Chapter One
Ambiance The hardest-to-define dimension of a place-harder than its costs of living, climate, crime, job opportunities, or the availability of health care and educational services-is its ambiance, its atmosphere, the way it feels, the way it may make you feel about living there. Is this location interesting, exciting, diverse, comfortable, relaxed? Does it have a history and a soul that you notice when you walk down the sidewalk, drive down the street, or simply stretch out in your backyard?
Along with an acceptable alternative spelling ("ambience"), there isn't one kind of ambiance, but many. Some people thrive on the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. Others can think of nothing more idyllic than a quiet spot by a rural lake. But a number of elements comprise that elusive feel-the people, the natural surroundings, the sense of history, the recreational opportunities, the food, the arts, the culture. For many older adults, the best places to retire boast an interesting mix of all these elements.
Like mild and dry climates, ambiance isn't distributed fairly. Chapel Hill-Carrboro, North Carolina, for example, has indoor blessings in good restaurants and a fine performing arts calendar, but few amenities outdoors in scenic or protected recreation land. Over in Rabun County, Georgia, hundreds of miles to the west, the situation is reversed: no lively arts but enviable riches in lakes and extensive natural areas. In still other places, such as Middle Cape Cod, Massachusetts, or Santa Barbara, California, free-time attractions are plentiful indoors and out. For many older adults, an ideal haven balances fun and games with culture and the arts, culture and the arts with the great outdoors, and all of it in an interesting setting.
OBSERVING A VISIBLE PAST
Stroll the cobblestone streets of Charleston, South Carolina, and you feel as if you've journeyed back in time to before the outbreak of the Civil War. Step into the central plaza of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and imagine the days when the city was an outpost of Spain. Travel a bit outside of the New Mexico capital, and you encounter the pueblos of Native Americans as they existed before the Europeans had any idea that there was a "New World."
Charleston is quite different from Santa Fe. But one of the reasons both cities are among the top-rated retirement places is the contribution that history makes to their ambiance. Santa Fe mandates the Spanish-Pueblo adobe-and-wood construction that recalls the city's 18th- and 19th-century past, for instance, and Charleston's zoning code protects even the most dilapidated antebellum "shotgun" shack from demolition. Their histories are different, but both have preserved a palpable sense of their pasts, and thus have created an enticing present.
The visible past is an important component of all places' ambiance. As Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, puts it, historical places are important, "not just as isolated bits of architecture and landscape, not just as lifeless monuments, but as environments where we can connect with the lives of the generations that came before us, places where we can build and maintain safe, rich, meaningful lives for ourselves and the generations that will come after us."
You don't have to live in an exceptional place like Charleston or Santa Fe to enjoy a sense of the past. Communities preserve their visible history by saving a school, a house, a hotel, or a department store that provides a link to the years gone by. And the preserved buildings don't have to be frozen as museum pieces, either. The school can become a restaurant, the house a bed-and-breakfast, the department store an apartment house, the hotel ... well, it can still be a hotel.
Retirement Places Rated scores a community's visible past by counting the number of "contributing" residential buildings in historic districts listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Register was established by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. It calls attention to "districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects that are significant in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering and culture." Contributing buildings are "unaltered, authentic historic structures" that are eligible for preservation tax credits.
SAMPLING THE LIVELY ARTS CALENDAR
How do you measure the cultural goings-on in another place? If you loved your hometown's symphony, will you, after surfacing somewhere else, have to settle for shaded seats at the annual outdoor Country Harmonica Blowoff?
Put it another way: if you exchange a big place for a smaller one, dirty air for clean, cold seasons for warm sun, the costly for the economical, do you also risk trading the lively arts for a cultural desert?
A catalog of culture can include, among many things, art and history museums, comedy clubs, live theater, bookstore readings, National Public Radio stations, street festivals, and charity auctions. Retirement Places Rated doesn't attempt such comprehensiveness. Instead, it focuses on three common crowd-pleasers that take place on the local campus or in civic auditoriums.
