seen it written so my spelling is probably off. Socioeconomic class envy, mostly. The summer people can be pretty pretentious and boorish. The locals are happy to get their town back in September.
Lol! I don't know in what context you heard it that you thought that, but that's funny. No, it just means summer visitors and tourists at the shore.
Interesting term you have up there, too.
In the South Jersey shore area, they call the Philly visitors "shoobies", apparently an old reference to them arriving with their possessions in shoe boxes.
We spent a week in San Diego with my NIMBY BIL and his wife. Everywhere we went I saw the most elite attitudes and behavior.
In the Seventies I moved from the Midwest to near Seattle and one day came home from a shopping trip to Seattle nearly in tears. Told DH I didn't know what was wrong with that whole city full of people who stare straight through you like you don't exist. I'd never seen anything like that in my life at that time.
But I don't know whether it was an attitude towards tourists or just the general atmosphere of those places. Cold to the point of unnatural.
My experience is that plenty of travels in the Deep South, which we are constantly conditioned to think of as hostile to Northerners, is that we have been received with graciousness. I've seen that in all races and economic levels.
Tourists can be very destructive, look what they've done to Las Vegas, and what they're doing to Cuzco/Macchu Picchu and Costa Rica.
In Las Vegas, it's all about: What will the tourists think, not what the residents think!!
The irony is, if Las Vegas lost all their tourists then you would REALLY see destruction. abandoned buildings aren't pretty, and there would be a lot of them.
In a way, Las Vegas is like a factory town. It was built solely to serve one major industry. At least tourists are more pleasant than factories, penitentiaries, slaughterhouses, nuclear power plants, or most other major employers that are the backbones of so many of the towns that are out in the middle of nowhere. But I can sympathize that it must be annoying when governments only care about what serves the local industry, and not so much the residents.
and what they're doing to Cuzco/Macchu Picchu and Costa Rica.
Peru is actually pretty proactive with Machu Picchu, they have daily tourist limits to the site (I think about 2,000) and restrictions on hiker permits on the trails nearby. I've no idea if the limits are suitable for long-term site preservation but at least they are taking a stand and I wish more unique sites in the world would do the same.
Out by me the visitors are called “citiots” (city + idiots).
LOL, we have a few people here who like the term "tour-ons" (tourist + morons). The irony is the you only hear this being said by college kids over at William and Mary, and the way I see it they're basically tourists, too.
That restaurant was Moby Dick forever before Boston restaurant money bought it and rebranded it as the much more upscale Back Eddy. I recall locals at the time being incensed about the jacked up prices for cocktails.
I’m from the next harbor to the east. The Massachusetts South Coast is an economic backwater. There’s a lot of socioeconomic class resentment. You even get it within the town. If you grow up in Westport Point or Padanaram, you’re resented by people in the less affluent part of town. Marion and Mattapoisett are viewed the same way though they’re less socioeconomically mixed. There are an awful lot of people in the region making $30k who resent someone driving up in a luxury sedan that costs two years pay. Basic human nature. I’ve been at the same Vermont ski resort for many decades. It’s the same way there. It’s more reliant on tourism so you don’t get the “you people...” thing very often.
I am pretty sure the restaurant was already called The Back Eddy. This would have been around 1986 or 1987. It was not upscale by any measure; maybe it had just been bought and the workers hated having a new owner From Away (as they say in Maine). What was ironic about the treatment was I was NOT one of the moneyed class, just a worker bee who had ordered a very ordinary burger and have never owned a luxury vehicle, not even now.
Even then and even not having grown up in any of those towns, the split between Padanaram and other yachtie areas was evident. Westport Point seemed to be a bunch of New Yorkers’ second homes, a.k.a. beach “cottages.”
Decades ago, the local governments figured out that the continual sprawl happening in adjacent counties, wasn't going to work here. Run on single family home developments and strip malls would eventually drive the Amish out, and kill the tourism goose. Since then, they have created some of the best farm preservation and land use regulations around. The valley behind my house looks like the cover of a travel magazine, twelve months a year. Locals tell me that it looked exactly like it does now, fifty years ago. It won't change before I'm gone, either. Those tourism dollars also create a giant ecosystem of events, venues, theaters, restaurants, stores, and other things that make for a really nice quality of life here. I've been to some remote Amish communities in this state, places where there essentially are no visitors. It gives you a chance to reflect on exactly how much those tourism dollars do to your neighborhood to make it a much better place to live.
Honestly, the congestion and high land prices have already driven out many of the Amish as the young people do not have the necessary land to farm. MANY of the folks have moved west to Ohio where land is somewhat reasonable.
The irony is, if Las Vegas lost all their tourists then you would REALLY see destruction. abandoned buildings aren't pretty, and there would be a lot of them.
In a way, Las Vegas is like a factory town. It was built solely to serve one major industry. At least tourists are more pleasant than factories, penitentiaries, slaughterhouses, nuclear power plants, or most other major employers that are the backbones of so many of the towns that are out in the middle of nowhere. But I can sympathize that it must be annoying when governments only care about what serves the local industry, and not so much the residents.
You mean like Las Vegas in mid-2009 ... with streets of 20 homes with 13 for sale signs ...
You mean like Las Vegas in mid-2009 ... with streets of 20 homes with 13 for sale signs ...
And that was just a taste of what can happen if a tourist town loses its tourists.
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