Boston parks still bring them in.

The venerable Cheers Pub is one of Boston's top three tourist attractions, after the USS Constitution and Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Standing in line, waiting to catch a glimpse of Norm or Cliff, visitors can't help but look across the street at the glorious Public Garden, filled with acres of exotic trees, a bucolic lagoon with 19th-century Swan Boats, and home to the famous Make Way for Duckling statues.

And while millions of tourists visit the famous sitcom setting each year, it is the ambience of the Public Garden (f. 1858) and Boston Common (f. 1634) which defines and gives character to both Cheers and its surrounding neighborhood. Cheers as a destination point may only last as long as its ratings, but the Public Garden and Common have been and will remain the places which characterize Boston.

One of the bemusing characteristics of the tourism industry is its tendency to classify a locality's assets as largely being celebrity haunts, historic landmarks, restaurants, shops or museums. Count up the number of visitors, hotel rooms booked, and dollars spent over a fixed time period, and experts can tell you whether tourism is going boom or bust in that particular season.

Parks professionals begrudedly accept such definitions, secure in the knowledge that while public parks are very often an overlooked and ambiguous element in the courtship of tourists, they are nevertheless a constant and enduring one.

In Boston, parks have until recently been considered secondary to the tourism industry's pitch that our city deserves to be visited. The verdant and aesthetic aspects of the nation's oldest public park system are often cited in the "quality-of-life" category, after the features of first-class hotels, historic landmarks, sports teams and trendy spots are praised in detail.

Parks officials have no problem with this categorization of our worth. We recognize what a wonderful respite parks can be from hours of slogging around with a camera and map in hand. We encourage tourists to consider our parks as places to relax, observe, ask questions, or to simply reclaim the peace of mind for which a vacation is designed.

But thanks to the enlightened and inclusive efforts of the Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, the agency charged with bringing in tourists, the Boston park system has in recent years shed its standing as merely a supplementary feature of Boston. While our primary task remains delivering basic services to city residents, we have also begun to court tourists by marketing them into our programming, and by making our facilities available to tourism agencies in a manner which furthers our own aims to keep the parks clean, safe and active. In the process, we have learned a few lessons about tourists.

When tourists come to Boston, they are confronted by the beaten pathways dug out by previous visitors--to the Freedom Trail, the Faneuil Hall or Fenway Park. Those attractions are fine and recommendable, but many visitors also want to experience the city, and to make some connection which is not solely commercial and exclusive to tourists.

Public parks are the great venue for connecting--with a city's history, its people, its cultural and social vitality. They constitute a common denominator which transcends geography, and they allow people to establish a physical and mental base from which to get their bearings, meet local residents and participate in the life of the city.

Working with tourism agencies and tour operators gives a parks agency a new perspective about how visitors view the city. It has made us understand the importance of signage in city parks, the benefits of a well-informed park ranger unit, and the popularity of free, quality events in park facilities. It has also allowed us to experiment with merchandising parks materials, ostensibly to help offset the budget cuts which city agencies face, especially in the marketing area.

There are numerous ways to market public parks to tourists, and what follows is simply a summary of our own observations and guidelines. By being attentive to the needs of all park users--residents, commuters and tourists--we believe we have expanded the role of city parks by making them more versatile and responsive. Not only does that put the parks department out front on new events and activities coming to the city, it also upgrades our value to the city administration as an agency which cannot only deliver services to residents, but can also accommodate commuters and visitors to the city.

* Tourists Love to Feel like Residents. In 1992, 8.76 million people flocked to greater Boston, and that figure is expected to jump by seven percent in 1993. Stuck in lines outside of the Cheers Pub, people are thirsting for "a place where everyone knows your name," or at least gives you a friendly smile.

Parks events have a democratic quality in that they are accessible to all, welcoming people from Beacon Hill to St. Louis, from Dublin to Tokyo. While free concerts, book fairs, park ranger tours and special events are all designed for residents and commuters, they also attract and welcome tourists.

The best tourist turnout appears to be at downtown events and early evening events, when people are returning to their hotels before going out for the evening. Large-scale park celebrations, such as the Ice Cream Festival, Halloween Parade and Christmas Tree Lighting are the types of special events which allure tourists because they can eat, drink and be entertained, blending with the locals and sharing in local cultural traditions.

Tourists like to feel they are welcomed at a park's activity, and to that end park rangers are among the department's best emissaries. Boston park rangers take intensive training courses each spring on how to interact and advise the hundreds of people they meet on a daily basis. Emphasis is not only on historical and local lore, but also on customer service.

* Sponsor Sporting Events for Tourists. According to the forecast of International Events Group, sponsorship spending by North American companies is expected to reach $3.7 billion in 1993, a 17 percent increase from the previous year. Park systems have vied successfully for that funding, offering facilities, political leaders and built-in crowds. Sporting events especially are seen as a way of capturing sponsorship dollars, and very often are a direct means of attracting tourists.

