When a Factory Town Becomes a Museum Town

My wife and I recently spent two nights in North Adams, an old industrial city in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts, at a lodging place called Tourists. What was once an unprepossessing small motel across from the Stop & Shop on Route 2 reopened last summer as a 48-room “hotel and riverside retreat,” still across from the Stop & Shop but now oriented toward the Hoosic River behind it. The lead investor is a Boston developer who oversaw the mostly minimalist design, with as minority partners the co-founder of a local brewery; the founder of Brooklyn Magazine; Wilco’s bassist, who created the playlist for the in-house radio station (which you can also listen to on Spotify); and a James Beard Award-winning chef from San Francisco who will be opening a restaurant across the river next year (accessible by a new and charmingly wobbly pedestrian bridge) and has already devised a menu for the hotel lodge that includes fish stew, braised chicken thighs and infused-spirit-based drinks.

The place has of course already been written up by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, Wallpaper, Dezeen, Afar, Surface … am I forgetting anybody? The other guests when we were there — these were weeknights in far-from-prime season — consisted mainly of two different groups of informally but stylishly dressed young people who appeared to be on company offsites. When we asked a bartender if by any chance the second group worked in marketing or advertising, she told us that they were from a “global marketing and innovation” firm.