Here in Natchez we treat everyone like family — even the tourists.

That was the thought that crossed my mind the other day when I watched crews pour concrete for the new parking lot for the Natchez Convention Center.

From the sidewalk I spied a couple of convention center employees, sitting in the loading dock smoking cigarettes and having a laughter-filled conversation waiting for one of the center’s events to conclude.

The scene brought up this question: Which door do you instinctively go to when you visit someone’s house — the front door or the back?

When I was a kid the answer to that question depended on how good a friend of the family you were.

Take the house I grew up in. Like many of the houses built in Natchez in the 70s and 80s, our home was a one-story, ranch-style house that had two main doors.

One was the ceremonial front door. To get to it you had to walk along a brick walk that hugged the front of the house. The path was landscaped with beautiful azalea bushes accented with a couple of dogwoods. In the springtime, yellow daffodils waved visitors hello as they approached.

The other door was what I always thought of as our family’s real front door. It was hidden just inside the garage. To get to it you had to maneuver around the family station wagon, pass a broken lawn mower and skirt the big plastic garbage can. On a good day the carport would be relatively clean. On other days it might be cluttered with future garage sale items, a couple of bikes and a ping-pong table.

The thing is, this is the door that friends and neighbors regularly entered for a visit. Unless it was a special occasion, we welcomed our friends through the garage and laundry room.

And my mother and father didn’t seem to mind much, just as long as dirty laundry wasn’t covering the floor and the garage looked somewhat presentable.

Thanks to relying on reactionary thinking and to a lack vision, visitors to the convention center will now get similar treatment.

In a part of the country where people are famous for treating strangers like family, the center’s new parking lot may be carrying things a bit too far.

Twenty-five new parking spaces now fill the southwest corner of Wall and Franklin streets. What was originally set aside for a future expansion for the center is now one of the primary spots from which conventioneers will be welcomed.

Instead of approaching a dignified entrance, like those on Main and Canal street, visitors will be welcomed with the back end of the convention center.

From the new parking lot, tourists will see the loading dock, transformers, garbage cans, unused equipment and, if they are lucky, they might catch a glimpse of convention center employees taking a smoke break under the loading dock canopy.

From its inception, parking for the convention center has always been an issue. It was a question when the ground was first broken and remains one today.

The mayor and board of aldermen of three administrations have yet to develop an adequate solution to this ever-present problem.

The current parking lot is the latest reactionary move by the city. To replace the 100 or so spaces lost by the hotel construction site on Canal Street our city leaders built 25 spaces next to the center’s loading dock.

And even though the architects designed a nice front door for future tourists and conventioneers, many will now have to walk by something akin to the broken down lawn mower and garbage cans of my childhood.

No effort has been made yet to add a tree or any form of landscaping to screen the view.

All is not lost, however. Maybe they can do what my mother did do divert attention away from all the clutter. Maybe they can put a “Welcome Friends” sign on the door.

Ben Hillyer is the Web editor of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3540 and by e-mail at ben.hillyer@natchezdemocrat.com.