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Photograph by Wade Lawrence, courtesy of New York State Historic Preservation Office

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Last updated: December 8, 2021

Original Woodstock site: a great music venue, museum and a grassy field

• Updated: Apr. 21, 2015, 7:53 p.m. |
• Published: Apr. 21, 2015, 6:53 p.m.
• David Figura | [email protected]

Woodstock has been called the event that defined an entire generation.

The Woodstock Music and Art Festival, held Aug. 15-18, 1969 in the Sullivan County town of Bethel, was planned as a three-day concert, which got extended into a fourth day.

It featured many of the hottest bands of the era and took place on the farmland of dairy farmer Max Yasgur, a mild-mannered man who became a hero figure to the counter culture, although he shared little in common with that moment.

Organizers started off selling tickets but in time the gates were stormed by attendees and it became a free event, attending by more than 500,000.  News of that spread and countless people tried to get in, but were turned away by police. At one point, the New York State Thruway was closed down .

Many think of Woodstock as event that had lots of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, skinny dipping in a nearby pond - and copious amounts of mud.  However, for many it was, and continues to be, symbolic in that so many people could get together at one event and keep peace among themselves.

Yazgur's quote to the crowd at the concert: "This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place and I think that you people have  proven something to the world. That a half million people can get together and have three days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music. God bless you all."  Read more about the event's history.

WHAT TO EXPECT TODAY

Today, the concert site is an integral part of the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts , an 800-acre campus that includes the original grassy site where the concert was held, an outdoor amphitheater pavilion, a museum and a conservatory for arts and education.

The site today features an outdoor amphitheater/pavilion that can seat up 16,000. It has treated concert goers in recent years to a wide variety of musical genres and performers, ranging from the New York Philharmonic to Bob Dylan and Elton John.

In addition, the complex includes the Museum at Bethel Woods , which is housed in a LEED-certified green building, set back from the top of the Woodstock festival hillside. The museum offers a variety of programs and its main exhibit gallery, "Woodstock and The Sixties" iincludes an ever-growing collection of artifacts and reference materials and programs for children, youth and adults that make "the lessons and ideas of the Sixties relevant and accessible today." There's also the Muse Cafe, a dining facility.

Most recently, a conservatory has been added to the complex for arts and education programing.

As for much the original concert site, it's currently a fenced, grassy field.

The concert took place on a stage set up in a natural bowl on Yasgur's property at the corner of Hurd and West Shore Roads. Near the  intersection is the Woodstock monument, which features the names of all the bands that played there.  Many who visit the site have their pictures taken with it, overlooking the field.

As you face the monument and the expansive field, the location where the concert stage was situated is down the hill to your left on the same side of the road. The pond where concert-goers skinny dipped is behind you, across the road.

ADDRESS/FURTHER INFORMATION

200 Hurd Road Bethel, N.Y.

For more: Call 1-866-781-2922 or email [email protected] .

Bethel Woods Center for the Arts: See the center's schedule for upcoming concerts and events.

Museum at Bethel Woods: The museum has various hours, depending on the time of year.  It is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve Day and Christmas. On concert days, it closes at show time.

The Woodstock monument/the grassy field where the concert took place: The Woodstock festival site is open to the public during regular museum hours, except on most concert days, when the site is closed for safety and security reasons. The Woodstock monument (at the corner of Hurd Road and West Shore Road) is always open, weather permitting.

The Museum at Bethel Woods: General museum admission (includes main exhibit and special exhibit), Adults, $15; Seniors (65 and up), $13; youth (8-17), $11; children (3-7), $6 and children under 3, free.

Visiting the Woodstock monument/the grassy field where the concert took place: Free.

Bethel Woods Center for the Arts: During concerts, a number of lots and shuttles are put into use. Follow the signs and the parking attendants. Free

The Museum at Bethel Woods: Parking is free and is located across Hurd Road from the museum. Follow the signs to "Museum Parking. On Pavilion concert days, museum visitors will be directed to a special parking area set aside for museum guests. Follow the signs and the parking attendants.

Visiting the Woodstock monument/the grassy field where the concert took place: You can park in the museum lot or at the pull-off where the monument is located.

DOS AND DON'TS

Every year the Woodstock site is visited by tourists (the locals call them "pilgrims") from around the world. The main thing to remember is this is not 1969. Visitors are not allowed to camp there. Visitors are allowed to walk and even picnic on the grassy field where the concert took place, but open and lengthy partying is not allowed. Remember, the field is only open during museum hours.

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Bethel Woods Center for the Arts – Historic Site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival

It was a time of great controversy. A time of strife and social instability. A time when it felt as though America would remain divided forever. And, at the time, many believed the path to the future could no longer lay through peaceful means. It was 1969 and a little known festival held in Bethel, NY – the Woodstock festival – would soon change everything. But before there was “ Peace, Love, and Woodstock ,” there was the story of how a small town of Bethel, NY and a staunch conservative named Max Yasgur saved the festival.