When the parks department built a new cross-country running course as part of the city's $120 million capital renovation of parks and open spaces, it decided to showcase the new facility by bringing in the prominent IAAF World Cross-Country Championship, in which elite runners from 60 nations compete in different cities around the world. The race, held in March 1992 at Boston's Franklin Park, brought with it more than $500,000 in sponsorship money, an attendance of 30,000, mostly from outside New England and the United States, and a television viewership of 40 million worldwide.

Further, it catapulted the parks department as an agency capable of hosting major sports events in its facilities. One outgrowth has been the formation of a Boston Sports Bureau, which operates out of the parks department and is charged with securing similar sporting events compatible to city parks. The bureau has uncovered a number of sports circuits that alternate among different cities, and is currently competing for sporting events which bring tourists, sponsorship dollars and media visibility.

* Tag onto Major Events. Since 1896, the Boston Marathon has wound through the hills and dales of greater Boston, finishing right at Copley Square Park, one of the city's signature open spaces. While the Marathon is firmly and historically established, the parks department was recently able to add an ancillary activity to this prestigious race--a pre-marathon sports fitness day for kids on the Boston Common. Sponsored by the marathon's Boston Athletic Association with help from Adidas, the event features running, jumping and coordination activities, with T-shirts and medals for all participants. In 1993 more than 1,000 children registered, and Olympic great Jackie Joyner-Kersee was the guest athlete.

In 1992, the Sail '92 Tall Ships extravaganza came to Boston, drawing more than six million visitors for a week-long celebration. while all city agencies were involved in logistical aspects of the celebration, the parks department managed to elevate its role by hosting a fundraiser for the Courageous Sailing Center, the city's program for inner-city and physically challenged kids. Borrowing on the goodwill of the event organizers and local media sponsors, the Courageous event garnered extensive promotion and visibility, and raised thousands of dollars for this important program.

The rule of thumb here is to look for opportunities where a park facility can contribute to the success of a commercial event, and then trade the facility, staff and resources with the event organizer to benefit the parks department.

* Promote Parks Through Tourism Outlets. Because a parks department's marketing outreach tends to emphasize local outlets and schools, libraries, city agencies and office buildings, promoting parks events to tourists requires a concerted effort. The obvious tourist venues include hotels, information centers, tour agencies and tourist magazines, and most outlets are willing to display and distribute materials, or to list activities in their own publications.

One sure way to establish a good working relationship with tourism publications is to offer photos and color slides of park facilities. Publications and brochures need attractive imagery to support copy, and very often have to purchase images from commercial shops.

The Boston Parks Department has made it a policy to provide color slides and photos to publications in exchange for photo credit and/or caption acknowledgement. This policy not only establishes goodwill with editors, but also leads to photo essays or feature stories on parks.

Another way to break into tourism outlets is to enlist hotels to co-sponsor special events. When the parks department brought back its outdoor winter skating at the Public Garden lagoon, it got the support of the prestigious Four Seasons Hotel, which faces the Public Garden. In exchange for the hotel's cash donation to underwrite posters and flyers, Four Seasons patrons were given vouchers for skate rentals. The program became a small but welcomed amenity to please hotel guests in the heart of winter.

* Don't Forget the Tourist on Holiday Weekends. Very often tourists choose holiday weekends to roam around Boston, predicated on the belief that lines will be shorter and attractions will be more accessible. Nothing is more distressing than to see clusters of people looking around, cameras strapped to their necks, searching for some activity in a deserted downtown.

As a way of supplementing the standard public celebrations such as ethnic parades or rites of season, the parks department has recently sought to program special events on secondary holidays such as Columbus Day and Veteran's Day.

We created a civil war reenactment on Veteran's Day weekend, to commemorate the service of war veterans but also to publicize the city's Adopt-A-Statue campaign, which works to restore some of the tarnished but valuable memorials and statues in city parks. With participants and observers coming from as far as Virginia, the reenactment not only lent an historical and entertaining dimension to the public holiday, but also helped to garner donations to restore the Thomas Cass Memorial, in honor of a civil war leader from Massachusetts. Thousands of people heard the cannons roar and the sounds of muskets, and by mid-day the Boston Common was full of people taking a class in living history.

Likewise, we created a supplementary activity to the annual Columbus Day Parade by introducing the Fall Fest, three days of music, food, arts and entertainment on the Boston Common. Sponsored by local radio station WKSS, the musical lineup attracts tourists from throughout New England who won't otherwise find a reason to visit Boston on that weekend.

Park systems have an enormous potential to play a central role in a locality's tourism efforts. If the goal is simply to give a park system more visibility and offer its services as an additional tourist amenity, then a close association and partnership must be developed with the leading tourism agencies and publications.

If the goal is to convert tourism potential into an opportunity for the parks agency--through corporate sponsorship, merchandising, facility rental, or exchange of services--then parks officials must act like tourism professionals, which means putting a value on parks facilities and activities. and competing with other venues for the tourist dollar.

Parks have their own special value, and while they don't often produce the intense tourist activity of a Cheers Pub, they have a more enduring and important role to play in a locality. Defining that role and then utilizing your marketing capabilities to promote that role is the key to a successful tourism program within a parks system.