Map of Pennsylvania highlighting Lancaster County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Stadium: Check.
Arts district: Check.
Convention Center: Check.
Tourism: Check.
Sixteen years after business leaders tried to revive Lancaster city with an economic development plan, many of the plan’s major components have come to pass.
Lancaster is a very different city than it was in 1998.
Map of Pennsylvania highlighting Berks County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In April 1963, a group of forward-looking business and civic leaders organized the Reading-Berks County Pennsylvania Dutch Travel Association.
The region’s rich history and cultural heritage, they believed, could draw tourists whose dollars would strengthen the region’s economy.
The association has undergone several name changes and had several homes, but 50 years, later the founders’ vision still guides the Greater Reading Convention & Visitors Bureau.
“It’s still our history, art, architecture and the sheer beauty of our region that attracts visitors,” association president Crystal A. Seitz said Monday. “Tourism touches everybody’s life in Berks County.”
Map of Pennsylvania highlighting Lancaster County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The county’s tourism promotion board will soon launch a multifaceted campaign it hopes will catch the eye of as many as 100 million people.
It hopes many of of them will come here and spend money.
The Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau plans to diversify the $1.6 million it will spend on advertising this year.
In addition to a television commercial that will soon be aired in the Philadelphia and New York markets, the visitors bureau also will buy digital and static billboards to reinforce the same message.
Map of Pennsylvania highlighting Berks County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Of the 200 volunteers it takes to put together the Christmas celebration taking place Friday through Sunday evenings at Historic Joanna Furnace, Lisa and Marissa Martin have one of the more enviable jobs.
They’re coordinating the kitchen portion of the event’s living-history demonstrations, which means the mother-daughter team spent a good portion of last week testing out 19th century cookie recipes – you know, for authenticity’s sake.
With the cookies available for visitors to sample, the stakes were high – but Lisa Martin said the 19th century recipes she found online should please modern palates.
“My kitchen all approved it,” she said.
Image via Wikipedia
When quarterbacks Eli Manning and Tom Brady display their pigskin prowess in Super Bowl XLVI, they’ll not be the only ones grappling with a football during Sunday’s NFL classic.
Across Berks County and as far away as Connecticut and Texas, diehard fans will be devouring red meat from football-shaped links of Lebanon bologna as they watch the New York Giants and the New England Patriots do battle at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
“They’re the centerpiece of the Super Bowl party,” says Verna Dietrich, 80, whose family operates Dietrich’s Meats & Country Store in Krumsville.
Glad to see that people are finally noticing what Lancaster has to offer!
THERE’S MORE to Lancaster than outlets and buggies.
Although the eighth-largest city in Pennsylvania is closely associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch, a community that came to this part of Penn’s Woods back in the early 1700s, there’s as much city as there is country to this picturesque part of the state…
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