CAMBRIDGE -- Call it the town the tourists forgot -- or, more precisely, drove right through, on the way to someplace else.
Every summer, some 6 million vehicles, most of them beach-bound, pass through this Eastern Shore town on the banks of the Choptank River, immortalized in James Michener's epic novel "Chesapeake."
But few venture beyond the strip of fast-food joints, liquor stores and gas stations lining U.S. 50. And this struggling city of about 12,000 is tired of watching the cars go by.
"We have sort of been bypassed by everything, really. For years, we've just seen the cars zoom by on the way to Ocean City," said Shirley Brannock, a local artist who runs the Commodore's Cottage bed-and-breakfast in town. "We need something to pull them off the road."
Today, the town hopes a sort of scaled-down version of Baltimore's Harborplace will lure tourists, reviving a sagging economy and healing a long-standing inferiority complex.
Along the shores where Cambridge pins its latest hopes for a place in the sun, the air hangs heavy and still on a summer's day. A tiny beach at the bottom of an eight-foot earthen cliff is empty and lifeless. No children frolic on a new playground built on a wide expanse on the banks. Only a steady stream of traffic on a mammoth four-lane bridge leading into town disturbs the tranquillity on the picturesque, two-mile-wide river.
Here, town leaders envision the beginnings of a different Cambridge altogether.
Just 50 yards from the bridge, three white, Teflon-coated "sails" atop a 13,000-square-foot visitors center would rise 110 feet, or about 11 stories, forming the cornerstone of Sailwinds Park. On 31 waterfront acres spanning about a mile of the shoreline, plans call for a boardwalk, river-front shops, an amphitheater, a festival hall, a 300-room hotel and conference center, a new marina -- all built around the gleaming, ultramodern visitors center.
Inside the center, a glass atrium would open onto a rotunda with a circular walkway surrounding a huge relief map of the area and 4,500 square feet of exhibits highlighting the bay region's heritage, the environment and nearby Eastern Shore attractions.
The boardwalk would stretch from a fishing pier spanning the river, under a new bridge and along the shore, slated to undergo a state-funded project to create a gently sloping beach. Boaters could tie up at the marina, with about 200 public slips. Water taxis and paddle boats would ply a river-front between shops, an upscale hotel, festivals, shows and outdoor concerts.
But today, Sailwinds exists mainly on paper, and its future depends on private developers and investors bankrolling and building most of the $35 million project. While some, including a local investors group and national hotel chains, have expressed interest, Cambridge must first prove it can be a major destination to justify such investment.
That, the project's leaders acknowledge, proves a daunting challenge. "The biggest thing we've got to overcome is an image," said Frank J. Narr Jr., executive director of Sailwinds Park. "It's an image that it's really an impoverished area and that beyond the neon of Route 50, there's really nothing here."
By starting with the visitors center and a recently completed 16,000-square-foot festival hall in a former state port building, the nonprofit Sailwinds hopes to steadily increase the number of visitors, then sell developers and investors on the town over the next four or five years.
It's a markedly different approach than past, failed efforts, which first turned to developers to build a hotel and marina as tourism anchors.
Instead of outside developers dreaming up schemes, key decisions are left to the Sailwinds governing board. A separate group, the Eastern Shore Cultural & Visitors Foundation, oversees visitor center exhibits. It includes representatives of Cambridge and other Eastern Shore attractions, like St. Michaels, rallying behind the center as a way to promote the region.
"It's not going to benefit just us; it's going to benefit our county, our city and our region, and that is the approach," Mr. Narr said.
Sailwinds represents the latest in a series of efforts to create a tourist magnet that has eluded the Dorchester County seat while nearby towns like St. Michaels and Oxford have thrived with a steady flow of visitors keeping the cash registers ringing.
Indeed, getting people off the road and into one of Maryland's poorest towns has been the talk of Cambridge for more than a decade. Past hopes for a renaissance have risen and fallen like the tides, only to be dashed as plans to turn Cambridge into a tourist destination collapsed because of a lack of financing or community support.
Other ambitious projects left a legacy of a few dozen townhouses along a creek, some shops and restaurants -- along with considerable discord among locals and heightened mistrust of outsiders.
Now, the 311-year-old town desperately needs an infusion of new industry to jump-start the economy.
