After Yellowstone in 1872, other parks began to pop up around the country— Yosemite, Sequoia, and Mount Rainier all before 1900, as well as later-demoted Mackinac and Rock Creek, each with their own needs for concessions—alongside anxious chatter about the specter of “bad development.” Coney Island and Niagara Falls loomed large in the elite imagination as cautionary tales about the market catering too democratically to mass tastes at sites of natural splendor. At both sites, development run amok detracted from the view: factories, mines, and mills lined the rim of Niagara Falls; and amusement parks, racetracks, hotels, and restaurants stood between visitors and the seashore at Coney Island. However, such overdevelopment did not deter throngs of humanity from visiting each site. By 1894, The New York Times was applauding efforts to bring a more “respectable” class of people to Coney’s “Sodom-by-the-Sea,” despite the chagrin of “‘dive’ keepers and liquor sellers” who catered to the rowdy throngs. (Likely to their relief, that change did not happen quickly: a 1957 article in the Buffalo Evening News magazine noted the still “lurid” reputation of Coney Island [Roosevelt 1957, 1].) And although long hailed as the country’s finest natural wonder, by 1885, The New York Times decried Niagara Falls’ “employment of tawdry sensational attractions,” noting:
the increasing ugliness everywhere: the destruction of all vernal beauty and freshness; the crowding of unsightly structures for manufactures of various kinds around the very brink of the falls; the incessant hounding of travelers, and the enormous exactions of which they are the victims.
(1885, 11)
While Coney Island and Niagara Falls were being overrun by so-called “rogues and unscrupulous operators” (Zaslowsky and Watkins 1994, 15), concessions were cropping up in the nation’s first national parks in the nearly five decades between the 1872 founding of Yellowstone and the passage of the 1916 Organic Act which founded the National Park Service (NPS). Yosemite National Park, in California, offers a particularly interesting concession history animated by concerns over taste and class. Entrepreneurs had arrived in the Yosemite Valley at least a decade be-fore Congress turned the land over to California to preserve and manage in 1864, convinced of the tourist dollars that would eventually flow into the valley. “Local businessmen, curious hunters, and roaming photographers and artists found their way into the valley, but the expected crowds took years to materialize. A trip to Yosemite was expensive and difficult, requiring weeks of travel and dangerous risks” (National Park Service 2021). Nonetheless, as tourists started to make their way to the park—at first, travelers of means in covered wagons bringing their own supplies and, later, a wider economic swath of humanity via train and automobile, relying more heavily on park restaurants and lodges—concession offerings evolved rapidly.
In the early years, concessions tended to be extremely basic and might consist of a campsite or a tent hotel and a cook. Crude lodging facilities began to crop up in the late 1850s, yet by 1870, the Yosemite Valley still lacked the kinds of hospitality amenities that increasingly affluent visitors sought out and that would allow them to position themselves distinctively—hence the 1871 opening by John C. Smith of The Cosmopolitan Bathhouse and Saloon. “Known simply as the Cosmopolitan, Smith’s establishment offered Yosemite visitors two prime amenities – hot or cold baths at any time of the day or night, plus a very well-stocked bar. (Smith’s mint juleps were a favorite)” (Janiskee 2011; see also Green 1987). The elegant Cosmopolitan was a favorite of affluent travelers from the East, offering a level of amenity unavailable at the rustic inns they were staying in. The visitor register, signed by four US presidents and famed individuals including Rudyard Kipling and William Randolph Hearst, testified to not only the class of the visitors but also the relief The Cosmopolitan brought weary yet well-heeled travelers during its brief 13-year existence. The establishment’s very name reads like the throwing down of a gauntlet around status and social class: to be cosmopolitan is to be sophisticated and refined (Lamont 1992), to be a citizen of the world rather than a parochial hayseed. This kind of claim-staking to exalted status reflected elite discourses about class, taste, democracy, and distinction that were shaping the imagination about the future of US national parks.
