Want to See Opera in the Home of Baseball? Get a Room.

New York Times

3 days ago

In Cooperstown, most everyone loves baseball. How could they not?
It's home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, a storehouse of lore and an economic engine that draws throngs to Main Street's emporia and souvenir shops.
Every summer, youth baseball camps fill the town with hordes of bright-faced Little Leaguers who come to play in the shadow of the greats.
And in July, when the Hall of Fame inducts a new set of the game's legends, the eyes of the world turn to this small, picturesque place set along a lake in bucolic upstate New York.
But Cooperstown also draws baseball parents who arrive each week in overwhelming numbers — 100,000 strong over the course of some summers — intent on watching every inning of every game that their children play at the two local camps.
This has become something of a problem for the many people who come to town to enjoy not baseball, but opera — at the Glimmerglass Festival, held in a 918-seat venue founded in 1975.
Though many Glimmerglass patrons like baseball just fine, in recent years all those parents and grandparents have made it very hard for opera fans to find a local hotel room.
Robert Ainsley, the Glimmerglass Festival's artistic and general director, doesn't blame the baseball parents per se, but he calls the accommodation situation the chief gripe of his customers.
'There are people who won't come,' Ainsley said in an interview. 'They are not content to stay at the local inn or B&B half an hour to 45 minutes away.'
Some Glimmerglass devotees now book months and months in advance. Many are forced to find rooms a considerable drive from the venue. The festival attempts to address their concerns by posting long lists of accommodations on its website with helpful headings on their drive times: '5 Minutes or Less' — '15 Minutes or Less' — '20 Minutes or Less' — '30 Minutes or Less.'
The final category is labeled 'Beautiful, Scenic Drive.'
'A pilgrimage to Glimmerglass has become exactly that,' Ainsley said. 'For those seeking cultural succor, the faithful will book their trips up to a full year in advance; for the curious, recent converts, and neophytes, the search for humble lodgings is part of the adventure.'
Most everyone in Cooperstown has noticed the swarms of baseball families.
'In the last 20-ish years, the rise in popularity of the baseball camps has put pressure on everything,' said Jeff Katz, a former mayor of Cooperstown and executive director of the Community Foundation of Otsego County. 'In the old days, people would come for two days, one night at a hotel, and go to the Hall of Fame. Now because of the camps, people stay for a week.'
When it opened in 1996, Dreams Park, the camp located just outside downtown, drew 30 teams for a weeklong tournament. Now each week between June and August, more than 100 teams from across the country rotate into the compound, which features 22 fields on 165 acres. They play against one another in a tournament format.
The owners of the Dreams Park declined to address questions about the dearth of accommodations, but a parent sitting outside Maskots restaurant opposite the busy entrance gates sought to explain why so many families are drawn to experience the visit together.
'Many of these children have been playing together for five to six years,' said Andrew Bannoura, from Michigan. 'This is the last big chance to play together. It's once in a lifetime.'
He said he would be back again in two years with another son.
The players at Dreams Park, mostly 12-year-olds, stay in bunkhouses on site. But their parents face the same pressure to find a hotel room as everyone else.
'When I told people the prices, they said, 'Are you kidding?'' said David Simpson, who traveled from Hawaii with a ballplayer son and his older brother, who came along for the experience. He found a spot in an inn about a 20-minute drive from the fields.
Still, it was worth it, he said.
'There's a very special connection with baseball,' he said. 'To be able to stand on a field at Cooperstown, to give him that memory. We had that opportunity this year. So we said, 'Let's go.''
Matt Hittleman, the owner of the Brookside Inn at Laurens, about 17 miles from Cooperstown, said he puts up many baseball families, and some of the 'Glimmerglass people' stay with him too. 'They ding me on the review because it's so far away,' he said of the opera patrons. 'I didn't tell them it was close.'
Katz, the former mayor, and many others recognize that all the visitors fuel a welcome seasonal economic boom. When they are not on the fields, the families are shopping or visiting other attractions like the Fenimore Art Museum or the Fenimore Farm. (Cooperstown is named after William Cooper, father of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and there remain strong associations.)
'It infuses life, and if you don't have that then your glory days are 150 years ago,' Katz said.
