Beauty is in the eye of the beholder — in this case, these five experts
Are you ready for your close-up, America? The overall picture may come into slightly sharper focus after November, but that hasn’t stopped us from finding the 20 prettiest towns in the homeland right now. From Bisbee to Cape May, they’ve each got something special that should put them on the savvy traveler’s radar.
Identifying America’s prettiest towns is by definition a subjective undertaking — prettiness, to adapt an old saying, is in the eye of the beholder. So when we asked five experts for their lists of the country’s prettiest towns, we left the definition of “pretty” up to the judges themselves.
In Pictures: America's Prettiest Towns
“I felt that for a town to be considered ‘pretty,’ it must have something more going for it than simply enjoying a ‘pretty’ location,” says travel writer Greg Ward, co-author of "The Rough Guide to the USA." “The town itself has to have some aesthetic appeal on a human scale.”
Ward’s picks include Flagstaff, Ariz., which combines those natural and manmade elements into what he describes as a “definitive little Western town, where fine brick buildings on every block hold lively hotels, bars, stores and restaurants, and the majestic San Francisco Peaks soar to the north.”
For Bob Krist, author of "Travel Photography: Documenting the World’s People and Places" and host of PBS’ “Restoration Stories,” a selection of the U.S.’s prettiest towns ended up revealing a common denominator: tradition. “They’re the kind of places that don’t exist much anymore,” Krist says of his list, which includes the coastal Maine town of Rockport and the southern New Jersey resort of Cape May.
Krist adds that his picks share a photogenic richness that results from the “integrity of the traditional architecture. You can look down a street in Cape May (N.J.) and see seven or eight beautiful Victorians all in a row. It’s an architectural integrity that existed before strip malls and before things got homogenized with aluminum siding.”
Danno Glanz, an urban designer with the Berkeley, Calif.-based urban design, community planning, and architecture firm Calthorpe Associates, says he gravitates toward “places that have an exceptional, unique urban form.” Glanz says that in lieu of a traditionally pretty town like Carmel, Calif., “which has a lot of flower boxes on windows,” he’d opt instead to visit someplace like the southern Arizona enclave of Bisbee, whose cottages and bungalows form “eclectic hillside residential neighborhoods that terrace down the hillside in an organic way.”
Glanz also selected the smallest town on our list, Bodie, Calif., with a population of zero. The once thriving gold-mining outpost is now a well-preserved ghost town (and state park). Glanz says the abandoned homes, churches, and saloons have a “haunting beauty.”
While the towns here comprise a diverse array of locations, sizes and architectural styles, our expert’s selections lean heavily toward the East, and New England picks figure prominently in their selections. Three of our five panelists chose New Hampshire towns (Portsmouth and Hanover) as among the nation’s prettiest, and destinations in Maine, Vermont and Rhode Island are also sprinkled among the experts’ choices.
"The Rough Guide to the USA" co-author Greg Ward is the sole panelist whose choices drifted wholly away from the Eastern Seaboard. Among the traveler writer’s pretty-town favorites are Springdale, Utah, situated near Zion National Park, and Galena, Ill., which Ward describes as a “peaceful, verdant” town that “seems barely changed since local boy Ulysses S. Grant was elected president in 1868.”
There was only one overlap choice among our expert panel: In independent selections, Greg Melville and Sarah Tuff Dunn, co-authors of "101 Best Outdoor Towns," both singled out Lake Placid, N.Y., for its natural grandeur and small-town charm. “It's got the jagged mountain backdrop surrounding a quaint, unpretentious ski village bordered by two crystal lakes,” says Melville.
Melville explained the criteria he used in making his choices: “Each of these places is among the most picturesque (in the country) — whether it's the natural surroundings, the architecture, or more likely a combination of the two.”
Beyond the outward aesthetic appeal of the destinations chosen by our panel, and regardless of whether the towns are situated on colonial waterfronts, amidst awesome, snow-capped peaks or in stark western deserts, there seems to be a deeper quality that unites our experts’ choices — namely, how the towns “feel.”
When urban designer Glanz talks about the ghost town Bodie, he says, “It’s best to visit on a grey day in early winter with snow flurries whistling through the air. The rugged and sublime high mountain context will make any visitor feel like an extra in the movie "Unforgiven."
Sarah Tuff Dunn, describing her first visit to Park City, Utah, says, “I was struck by just how blue the sky was, and how dry the air, during a ski trip one March. I was used to soggy or icy conditions back East. After I skied seemingly bottomless powder at nearby Deer Valley, the whole town of Park City (which looked like a candy village, thanks to all the different colors of the Victorian buildings) seemed like it was on some crazy high from the sun, the snow and the altitude.”
Photographer Krist sums up the intangible quality shared by the pretty towns on his list: “They haven’t been homogenized, they still have their local character — and the charm is real.”
No comments :
Post a Comment