A casualty of the growing conviction that saloons should not operate outside of hotels, The Cosmopolitan—with its prosperous clientele, its promise of the finer things in life, and its name that bespoke bespokeness—ceased operation in 1884, several years before Yosemite was designated as a national park. It nevertheless served as a precursor to the exclusive, luxury lodges that would eventually populate the national parks of the western US. As trains began to reach the parks—the Grand Canyon in 1901, Yosemite in 1907, and Yellowstone in 1908—so did food begin to arrive by train; local foodways were quickly sidelined. Railroad freight and passenger services grew in tandem, increasing the variety of available foods, releasing people from the constraints of seasonal eating (Wallach 2013), and accelerating the speed of eating (Root and de Rochemont 1976) in the restaurants that would crop up to feed increasingly mobile Americans. National park eateries fueled a populace conversant with radical ideas from the likes of George Cheyne, John Wesley, John Harvey Kellogg, and J.I. Rodale associating spiritual and physical health with dietary choices—seekers whose time communing with nature in the parks required them to make distinctive choices about what they ate. Restaurant dining in national parks “made eating a form of entertainment and an object of conspicuous consumption as well as sustenance” (Lobel 2014, 6).
At the same time, parks quickly became unequipped to deal with the growing visitation rates facilitated by the opening of mass transit lines. Concessioners, eager to attract more well-to-do visitors, began opening grand, exclusive, luxury park lodges (Carr 1998) that would feature opportunities for opulent dining—at considerable cost, given the logistics of bringing fancy food to remote locations— in restaurants with priceless views. In Yellowstone, the Old Faithful Inn opened in 1904, and in the Grand Canyon, El Tovar in 1905, where visitors to the size-able dining room “could dine on fresh salmon from the Pacific Coast, California fruit, Michigan celery, Camembert cheese, and other delectables of industrial America” (Rothman 1998, 59). Entrepreneur Fred Harvey, known unironically as “The Civilizer of the West,” set up America’s first restaurant chain, the Harvey Houses, alongside railway routes in the Southwest, many in national parks, including El Tovar. Harvey hired attractive young women as hostesses—“Harvey Girls”—whose competence and agreeableness were expected to have a civilizing influence on the rough, largely male clientele of the era (Fried 2010). Harvey’s “Indian Department” promoted Indigenous arts and crafts and catered, through its “Indian Detours” program, to a tourist clientele hungry for cultural interaction with the so-called “forgotten people.” Despite their interest in civilizing the public through enlightened dining and arts and culture tourism, concessioners often did not have public interests top of mind, and those running the parks cooperated with concessioners at the public’s expense. For example,
not until 1928 did the Interior Department solicitor emphatically rule that local beef being brought into the park for public consumption must be inspected, even though such a regulation would add ten cents a pound to the 35,000 pounds being imported each year.
(Bartlett 1985, 202)
This concern for catering to those with more discerning tastes informed the motives of the men who established the NPS a decade later. Coney Island and Niagara Falls, sites of mass culture that provided working-class people with accessible recreation (Busà 2012), haunted their imagination as they set their vision for park concessions against these cautionary tales of the tawdry, the tacky, and the over-run. In an oft-told tale, borax magnate and publicity savant Stephen Mather got his job as first Director of the NPS in 1916, two years after writing to Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane to complain about the terrible food and accommodations in Yosemite Valley; Lane told him to run the parks himself if he didn’t like it.
A descendant of well-known Puritan minister and Harvard College president Increase Mather, Stephen Mather was widely admired. A good-looking live wire, full of energy and drive, described as “the popular dream of a man of distinction” (Shankland 1951, 8), Mather was a well-intended patrician. His immediate agenda upon his appointment as NPS Director was brimming: get Congress interested and willing to increase appropriations and to authorize a national park bureau, get said bureau up and running while increasing public interest by making travel easier, add more sites while keeping out undesirable ones, and get rid of private holdings, among other things (Shankland 1951, 56).
