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Tourism Cares
returns to the Gulf for a memorable 6th event
By Jay Turner
Citizen Staff
For a city
that was as ravaged as New Orleans was by Hurricane Katrina, the
sprucing up of a park may not appear to be high on any priority
lists.
It certainly
hadn’t been for city officials, as the 32-acre Louis Armstrong
Park had fallen into disrepair well before the storm struck in
late August of 2005. To make matters worse, the park, which is
named after the jazz great who, more than anyone else, embodies
the heart and soul of New Orleans, is located in a section of
the city that the travel guide Frommer’s has warned is “plagued
by severe crime and not advisable to walk through at night.”
 It was for
precisely these reasons, however, coupled with the fact that the
area is steeped in both African-American history and the city’s
rich musical heritage, that Tourism Cares, a Canton-based
non-profit organization, decided to help.
And help
they did. Arriving like a small army on April 18, more than 300
professionals from the tourism industry, including many
top-level executives, descended on the park to scrape, paint,
rake, prune, clean and plant. All throughout the day they
worked, stopping only to acknowledge the heartfelt honks and
waves of local passersby.
“We went
down there to bring back life to a neighborhood,” explained
Canton resident and Tourism Cares Executive Director Bruce
Beckham, who has led an annual volunteer effort at a different
American historic site for each of the past six years.
Beginning
with the inaugural event at Ellis Island in 2003, the Tourism
Cares for America program has now logged thousands of volunteer
hours all over the country in an effort to “help preserve,
conserve and protect tourism related sites in America that need
care and rejuvenation.”
“You get to
meet people from all over the country that have a common goal,
and that is to do good,” noted Beckham, whose organization also
provides grants that help preserve historic treasures throughout
the world, as well as scholarships to students studying
hospitality and tourism.
In choosing
the sites for the Tourism Cares for America projects, Beckham
said the organization looks for “iconic sites — sites that are
really meaningful to Americans.”
In 2005, for
instance, a group went to George Washington’s Mt. Vernon estate
in Virginia to clear dead trees and debris from a 300-acre
forest that had been damaged by Hurricane Isabel. Last year,
hundreds of volunteers worked on preservation and restoration
projects in the Old West mining town of Virginia City, Nevada —
once known as the “richest place on earth” at the height of the
silver mining boom.
And while
Tourism Cares had already been to the Gulf Coast twice,
including a 2006 trip to Mississippi just seven months after
Katrina, Beckham said this year’s event was “emotional from a
different kind of aspect,” given the context of African American
experiences throughout history and the widely publicized
disparity between whites and blacks in the post-Katrina recovery
process.
“It’s a
32-acre park right smack in the middle of the city, and it
pretty much had been neglected,” he said.
 The Tourism
Cares website, in fact, describes the area around Louis
Armstrong Park as the “single most important location of
African-American heritage in our country — truly hallowed ground
— the legacy of which must be preserved for generations to
come.”
Along with
its deep ties to jazz, the area is also home to Congo Square,
once known as the “Place de Negres,” where slaves would come on
Sundays to sing and dance and practice their native religions.
“This
particular event was more about the culture of the people of New
Orleans and about recognizing that culture,” said Beckham.
Yet as
meaningful as the recent trip was, Beckham, who owned and
operated Beckham Travel for years in Canton center, said he
harbors no illusions of grandeur when it comes to his somewhat
newfound role as a humanitarian.
“I spent
most of my life showing people the world,” he said. “Now I’m
trying to help save it for future generations of travelers.”
Pointing out
that Tourism Cares is “not a disaster relief organization like
the Red Cross or United Way,” he said his organization is simply
a case of the tourism industry “trying to eliminate a lot of
those used-to-be’s” — places of historical or even nostalgic
significance that all too often get bulldozed to make way for
strip malls and cookie-cutter developments.
“There’s a
certain responsibility that we have to be stewards of our own
history,” he said, “so we just don’t indiscriminately knock down
an old building and replace it with a new one.”
For more
info on Tourism Cares or to find out how to donate, visit
www.tourismcares.org.
May 1, 2008
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