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BATAVIA, GENEVA, ST. CHARLES –A TRIO OF TOURISM MAGNETS

For thousands of people, there is one reason to visit the Batavia-Geneva-St. Charles area: antiques. For others, the reason is shopping. Still others visit for the dining, bicycling, theater, music or art. And for some, all of those are reasons to visit.

Whatever the reason, people do come, though in numbers no one can pin down, because some of the same people come back again and again or scout many sites in one trip.

But consider these numbers: About 2.5 million people each year walk, skate, hike or bike Kane County trails, including the Fox River Bicycle Trail through Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles.

More than 750,000 people will browse, shop and dine their way through Geneva’s The Little Traveler, a shop that offers an eclectic mix of antiques, clothing, gourmet foods and other items inside the Victorian home where the business started nearly 80 years ago. Two restaurants inside the store serve about 500 diners a day.

The Kane County Fairgrounds in St. Charles will see more than 500,000 visitors divided among the annual Kane County Fair, the monthly Kane County Flea Market and special events.

Pheasant Run Resort in St. Charles will entertain and pamper about 150,000 business travelers and getaway weekenders at its 18-hole golf course, dinner theater, restaurants, spas, convention center and specialty shops.

And about 60,000 people with an interest in nature’s most fundamental building blocks will visit Batavia’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the nation’s foremost particle physics laboratory.

The variety of attractions throughout the Batavia-Geneva-St. Charles area and its proximity to Chicago to the east, Rockford to the west and Milwaukee to the north makes it a great place for a daylong visit, overnight stay or weekend getaway for people from throughout northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

“A lot of people come for two- or three-night stays,” said Kathy Loubsky, executive director of the St. Charles Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We draw a lot of people from the Chicago area. We get many calls from the Orland Park area and up in McHenry County. We even talked to somebody from Glendale Heights who spent a night here and that’s barely 10 minutes away. Two- to three-hour drives are the easiest to do for a weekend getaway or escape for the day.”

The St. Charles Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is funded by local hotel taxes, is working with counterpart organizations in Aurora and Elgin to promote tourism throughout the Fox River Valley. Of all the area’s attractions, the river and its rolling wooded banks are perhaps the most important, because it was the Fox River Valley that drew European settlers in the first place.

Without the river it is probable that Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles would not exist or would be different from the towns we know today.

One indication of the river’s importance to area tourism can be found at picturesque Pottawatomie Park, just north of downtown St. Charles. The park has been attracting visitors since its start in the 1870s, predating by some 30 years the Illinois Park Act, under which Pottawatomie Park was established as the first public park in the state.

In addition to its river landscape, the park has another attraction that annually draws thousands of visitors. St. Charles Paddlewheel Riverboats is based there, offering sightseeing and dinner cruises on the St. Charles Belle and Fox River Queen, scaled-down reproductions of Mississippi River paddlewheel boats reminiscent of those made famous by Mark Twain.

As its name implies, the 38-mile-long Fox River Bicycle Trail follows the river valley from Aurora at its south end to Crystal Lake at its north end, taking users through the hearts of Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles.

Festivals centered on arts, crafts, music or heritage also abound. It seems hardly a week goes by when there isn’t a festival in at least one of the towns. Geneva’s Swedish Days Festival in June marked its 51st year, making it one of the longer-running annual festivals in Illinois and giving the Geneva Chamber of Commerce the right to promote it as “The Granddaddy of Illinois Festivals.”

A growing attraction throughout the Tri-Cities area has been what Loubsky describes as “heritage tourism.” This is tourism generated by those who have an interest in historical architecture, antiques and collectibles, arts and crafts, museums or natural landscapes, all of which can be found in the area.

A host of art galleries, antiques shops and museums dot the Fox Valley towns. And for architecture, the downtowns are filled with 19th and early 20th Century homes and businesses. The Downtown St. Charles Partnership recently was named one of five winners of the 2000 Great American Main Street Award, presented by the National Trust for Historic Preservation Main Street Center.

The award distinguishes St. Charles as having one of the nation’s top downtown revitalization programs.

Heritage tourists are especially sought after by communities, Loubsky said, because they tend to visit more sites, stay longer and spend more money. According to surveys, the area’s heritage travelers spend about $124 a day per person.

Tourists of all sorts find something of interest at Fermilab, where science and nature collide.

To some people, the biggest attraction is not the lab’s underground atom smasher or the scientists who understand how it works. It is that some 60 American bison roam a tall-grass prairie outside those scientists’ windows.

Ten years ago, when the Kane County Cougars, now a Class A minor-league affiliate of the Florida Marlins, moved to Geneva’s Elfstrom Stadium, professional sports began drawing visitors to the area. The team this year expects about 500,000 fans to attend its 70 home games. In addition, the Midwest League All-Star Game was played there June 20.

“We attract people from an 11-county radius,” said Cougars General Manager Jeff Sedivy.

Just to the south of Elfstrom Stadium is the Fox Valley Ice Arena and Fitness Club, where the Chicago Freeze, a Junior A ice hockey team, competes.

“St. Charles and the whole Fox Valley have a great many attractions,” Loubsky said.

“[The Fox Valley towns] had been marketing themselves individually rather than in cooperation. Now that we’re teaming together, we’ll do a better job of spreading the word about all the great reasons to visit.”