Although he is revered for his pioneering leadership of the NPS, Mather’s view of the common people was arguably somewhat more instrumental than is commonly understood. Mather was credited with consciously shifting the focus of the parks from the elite to middle-class visitors, forging citizens who could provide political support for the parks out of everyday tourists (Sheail 2010). Presaging neoliberal themes decades before their widespread articulation, Mather was very interested in the ability of the parks to create better citizens: “He is a better citizen with a keener appreciation of the privilege of living here who has toured the national parks,” he wrote in his 1920 Report as Director of the NPS (Mather 1920, 13–14).
When famed park lodge architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood expressed dis-may at how those traveling by car (the “tin-canners”) often left camps and picnic grounds strewn with litter, Mather replied, “What if they do? They own as much of the parks as anybody else. We can pick up the tin cans. It’s a cheap way to make better citizens” (Shankland 1951, 161). Mather was convinced that time spent in the parks would make visitors better citizens, more thoroughly possessed of the land, and he didn’t mind picking up their litter if it meant the public would bankroll the conservation of parklands. For greater numbers of tourists to be able to access the treasures of the national parks, the early NPS modeled the parks as resorts to keep the land from being mined, grazed, or logged (Mark 2005). Mather sup-ported commercial development in the parks to accommodate more visitors; this “resort-friendly” stance empowered concessioners, whose amenities and recreational opportunities attracted tourists eager for engaging recreation opportunities in beautiful places.
However, not just any concessioner would do. One of Mather’s chief goals was “to sweep the superfluous and tacky concessions from the parks” (Zaslowsky and Watkins 1994, 23). In 1923, Mather visited Coney Island with park landscape architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who would later design Yosemite’s famed Ahwahnee Hotel:
The two men spent the day wandering through the crowds, stuffing themselves with hot dogs and raw onions, and washing it all down with orange pop. At one point Mather turned to Underwood and said, ‘This is exactly what we don’t want in the national parks. Lots of people seem to like it and if they do, they ought to have it, but not in the national parks. Our job in the National Park Service is to keep the national parks as close to what God made them and as far as we can from a horror like this.’
(Zaslowsky and Watkins 1994, 26)
These feelings about Coney Island were not unique to Mather but echoed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who more than a decade later raised concern about the effects of the infrastructure and commercial development that had supported a surge in tourist visitation in the 1920s and 1930s:
I have told them [Park Service officials] that we do not want any Coney Islands and that the parks are for those who will appreciate them and not merely for hordes of tourists who dash through them at break-neck speed in order to be able to say that they have been to Glacier or Yellowstone or some other park.
(Ickes 1938, cited in Mackintosh 1985, 82–83)
This sense that concessions should be shaped to keep “lots of people” with vulgar tastes at bay—to offer what Urry (1995) has described as a social differentiation-enhancing “positional good”—speaks to the founding premise of the NPS.
Lest one think that Mather’s ideas about the national parks as spaces of distinction are anomalous, the writings of second NPS Director Horace M. Albright are instructive. Albright and Taylor (1928) declared that national park visitors were of two types: “dudes” (also known as “couponers”; see Bartlett 1985), who came by train and “motor stage” and stayed at the hotels and lodges, and “sagebrushers,” who came by covered wagon (or later automobile) and proceeded in a more do-it-yourself fashion, camping and cooking for themselves. The dude, initially a figure held in slight comic contempt by the more rough-and-tumble locals, was a well-dressed, clean tourist of means who flitted from concession to concession. Albright noted that by 1928, the term had become one of distinction, proudly owned by the tourists themselves (and preserved for posterity in “dude ranches,” where wealthy tourists could go to have a try at authentic ranch living). Mather and Albright pre-sided over an NPS with young, initially genteel luxury hotels providing tasteful accommodations to moneyed travelers, reflecting the early NPS commitment to making the parks attractive for use by citizens who would throw their support be-hind preserving the lands they had so enjoyed. Both Mather and Albright elevated “‘park values,’ reliability, and public welfare above profits made on government property,” believing that “the park visitor deserved decent lodging and basic amenities, not hucksters clamoring to make a sale” (Keller and Turek 1998, 149). Hucksters and their easy marks were to remain at Niagara Falls and Coney Island.2