But the families also crowd sidewalks and roadways to the point where the county tourism agency posts a schedule of Dreams Park weekly changeover dates so that residents know to alter their driving routes when new teams are coming in and can decide when it is safe to pop out to the post office.
'It's chaotic,' said Riley Jubar, a legal assistant who lives in town. 'I try to stay out of their way. Dining out is definitely hard. Parking is hard. Especially when celebrities visit. It's cool to watch. It's just hard to be around.'
Don Murphy, a postal worker for 27 years, has a good vantage point for gauging local sentiment from the counter of the post office opposite the Hall of Fame.
'I hear mostly complaining,' he said, then mimicked what a town resident might theoretically say: ''I am glad the Dreams Park people are here'? No, I don't hear that.'
Indeed, the county posts a countdown clock online that shows Cooperstown's 1,800 residents when the camp season will finally come to a close and the crowds recede.
Baseball fans have been making the pilgrimage to Cooperstown since the Hall of Fame opened in 1939. On an average day in summer, it will draw 2,000 visitors. The Hall's nearby stadium is called Doubleday Field, though the myth that Abner Doubleday invented the game in a cow pasture there has been thoroughly debunked.
Brad Rivenbark of North Carolina was walking near the museum one day last month when he stopped along Main Street with his wife and two children.
'It's the home of baseball,' Rivenbark said of Cooperstown. 'Everybody we talked to who had been here before said, 'That was the best experience of my life.''
Additional hotels have been built in recent years in the environs of the town in an effort to meet the expanded demand. Lucrative rents have also persuaded some locals to offer their homes on Airbnb for thousands of dollars each week. But it's still a tough market in which to find an affordable room. Hotel occupancy rates for the county in peak season push above 90 percent, according to data provided by the town tourism bureau.
The intensity of the hotel hunt is hardly apparent, though, once one ventures onto the pastoral setting of the Glimmerglass Festival, which sits aside Lake Otsego on the site of a former turkey farm. Glimmerglass is what James Fenimore Cooper called the lake in his 'Leatherstocking Tales,' and on a recent evening, concertgoers mingled outside the theater near the fountain and fields, some enjoying chicken sandwiches and white wine.
This season's musical fare features several productions including Puccini's 'Tosca' and, on this evening, Stephen Sondheim's 'Sunday in the Park with George.' David Huffman, 74, had driven up from Orange County, just north of New York, to see it.
'We are staying in Oneonta because it's so difficult to find a place around here,' he said.
Glimmerglass now takes additional steps to address the hotel room situation, including publishing its programming a year in advance so that patrons can plan ahead. (This poses a challenge at a moment when many performing arts organizations find that audiences are less likely to make plans in advance and more likely to buy tickets at the last minute.) It has also shifted some performances to be matinees so that opera lovers have enough time to make a round trip in a single day.
But on induction weekend at the Hall of Fame every July (this year Ichiro Suzuki, the first Japanese inductee, was a main draw), the festival knows better than to fight the crowds that flood the town. It simply shrugs and closes its doors.
'We tried a few years ago, but counterprogramming doesn't make any sense,' said Kira DeLanoy, the director of communications for the festival.
On those weekends each year, as evidence that Glimmerglass is itself a fan of baseball, the festival offers up its theater as a venue for a Hall of Fame award ceremony for sportswriters and broadcasters, and as a backup location for the induction ceremony in case of rain.
The accommodation squeeze extends to the festival's own staff. It puts its roughly 45 resident artists up for the season at a community college 45 minutes away. Some other apprentice workers stay in a renovated motel and apartments owned by Glimmerglass. For the rest of the performers and production crew, the festival's own housing department finds accommodation in the market.
'We have to house 400 people for the season,' Ainsley said.
Wendy Curtis, a member of the festival board, has been visiting for 25 years from Millerton, N.Y., and has tried all kinds of approaches — historic inns, the local Holiday Inn, a bed-and-breakfast, a home she rented.
It's always been hard, she said, but now it's gotten harder. 'You have to plan ahead,' she said. 'I sign up the previous summer. I am an early bird.'
She sees the flip side to the hotel hunt, though, in all the bonds of kinship that the camp crowds seem to be experiencing. Concertgoers like her can persevere.
'If we have to take a back seat, that's just the way it works,' she said of the baseball parents. 'Families coming in because somebody is dedicated to some kind of sport, that's just fantastic.'