How Lenox earned the score

Let’s meet Lenox, Massachusetts

Lenox sits in the hills of Berkshire County in far western Massachusetts, settled in 1750 and incorporated in 1767, a town of 5,095 people at the 2020 census. That is a small number to hang a nationally known cultural festival on, and it is exactly the point. For roughly two months every summer the population of this village multiplies many times over, and the thing pulling all those people up the Housatonic valley is not a beach, a ski hill, or a factory tour. It is an orchestra. Lenox is the town that imported a symphony, and then spent close to ninety years building a visitor economy around the sound of it.

Before the music there was money. In the decades after the Civil War the Berkshires became a summer address for the American plutocracy, a cooler and more private rival to Newport and Bar Harbor. Lenox earned the nickname the Inland Newport, and it fit. The stretch of years from about 1880 to 1920 is now called the Berkshire Cottage era, when leading firms like McKim, Mead and White and Rotch and Tilden were hired by families named Morgan, Sloane, and Vanderbilt to raise grand country estates. They called them cottages, in the same knowing way Newport did. Somewhere around seventy-five of them went up in and around Lenox and Stockbridge, with some counts running as high as ninety-three. Land was not cheap even then. By 1903 an acre in Lenox could cost twenty thousand dollars.

Ventfort Hall is the survivor that shows the scale of the era. The 28,000 square foot Jacobean Revival house that Sarah Morgan, a sister of J. P. Morgan, built with her husband George in 1893 held twenty-eight rooms, among them fifteen bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms, and seventeen fireplaces, and reportedly ran to about nine hundred thousand dollars, one of the more expensive cottages of the lot. Railroad connections made this kind of seasonal migration practical, letting a family move itself, its staff, and its luggage from the city to the hills for the summer and back again. The estates were private by design, and that privacy is part of why the decline, when it came, was so complete. A house built to host a closed circle of the very rich has almost no second use when the circle dissolves.

How the town found its anchor

The cottage era did not last. Income tax, the First World War, the Depression, and changing fashion all worked against the enormous private summer house, and by the 1930s Lenox was a town with an oversupply of beautiful, expensive, and increasingly unwanted real estate. Plenty of resort colonies in that position simply declined. What separates Lenox is what arrived next.

In 1934 and 1935 a series of outdoor concerts brought symphonic music to the Berkshires, and in 1936 the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Serge Koussevitzky, were invited to take the series on. In the winter of 1936 Mrs. Gorham Brooks and Miss Mary Aspinwall Tappan offered the orchestra a gift that decided everything: Tanglewood, their family estate straddling Lenox and Stockbridge, with its lawns and meadows. On August 5, 1937, the largest crowd the young festival had yet seen gathered under a tent for an all Beethoven program. The Boston Symphony has spent its summers in Lenox ever since.

The tent did not last long, and the story of what replaced it is the story of a town committing to an idea. A summer thunderstorm during a 1937 concert soaked the audience and convinced the organizers that the music needed a roof. The result, opened in 1938, was the great open sided pavilion now called the Koussevitzky Music Shed, which seats more than five thousand people under cover with room for roughly fifteen thousand more on the surrounding lawn. Two years later, in 1940, Koussevitzky founded the Berkshire Music Center, the summer academy known today as the Tanglewood Music Center, formally opening on July 8, 1940. Its first classes included a young conductor named Leonard Bernstein, taught alongside faculty that included Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith. Lenox had not just booked a concert series. It had acquired a conservatory and a national institution.

How Lenox built it out

An anchor is only worth what a town builds around it, and Lenox kept building. Some of the layers were already there, waiting to be reframed. The Mount, the estate Edith Wharton designed in 1902 and considered her first real home, sits a few minutes from the center of town. Wharton laid the house and its gardens out herself using the ideas from her own book on design, and in her ten years in Lenox she wrote some of her most enduring work here, from The House of Mirth to Ethan Frome, which is set in these hills. After decades as a private house, a girls’ school dormitory, and even the early home of a theater company, The Mount was rescued by a restoration group, named a National Historic Landmark in 1971, and now welcomes more than fifty thousand visitors a year as a house museum and cultural center.

