Has Mystic tourism passed a tipping point?

I am old enough to remember when downtown Mystic was kind of run down, a bit like my grizzled, grey-haired self today.

What is now a wonderful riverfront park on the Stonington side was, back in the late 1970s, a rambling collection of buildings that made up a working hardware store and lumber yard. Plywood was stored under open-sided sheds along the river.

Across the street was one of the principal watering holes in town, an Irish bar with a pool table as its centerpiece. The dress code rarely rose above t-shirts and flannel.

A lot of buildings in Mystic then were run down and some literally collapsing. Paint peeled all over town. Stores mostly catered to locals.

Some of the most exciting new food choices in town came from the Mischievous Carrot, where a vegetarian kitchen catered to customers who back then didn’t mind calling themselves hippies.

The Halsey sisters were cultivating what seemed then like cosmopolitan new food options at their Two Sisters Deli, with dishes like smoked chicken in sour cream sauce.

A big diner, Bee Bee’s, with its menu special, a Bee Bee dog with chili and fries, dominated Main Street.

It would have been hard to image then Mystic today, with tourists strolling shoulder-to-shoulder on sidewalks and lining up for tables at restaurants that serve $15 cocktails and $45 entrees. There’s no peeling paint in sight.

I have heard lately from a lot of people who believe Mystic has passed a tipping point for out-of-control development, with what seems like explosive growth and ever more traffic snarls year over year.

Right now, there are two pending proposals to add new restaurant/bars on the Groton side, despite the general lack of parking in town. It would certainly be hard to argue there are not enough places in Mystic right now to buy a drink.

So I, too, might join those who suggest at least tapping the brakes, as Mystic evolves further into a tourism juggernaut.

Still, I would consider myself generally agnostic about commercial growth in Mystic, which has grown exponentially but is still a long way from being overrun and dominated by tourism as Newport is.

Maybe Mystic is still finding its new, successful self.

“Mystic is popping off as the place to be,” I heard one new storekeeper telling a customer the other day, as a steady stream of customers filed in and out his front door.

Popping seems to be a good way to characterize what’s been happening to Mystic, where lumber sheds on valuable riverfront property are long a thing of the past.

I do think that the growth and new development is completely organic and there is a decided lack of planning analysis on both sides of the river, in both the towns of Stonington and Groton, which share control of the bustling little village.

I think voters in both towns should demand some accountability from planners and the politicians who hire them. There really are no plans to address the growth, whether you think it is a good thing or not.

The only sort of combined planning for the two sides of Mystic I see comes from the chamber of commerce, and, naturally, the philosophy there is pedal to the metal at all times.

It’s an election year for the General Assembly, and candidates who seek to represent Groton and Mystic ought to have some answers about where Mystic is going and whether everyone is comfortable with that.

Not only is there little planning being done by the two towns, but I don’t see much attention at the state government level. The state collects a lot of tourism-related taxes and spends a lot of it on tourism promotion.

There needs to be a lot more attention paid to tourism infrastructure.

Think about that the next time you vote, or when you decide to turn around and go elsewhere, because the snarled traffic in Mystic makes the Route 1 village straddling the Stonington/Groton town line impenetrable.

That Irish bar with a pool table, by the way, is long gone, buried by bulldozer.

This is the opinion of David Collins

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