Touring Artists Bookings
Long before a touring pianist, European boys choir, or visiting New York contemporary dance troupe comes to town for a date at the local performing arts center, the guest performer is booked by a nonprofit college or community concert association.
Does this mean you'll find the performing arts only in a big city blessed with an expensive concert hall and a nonprofit community concert association bankrolled by philanthropists, managed by paid professionals, and attended by season member- subscribers? Not necessarily.
The attendance growth at fine arts concerts is due not to turning up the volume and variety of performances in big cities but to popular interest in smaller cities and towns. And a good part of the interest comes from older fans. Among the 203 places in this guide, 124 benefit from 287 college and community arts series that regularly book touring artists.
Resident Ensembles
Besides taking in the touring attractions, people in some places have the additional option of attending performances of resident ensembles.
Opera. The image of horned helmets, silvery shields, and unintelligible singing is a low-brow clich. Fans boast that operatic stagecraft is the most demanding of the performing arts because of the unique commingling of instruments and voice with theater and dance; if you're introduced to a good production, they say, you'll be hooked for life. Among the 23 places in this book with live opera, Brevard, North Carolina; Madison, Wisconsin; and Santa Fe, New Mexico may have little else in common but they all belong to this group.
Symphony Orchestras. Orchestras are more common than opera companies; in fact, 63 places in this book have at least one. Their music is heard in woodsy state parks, high-school auditoriums, philharmonic halls, impressive new civic arts centers, and small-town bandboxes and pavilions.
CONSIDERING OUTDOOR RECREATION ASSETS
For many, the great outdoors is one of the most important factors behind a move in retirement. It takes in a wide range of possibilities. It might mean lying on a Gulf Coast beach, tramping the Appalachian Trail, fly-casting for Rocky Mountain rainbow trout, day-sailing on Chesapeake Bay, or just getting away from it all to a cabin on the edge of a Pacific Northwest wilderness area.
Well before the time comes for shedding job obligations, many people have already identified from past family vacations the places where, when they retire, their own ideal of the great outdoors will be right outside their door.
The Water Draw
Maryland watermen tell mainland tourists, many who come to Chesapeake Bay fishing villages for the oysters and soft-shell crabs, that the true length of estuarine shore reached by the bay's tide would total more than 8,000 miles if all the kinks and bends were flattened out.
They say in Michigan's Roscommon County that the locals tend to live away from Houghton Lake, the state's biggest inland body of water, while the transplanted retired folks who've migrated up from Detroit or Cleveland or Chicago unerringly light on the shore like loons there for the duration.
And Oklahomans vaunt the state's collection of Corps of Engineer lakes. If you could tip the state a bit to the south, they say, the water would flow out and flood Texas for a good while.
There's not much connection between the migration of retired people on the one hand and the sight of water on the other, however. Water didn't play nearly as great a part in attracting older adults during the 1980s as did a mild climate and resort development. In fact, certain Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico counties that are desert-dry attracted retired people at a faster rate than wet counties in other parts of the country.
For all that, you'll spot lakes, ponds, and marine bays in 9 out of 10 of the 203 Retirement Places Rated locations. Aside from being a basic necessity for supporting life, water is regarded by most people as a scenic amenity; many regard it as a recreational amenity-as long as there is enough of it to fish in, boat on, or swim in without enduring snow-melt-cold temperatures. What's Petoskey, Michigan, without the Straits of Mackinac?
Or Cape Cod minus the Atlantic Ocean? Four out of five Americans today live within a hundred miles of a coastline; in another 10 years, the Department of the Interior predicts three out of four will live within 50 miles. Not surprisingly, 67 Retirement Places Rated havens have an ocean or Great Lakes coastline.
Counting Acres: The Public Lands
Of all the outdoor activities that older adults take to most frequently, the leading ones-pleasure driving, walking, picnicking, sightseeing, bird-watching, nature walking, and fishing-might arguably be more fun in the country's splendid system of federal- and state-run public recreation areas.