That theater company is itself part of the pattern. Shakespeare and Company was founded at The Mount in 1978 by Tina Packer and a small group of collaborators, and it grew into one of the larger Shakespeare festivals in the country before moving to its own Lenox campus in 2000. Ventfort Hall, the Morgan cottage that once faced the wrecking ball, was saved by a local preservation association formed in 1994 and reopened as a Museum of the Gilded Age, a second act that a film crew noticed when they used it as a location for The Cider House Rules in 1999. A few minutes away in Stockbridge, on a former Jesuit seminary property called Shadowbrook, the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health opened in 1983 and became the largest yoga and wellness retreat in North America, drawing on the order of forty to fifty thousand guests a year in its own right.

Tanglewood itself never stopped growing. In 1994 the festival added Seiji Ozawa Hall, a concert hall for the music center’s students and for chamber programs. In 2019 it opened the Linde Center for Music and Learning, a modern four building complex reported to cost thirty three million dollars, extending the season and the programming beyond the classical calendar. The lineup broadened too. James Taylor, who lives in the Berkshires, has made his Fourth of July concerts at Tanglewood an institution, returning year after year, and in 2024 he received the Tanglewood Medal fifty years after his first performance on the grounds. Around all of it, a refined Main Street of inns and restaurants filled in. Blantyre, a 1902 Tudor mansion on its own hundred and ten acres, now runs as a Relais and Chateaux hotel with a residency by the Michelin starred chef Daniel Boulud. The visitor who comes for a Saturday concert stays for a long weekend, and the town is built to hold them.

What it created

The numbers are the proof that this is an economy and not just a calendar of events. In a typical summer Tanglewood welcomes more than 350,000 visitors to its performances and programs across roughly five hundred acres. A 2018 study by economists at Williams College found that Tanglewood brings more than one hundred million dollars into the Massachusetts economy, a figure later estimated to rise toward one hundred twenty seven million as the Linde Center came online. The reach is regional rather than local: nearly 84 percent of attendees come from outside Berkshire County, and close to half from outside Massachusetts. The average Tanglewood visitor stays in the Berkshires for 3.8 days and spends across hotels, restaurants, shops, and other attractions, bringing more than forty three million dollars a year to local businesses. Some of those visitors never leave. Second homes bought in part for their nearness to Tanglewood generate around thirteen million dollars a year in property taxes in Lenox, Stockbridge, and nearby towns.

The growth was there almost from the start. By 1941, only a few years after that first concert under a tent, the festival was already drawing close to one hundred thousand visitors a year, and it never really stopped climbing. The audience that fills the lawn today is spending in a way a single ticket price does not capture. It rents rooms, books tables, tours the cottages, and buys the second homes that anchor people to the valley for good. That is the difference between an event and an economy, and it is the difference the numbers describe.

This is culture led tourism at maturity. One anchor institution, accepted almost by accident in the middle of the Depression, has seeded a layered high end visitor economy that now includes a literary landmark whose gardens were laid out with the landscape designer Beatrix Farrand, a Shakespeare festival, a Gilded Age museum, a wellness capital, and a hotel and dining scene that punches far above the town’s five thousand residents. It helps that the neighbors reinforce rather than dilute the story: the Norman Rockwell Museum sits just down the road in Stockbridge, and MASS MoCA, one of the largest contemporary art museums in the country, anchors nearby North Adams. On the Visitor Impact Score, Lenox lands at 94, a Destination Leader, with its strongest marks in exactly the places this history would predict: a category defining Anchor, a clearly differentiated Brand, and a deep Stay and itinerary layer that turns a concert into a weekend.

Why other towns should study Lenox

The instinct in most places is to chase a new attraction every few years, hoping one of them sticks. Lenox did the opposite. It found a single serious anchor, committed to it across generations rather than budget cycles, and then treated every other asset in town, the empty mansions, the writer’s old house, the seminary down the road, as another layer to fold into the same story. That layered identity is what makes a Destination Leader durable. When the weather cancels a lawn concert, the visitor still has The Mount, Ventfort Hall, Shakespeare and Company, and Kripalu. No single closure can empty the town.

It is the same lesson, at the refined end of the market, that shows up in very different places on this list. A small Minnesota lake town discovered that a set of giant wooden trolls could pull hundreds of thousands of visitors and reshape a local economy, which is the story of our flagship report on Thomas Dambo’s trolls in Detroit Lakes. The anchor could not be more different. The play is identical. Pick the thing only your town can credibly own, commit to it for the long run, and build the visitor economy in layers around it so that no one bad season can undo the work.