‘Oh my god what is happening?’: historic second home communities and post-disaster nostalgia

ABSTRACT

Nostalgia is an important concept in the study of heritage tourism, especially as a push factor, but less attention is devoted to how nostalgia influences place attachment and vice versa, especially in relation to both individual and collective community experiences. While place attachment has been discussed in the context of second homes, nostalgia has received little attention, with none directed specifically at historic second home communities or those which had recently experienced a disaster. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted among second homeowners in Ocean Beach, New York, which is a century-old second home community with a rich local heritage that was hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The findings show that the respondents display different aspects of nostalgia, in particular endo- and meso- nostalgia. This work conceptualizes meso-nostalgia as an umbrella term for the previously discussed nostalgias which focus on the gray area between personal and collective memories. The findings also show the respondents’ deep connection to the second home landscape, but there was a marked difference between respondents with inherited second homes and those who had purchased them wherein inherited homeowners’ nostalgia was closer to those of permanent residents in previous studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Second home
• nostalgia
• post-disaster
• coastal heritage
• place attachment
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

The project from which this data was collected received ethical approval from Solent University, UK on 31/05/2017. All participants signed a written consent form granting use of their interview statements and were informed of their rights prior to signing.

Notes

1 This is one of the ‘streets’ in Ocean Beach, locally called walks which are pedestrian only during the summer season.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bailey Ashton Adie

Bailey Ashton Adie is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Business, Law and Digital Technologies at Solent University, Southampton, United Kingdom. Her research interests include World Heritage tourism and management, sustainable heritage tourism for community development, second home tourism, tourism and disasters, tourism branding and marketing, film tourism, overtourism, and visitor management. She has published in number of leading journals including: Annals of Tourism Research, Current Issues in Tourism, the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Tourism Management Perspectives, and the Journal of Heritage Tourism. She is also the author of the Routledge book, World Heritage and Tourism: Marketing and Management.

Cecilia de Bernardi

Cecilia de Bernardi holds a PhD in Tourism Research from the University of Lapland and currently works as a lecturer at the Centre for Tourism and Leisure Research (CeTLeR) at Dalarna University in Sweden. Her publications concentrate mostly on the conceptualization of authenticity in Indigenous tourism and heritage, especially regarding marketing communication. She has also authored and co-authored publications on philosophical issues in academic work, effects of Airbnb accommodation on urban areas and on tourism policy related to winter tourism and work in the Nordic countries. Cecilia has several research interests, both closely related to her discipline, tourism, but also just pertaining to the philosophical approach critical realism.