National Forests. "Clear-Cutting Turns Off Tourists" say the bumper stickers in northwest Arkansas. So do rumbling, 18-wheel logger's trucks. Although various parts of the national forests are classified as "wilderness," "primitive," "scenic," "historic," or "recreation" areas, the main purpose of the system is silviculture: growing wood, harvesting it carefully, and preserving naturally beautiful areas from the depredations of amateur chain saws, burger palaces, miniature golf, and time-share condos.
In rainy Deschutes National Forest near Bend, Oregon, the harvest is Douglas fir. Among the widespread components of Mark Twain National Forest in the southern Missouri Ozarks, the crop is local hardwoods of blackjack oak and hickory. Within Pisgah National Forest in western North Carolina (near Asheville), the trees are virgin oak, beech, and black walnut.
But also within the forest system are more than a quarter of a million miles of paved roads, built not just for logging crews but for everyone. They lead to a wide variety of recreation developments: some 400 privately operated resorts, marinas, and ski lodges, plus fishing lakes and streams, campgrounds, and hiking trails. In 92 places profiled in the following pages, more than 3 1/2 million acres are national forest lands.
National Parks. Where multiple use is the philosophy behind national forests, the National Park Service preserves irreplaceable geographic and historic treasures for public recreation. This has been its mission ever since Congress created Yellowstone National Park back in 1872, in adjacent western corners of the old Montana and Wyoming territories, "as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."
The collection of national parks, preserves, monuments, memorials, battlefields, seashores, river ways, and trails makes up the oldest and largest national park system in the world. Eleven million of the National Park System's 79 million acres are found in Retirement Places Rated areas.
National Wildlife Refuges. Wildlife refuges protect native flora and fauna from people. This purpose hasn't changed since 1903, when Theodore Roosevelt created the first refuge, Pelican Island near Vero Beach, Florida, to save the mangrove-nesting egrets from poachers scrounging for plumage to adorn women's hats.
Most of the country's 498 refuges are open for wildlife activities, particularly photography and nature observation. In certain of the refuges and at irregular times, fishing and hunting are permitted, depending on the size of the refuge's wild populations. But you don't have to move to the sticks to be close to nature: one-third of the land area of Clark County, Nevada (where Las Vegas is the seat of government), is dedicated to wildlife refuges. Fort Myers-Cape Coral, Florida, has four refuges on 5,664 acres-Caloosahatchee, J.N. "Ding" Darling, Matlacha Pass, and Pine Island.
State Recreation Areas. The 10 million acres of state-run recreation areas are often equal in quality to the federal public lands, and in most states, older visitors get a break on entrance fees. They range from small day-use parks in wooded areas or on beaches, offering little more than picnic tables and restrooms; to large rugged parks and forests with developed hiking trails and campsites; to big-time destination resorts complete with golf courses, swimming pools, tennis courts, and full-time recreation staffs.
DIAMONDS AND STARS: FINDING GOOD RESTAURANTS
The most common service establishment in this country is the one where you walk in, sit down, and order something to eat. If you enjoy an occasional dinner splurge, you may as well go to a worthwhile eatery instead of a diner or a portion-controlled Casa de la Maison House where distantly prepared frozen packs of beef Wellington and veal cordon bleu are microwaved, dished out, and "menued" at 10 times what the chef paid for them.
To learn which places have restaurants more than just a cut or two above average, Retirement Places Rated consulted the American Automobile Association (AAA) TourBooks and the Mobil Travel Guides, which for decades have rated restaurants across the country.
The ratings come from two sources: customer comments and inspection reports of field representatives who dine anonymously at establishments throughout the year. Restaurants are judged by the quality of their food, service, and ambiance.
One AAA diamond or Mobil star indicates a simple, family or specialty meal in clean, pleasant, and informal surroundings. The food is basic and wholesome, and the service is casual or self-serve.
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Excerpted from Retirement Places Rated by David Savageau Excerpted by permission.
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