Woodstock: The Festival That Wasn't in Woodstock

Woodstock, New York, is a small town in Ulster County at the base of the Catskills, an art colony since nineteen oh two, a bohemian community that by the nineteen sixties had been home to musicians, painters, and poets for two generations. It is not where the Woodstock festival happened. The festival that carries its name was held sixty miles away, in Sullivan County, on a dairy farm.

The story of how Woodstock moved: organizers Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld had chosen a site in the town of Wallkill in Orange County. Wallkill passed an ordinance in July nineteen sixty-nine effectively banning the festival. With three weeks until the scheduled opening, they had no location. Elliot Tiber, a local hotelier, had a permit and some land. He led them to his neighbor: Max Yasgur, a dairy farmer in Bethel, Sullivan County, who had six hundred acres of rolling pasture and was willing to rent it for fifty thousand dollars. Yasgur's neighbors were not pleased. He rented his farm anyway.

The organizers expected fifty thousand attendees. Approximately four hundred thousand came. The New York State Thruway was closed to inbound traffic as cars backed up for miles in every direction. People abandoned their vehicles and walked. The stage was late. The toilets were insufficient. The food ran out. Rain turned the meadows to mud. The music ran from Friday August fifteenth through Monday morning August eighteenth, nineteen sixty-nine: thirty-two acts over four days, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Joe Cocker.

The counterculture had many homelands, but this one became the symbolic address. Three people died at the festival, two of medical causes and one accidentally beneath a tractor. Two babies were reportedly born. The declaration that four hundred thousand young Americans had assembled peacefully in the mud for four days of music became a cultural foundation story for a generation that needed one, delivered in the summer of the year that also contained Charles Manson, Altamont, and the ongoing deaths in Vietnam.

The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts occupies the Yasgur farm site today. The original stage location is marked. The meadow still slopes toward it the same way it did in August nineteen sixty-nine.