Charlottesville area tourism: branding problem or identity crisis?

Clearly, any marketing the the tourist bureau might want to do has become more complicated.

Daily Progress reporter Allison Wrabel recently wrote an interesting story about a Charlottesville-Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau board meeting, during which participants argued about how to bolster tourism in the area. In the past, Charlottesville didn’t have to worry very much about that, regularly appearing on "best places to live" lists, and having two UNESCO Cultural World Heritage sites to tout, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and the University of Virginia, two of only 11 such sites in the country, which include the Statue of Liberty and Independence Hall. Then, of course, there was the Unite the Right rally in 2017. Since then, Charlottesville has been struggling to find its way, while at the same time dealing with a global pandemic, and what were once mainstays of the local tourism industry have fallen seriously out of favor.

Recently, C-Ville Weekly declared that we are "so over" Thomas Jefferson and that he was a pedophile and a "smug aristocrat whose hypocri…