A Museum On Woodstock, With a Haircut

The plans call for a final stop dubbed "Woodstock Becomes Mainstream." Beyond that is a large section on the blueprint that is blank but for a single word: "Retail."

You could call it a hippie museum with a haircut. It demonstrates more than anything else the American capacity to turn even the most unruly and chaotic moments in our history into something orderly, manageable and culminating in a gift shop.

The whole arts center, with its concert pavilion, amphitheater and cavernous new reception hall adjacent to the museum, feels a lot like Wolf Trap in the Washington suburbs. It's a place where you could attend a performance and sip some white wine, but couldn't light up a cigarette -- or anything else.

The museum is not designed to bring on the revolution. What it can do, supporters say, is bring people and revenue to rural Sullivan County, about 100 miles north of New York City.

Former town supervisor Allan Scott says Bethel has wrestled with its Woodstock legacy. In years past, pilgrims would come to the area and hold all-night concerts without approval from local authorities.

"It was so important for us to get control of this thing for the benefit of our economy," Scott said as he drove along Filippini Pond, famous for Woodstock skinny-dipping.

Sullivan County was more prosperous in the days when "the Catskills," as this area is called (the actual mountains are a bit to the north), offered an alluring vacation destination for city folks from around the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic. They would go to tony hotels such as Grossinger's, just up the road. But the Catskills went out of fashion as the moneyed East Coast set switched to jet travel and more glamorous vacations.

"It was like falling off the edge of the world. It was terrible," Scott said.

The name Woodstock has generated geographical confusion for 38 years. In 1969, the promoters of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair failed to get a site, as they'd hoped, in the vicinity of Woodstock, N.Y., about an hour's drive from Bethel. Eventually, they persuaded Max Yasgur, a dairy farmer in Bethel, to allow the concert to take place on his alfalfa field. What ensued became one of the signature chapters of the 1960s: a mass migration of young people, as many as 500,000.

They camped in the fields throughout the area and bathed in the lakes and streams. For three days and nights, they listened to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana, the Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Band, Sly & the Family Stone, the Grateful Dead (cut from the famous movie and album because of technical problems) and many others.

But Bethel never became a brand name. As Woodstock hardened into legend, many of the economic reverberations were felt far away, in the town of the same name.

Enter Alan Gerry, local boy made good. A high school dropout and former TV repairman, Gerry (who via a spokeswoman declined to speak for this article) started a cable TV company and became a billionaire when he sold his business to Time Warner. This year, he was No. 297 on Forbes's list of the richest Americans. In 1996 he formed the Gerry Foundation, and it began buying up about 2,000 acres of land in Bethel, including the Woodstock site. Last year, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts opened its gates.