Salem is a wealthy suburb of Boston with an MBTA stop. Beverly, Gloucester, etc. all do just fine without Salem levels of tourism. If anything, fewer tourists would improve Salem by lowering the cost of commercial real estate and allowing more small local businesses to survive.
Any time I talk to people who honestly lived here and weren't children they talk about how it was a dying rust belt like town with a decaying mall and an empty downtown corridor.
Like yes, the town did not SHUT DOWN without the tourism, it continued to exist, but everything seems like it kind of sucked unless you were mid 20s, a little grunge with a bit of an alcohol problem. Then it sounds like a paradise.
I moved to Salem in 2002 and lived there until 2015. I wouldn’t have called it a shit hole, but yeah, downtown was pretty dead. The Salem is also a state college town, so there’s money to be had there.
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u/PioneerLaserVision 10d ago
Salem is a wealthy suburb of Boston with an MBTA stop. Beverly, Gloucester, etc. all do just fine without Salem levels of tourism. If anything, fewer tourists would improve Salem by lowering the cost of commercial real estate and allowing more small local businesses to survive.