The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

“It doesn’t bother me,” he said of the prison.

That’s the sentiment all over Walla Walla, a rural town once known best for onions. Now it’s enjoying a renaissance as home to more than 75 wineries, most of which were founded in the last decade.

Residents and tourism officials there agreed that Walla Walla’s formula can’t be copied, but they also offered some advice on how Madras can make the most of what it has.

Surprise, surprise

Local lore has it that more than 100 years ago, Walla Walla had the choice of hosting Washington State University or the Washington State Penitentiary. Residents chose the prison, Waterbrook Winery founder Eric Rindal said, because they thought it would be a more reliable employer than the startup university.

Today, Walla Walla is unique among prison towns in Oregon and Washington. For one, it is the only one that also draws accolades from the likes of Sunset magazine. The lifestyle publication named Walla Walla’s downtown “Best in the West” in 2002 and dubbed the city “Wine Destination of the Year” in 2005.

On summer weekends, packs of tourists wander between the 11 downtown tasting rooms or shuttle to farther-flung destinations on dedicated wine buses.

Washington’s most southeastern town is gaining a lot of attention now for top-shelf wine, but 15 years ago the sleepy city wasn’t on many lists of must-see attractions, said Timothy Bishop, executive director of the Downtown Walla Walla Foundation.

“It used to be on Sunday, you could literally hear the pigeons crossing the street,” Bishop said.

That was true in 1983, when Rindal founded Waterbrook Winery, the city’s fourth.

“You’d come down here at 5 p.m. and the only thing you’d have to miss to find a parking spot was the tumbleweeds,” Rindal said.

He got into the wine business as a hobby, helping Martin and Megan Clubb with their fledgling L’Ecole No. 41 winery. The region’s climate is ideal for growing premium grapes, they found, and eventually the hobby turned into a full-time job.

As word of the area’s unique climate spread, more and more winemakers migrated to Walla Walla, turning the small circle of winemaking friends into a full-fledged community, Rindal said.

By the late 1990s, more than 30 wineries had sprung up in Walla Walla. Now, a new wave of developments — higher-end restaurants and a proposed destination resort-style private community — are coming to “the town so nice they named it twice.”

“These things all came up and jumbled together to make a great town,” Rindal said. “I don’t think it was something anyone created.”

Walla Walla’s new economy centers around the burgeoning wine trade — which generates more than $100 million annually, according to the Walla Walla Valley Wine Alliance. But Walla Walla has more going for it than just wine.

Historically, the town’s economy revolved around agriculture, two private colleges and health care, Davidson said.

Whitman and Walla Walla colleges each draw thousands of middle- and upper-class students to the town and enrich the city’s cultural diversity, Davidson said. Whitman, founded as a seminary in 1859, predates Washington’s statehood and is now a top-tier liberal arts college. Walla Walla College is a 1,900-student school affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, founded in 1892.

The city hosts three hospitals: the Catholic-affiliated St. Mary’s Medical Center, Adventist-affiliated Walla Walla General Hospital and the federal Jonathan M. Wainwright Memorial Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

The farming sector includes wheat, potatoes, peas and Walla Walla sweet onions. Those industries, along with the prison, have given the town a stable employment base.

Madras, which is still seeking employers to complement the 1,100-employee Bright Wood mill, has farther to go than Walla Walla did. Wine changed Walla Walla. For Madras, the continuing flood of newcomers to Central Oregon could be an even more powerful trend, if Redmond and Bend are any measure.

Less than two years before regional growth and the new prison converge on Madras, Walla Walla tourism officials shared their tips for making Madras a more tourist-friendly destination: Make improvements with residents, not tourists in mind. Play to the city’s strengths. And if everyone ignores the prison, it’ll mostly go away.

Not for the tourists

As Rindal, the Waterbrook Winery founder, said, no government agency decided it was time to make the city nicer for tourists. Instead, private citizens worked with city officials to spruce up their own downtown.

“I don’t think downtown revitalization happened because someone said we need to do something for the tourists,” said Dave Warkentin, executive director of the Walla Walla Valley Chamber of Commerce. “I think we did it for ourselves.”

The revitalization included restoring original facades to downtown buildings, adding sculptures and installing retro-styled street lamps, said Bishop, executive director of the Downtown Walla Walla Foundation.

Improving Walla Walla’s appearance didn’t change the way the town worked, but it did make the city more “livable,” he said. And as cities become more crowded and commutes get longer, that lure of livability will only be greater, Bishop said.

Doing it naturally is preferable to trying to be something you’re not, said Michael Davidson, director of Tourism Walla Walla, the city’s year-old promotional arm.

“Ultimately you are what you are, and if that’s something people would like to be part of, that’s great,” Davidson said. “Manufactured destinations, to me, they’re horrible.”

Davidson and other Walla Walla residents frequently commented on the town’s authenticity, the fact that locals, not just tourists, shop downtown, too.

“You can go downtown and buy a pair of socks,” Davidson said.

Playing to Madras’ strengths

For Madras, according to the Downtown Foundation’s Bishop, it’s all about location and size. The city is less than an hour north of Bend and smaller than Bend and Redmond.

It’s a tactic that Madras leaders have already seized upon.

“I think Madras particularly has the advantage of being part of the whole Bend regional drive,” Bishop said. “I think that’s a very realistic opportunity.”

To be successful, though, leaders from all parts of the community need to share a vision, said Davidson, of Tourism Walla Walla.

“There was an understanding by the local business community and the city that there was something here and how can we take advantage of it,” Davidson said.

In the late 1990s, once tourists began to discover the city, Walla Walla nudged the process along by adopting a lodging tax to fund tourism promotion, said City Manager Duane Cole.

“I think we’ve kind of developed a brand and become a destination through that investment,” Cole said.

Now the region targets its relatively limited promotions budget to wealthy wine drinkers in Seattle and Portland.

What prison?

Maybe the most important lesson Madras can learn from Walla Walla is that if your city is someplace people want to go, they won’t care if there’s a prison there or not. It just happens that most towns with prisons aren’t the sort of places people usually visit.

“I can’t think of any time I didn’t go someplace because there was a pen there,” said Elizabeth Martin-Calder, executive director of Walla Walla Valley Wine Alliance.

The prison doesn’t seem to be keeping tourists away from Walla Walla. From north-facing rooms at the Holiday Inn Express here, guests enjoy an unobstructed view of the Washington State Penitentiary, home to the state’s most dangerous criminals. At night, especially, the blaring lights can’t be missed.

But few tourists who stay at the hotel ever guess that they’re looking at the high brick walls of a 119-year-old prison, said General Manager Liz Pierce.

“They think it’s a stadium,” Pierce said.

That’s proof that torrents of good press have swamped old ideas of Walla Walla as a prison town, Davidson said.

“Walla Walla gets so much positive attention these days,” Davidson said, “the prison doesn’t even register for most people.”

“We’ve knocked it down to number three now,” in people’s minds, Davidson said. “We figure it’s wine, onions and then penitentiary.”

Not everyone in the tourism business ignores the prison, though. Jim and Kathy Ruzicka’s Gotta Go Embroidery T-shirt shop makes good money selling the penitentiary to tourists.

“We use it a lot for humor,” Ruzicka said.

There’s an entire rack of prison humor T-shirts in the store, displaying slogans like “What’s your cell number?” “Hard Time served” and, in homage to the prison’s floodlights: “Walla Walla, we’ll leave the lights on.”

Keith Chu can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at kchu@bendbulletin.com