Editorial: August 31, 2023

It’s Not ‘Over’ Yet

Something happened last weekend. All of a sudden the Village of Cooperstown was quiet; the sidewalks were sparsely populated; there were a number of parking spaces on Main Street (though not so many opposite the Hall of Fame, where the sign says 15-minute parking); there were no horns blaring (though the fire department siren was working hard, as is its wont); and there were fewer cars speeding up and down the lake and on Route 28, south toward Oneonta. The nasty traffic glitch at the entrance to the Cooperstown Dreams Park has disappeared as well.

So what has happened? The weeks-long runs of the Cooperstown Dreams Park and its Oneonta cohort, Cooperstown All Star Village, have come to a close. Dreams Park was created in 1996 by a former baseball player who believed every kid in America should have the opportunity to play baseball here, in Cooperstown. Since its founding, more than 200,000 players, coaches and umpires have plied their trade on the Dreams Park fields, some going further on to the World Series. In fact, in the 2022 World Series there were eight Phillies and five Astros who had spent at least one summer each at Dreams Park.

The more than 14,000 U12s who came from across the United States to play baseball at the Dreams Park this summer—that’s 100 teams per week, playing on 22 fields—have finished their 13 weeks of pitches, catches, slides, hits, runs, errors and at-bats, and they have all gone home, taking with them their coaches and their umpires, their families, who inevitably came along for the ride, and their new-found, fresh, and exuberating memories of having played baseball in the mythical Village of Cooperstown, just seconds from the Hall.

And we local residents of Cooperstown and Oneonta have watched these players and fans come and go, all summer, as we have done these past 27 years. We have rented our houses and camps, filled our shops with tantalizing commodities, provisioned our restaurants, planted our gardens, swept our streets and pasted some smiles on our faces. We know they had a good time here; we hope we did, too.

Fourteen thousand 12-year-olds and their entourage are a lot for the Village of Cooperstown to keep up with, not to mention the multitude of other than U12 baseball fans who come to the Hall of Fame. There isn’t enough room on our sidewalks, or on our streets. But we are lucky. We have not yet reached the tourism tipping point—overtourism, as it was so aptly named in 2012—that has hit the many towns and cities in this country and abroad that have viable, historical, attractive, beckoning attributes which appeal to the growing number of people who travel. On September 4, Greece will cap the number of visitors at 20,000 per day, to the Acropolis; in Paris, the Louvre has already limited its visitors to 30,000 per day; cruise ships are no longer allowed to dock near the city center in Amsterdam; Cambodia’s Angkor Wat has visitor limits, as do our national parks. Venice is not only sinking, it’s drowning in tourists.

Overtourism can, and does, damage fragile environments and landmarks, scare wildlife, push up local rents, crowd narrow streets, and irritate local residents whose quality of life is challenged in many ways. It can also disappoint the tourists themselves, especially when the systems break down. Although the tourism industry provides jobs and boosts economies, when tourism becomes overtourism and its negative consequences are not responsibly managed, the economic, environmental, and sociocultural effects are disruptive to everyone.

We need to make some plans.