East Bay Chamber aids town with new facility
Newport and Providence both have visitors’ centers. So does Warren – a little place where you can relax for a few minutes and pick up brochures for local attractions and hot spots throughout Rhode Island.
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But Bristol, home of America’s oldest Fourth of July parade, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, the Blithewold Mansion, Gardens and Arboretum, the Herreshoff Marine Museum, and one of the largest clusters of Colonial-era houses in the nation, had never offered such a basic convenience.
This month, after more than two years of planning and preparations, the town officially unveiled its new visitor center, in a former office space in the historic Burnside Memorial Building on Hope Street, around the corner from Town Hall.
The center will be open daily from May through October, staffed by one part-time town employee and a group of volunteers.
Inside, visitors will be able to learn about Bristol’s history and culture, including the waterfront, museums and other points of interest, shops, restaurants – anything a tourist might need to find all the town’s treasures.
They’ll also have access to an array of brochures and promotional materials for attractions in Newport, other East Bay communities, and the rest of the state.
It wasn’t these things, however, that first got the conversation started about building a visitors’ center, said Betty J. Pleacher, president of the East Bay Chamber of Commerce and head of the East Bay Tourism Council, both of which helped the town pay for the project.
“Our tourism has increased over the past several years,” she said, “and one of the complaints of many of the tourists coming in was that there weren’t enough public restrooms. That’s how the visitors’ center really started.”
The town has also been getting more and more attention as a tourist destination, with a recent article in the June issue of Boston Magazine, for example, that highlighted the charms of the town’s waterfront and its historical heritage.
The Burnside building was “a perfect spot” for the center, Pleacher said, because it’s in the heart of the historic district, in an area frequented by the vast majority of visitors.
“When people come into Bristol, they know where many of our tourism venues are, but not all,” she said. They may miss the Haffenreffer Museum, which is on Route 138, or lesser-known historic attractions, or sites they don’t know to look out for. “Now we’ve opened the doors for tourists to see all that Bristol has to offer,” she said.
“It’s going to have a great impact on our tourism,” Pleacher added. “They can spend a day in Bristol, they can come up to Warren … and if they want to go across the bridge into Newport, they can do that as well.”
