Our Ride to the Garden passes numerous relevant sites that are easy to see and photograph from the comfort of our tidy, insured transport vehicles.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair was promoted as an Aquarian Festival meant to provide people from across the country a chance to experience three days of peace and music in a pastoral setting of rolling hills and sweeping farmland. This area at the southern edge of the Catskill Mountains became famous for its fresh air and delicious water and was long used as a refuge often prescribed as a healthful respite for city dwellers just two hours to the south. Some pertinent structures still stand, tho many have been lost... but the positive vibrations remain.
You can feel (and almost hear) them resonate as we retrace the journey of hundreds of thousands of young people who converged on the bucolic town of Bethel. Originally planned as a modest fund raising effort to build a recording studio in the town of Woodstock, the organizers were denied a permit there. Then, after successful negotiations with the town of Wallkill and subsequent three months of site preparation, their contracts were revoked and they were evicted.
With less than 30 days’ time left to fulfill their promise to about 100,000 people who had purchased tickets in advance, they received a call from Elliot Tiber, whose family owned the El Monaco Motel and held an annual permit for an art festival in White Lake. In short order concert promoter Michael Lang shook hands with dairy farmer Max Yasgur in his gradually sloping field of alfalfa, grown for cow feed, where wells were dug, power and phone lines were strung and a stage was built at the bottom of the natural, beatific audience bowl.