The Sixties – A Decade of Change

Why was woodstock held in bethel, ny, woodstock 1969, the rain at woodstock, we are golden – special exhibit to celebrate 50 year anniversary of woodstock, other things to do at bethel woods center for the arts, bethel woods – the woodstock festival field.

The first thing that surprised me about Woodstock is that it was held nowhere near the town of Woodstock, NY. Instead, the festival took place in a town about an hour south – Bethel, NY. Today, on the site of the original festival you will find Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and the Museum at Bethel Woods . The museum is dedicated to the preservation of both the history and the spirit of the sixties and the Woodstock festival. Here, you can walk the original grounds, learn about Woodstock’s history, and work on developing your own skills as an artist or a musician. As I strolled the museum, accompanied by a docent Charlie Maloney – a Woodstock 1969 attendee, I learned how the festival came to Bethel and how it left a lasting impact on the world.

As we walk into the main exhibit at Bethel Woods Center – Woodstock and the Sixties, I am greeted by pictures of well-dressed families . They are perfect the way one might see the 60s on “Leave it to Beaver” or the first episode of “Mad Men.” “Everything was black and white back then,” Charlie shrugs. “Not just on TV. The world was black and white .” As we stroll through the exhibit, I understand what he means. The reality of social change can be seen right here as the exhibits gain color and shade.

On the exhibit’s walls, I see the photographs of a changing age. The hair gets longer, the clothes grow looser, but something changes about the faces too. The people staring back at me are no longer satisfied with polite emotion . There is a raw feeling in the pictures that didn’t exist before. “Social and technological change came together,” Charlie explains. “We were listening to music on FM radio – the Doors and Janice. Those songs weren’t played on the tightly regulated AM waves. But on FM, the DJs played entire records, without stop, without a commercial.”

The changing face of America is on display in the first hall of The Museum at Bethel Woods. A time of instability. A time when people joined each other’s causes. The anti-war protesters joined the civil rights marches, and the queer folk welcomed the civil rights groups. It was all coming to a headway and the tension tight in the quickly warming air. “ We needed to get away ,” says Charlie.

The four original promoters came up with the idea of “a festival of peace, love, and music” in early 1969. They had plenty of time to get the festival off the ground. The men went looking for venues, which turned out to be harder then they’d realized. Wherever they found a suitable venue the town’s residents opposed the venture. “ We were dirty, we were loud, we had long hair . Charlie sa ys, “ Nobody wanted us around .” Woodstock was about to die in its infancy – long before the first musician struck the first chord.

Enter Max Yasgur. A conservative farmer from Bethel, New York, Max disagreed with just about everything about the hippie movement . However, he and organizers came to an agreement – the festival (of no more than 50,000 people) would be held on his alfalfa farm in Bethel. No matter how hard things got for him later, he never wavered from his word. When the town boycotted him, Max refused to cancel the festival. “ They have a right to their opinion and their speech ” was Max’s response.

In the first exhibit hall at the museum, I see a picture of Max Yasgur. He seems unlikely to have helped herald a cultural revolution. A thin man with a receding hairline, thick glasses, he smiles at shyly at the camera. Superheroes often wear unusual costumes .

And so, Charlie and I walk into The Museum’ at Bethel Woods main exhibit hall – otherwise known as Woodstock central. The world is no longer black and white – the colors of Woodstock and hippie culture shock me and leave me in awe. Right in the middle of the room, I see a school bus like creation. I enter the vehicle – the inside is much like it would have looked 50 years ago. Which is to say, an ideal place for social media images (a must in our post-hippie world). Next, to the bus, a VW bug that could only be designed by a flower child. And to the side, a large amphitheater with screens that cover the walls and the ceiling.

Here I take a seat in one of the bean bags, and, find myself at Woodstock. Surrounded by giant screens on the walls and the ceiling, I hear the music of Jefferson Airplane, Jimmy Hendrix, and The Who. All around me, ring the voices of those who were at Woodstock 1969. “ We ran out of food on the first day ,” says a woman. I lift up my head to look at Charlie. “You ran out of food? And there was no rioting?” He shrugs. “No – we all helped each other out. Some managed to go into town to buy food. The townspeople, even those who didn’t want us there, brought sandwiches. And if you had an apple you’d share it . And tomorrow someone would share their orange with you.”

“And then the rain started,” says the same voice. The screens on the sky above me grow cloudy and I hear the sound of water dripping all around. The hippies had a reputation for being dirty and these overgrown kids, on the screens, are covered in dirt. Dirty, hungry, cold . And yet almost no one left. No one rioted. I think back on the recently infamous Fyre Festival and wonder what made it different. “ We had different expectations, ” says Charlie as though he guessed my question. “We didn’t expect luxury.”

I hear the sound of choppers overhead. An announcement from the speakers “Do not be alarmed. The army is sending us medical personnel. They are here to help. They are with us – not against us” The order could have, just as easily, been to disperse the crowd. Hundreds of thousands of people attended Woodstock – technically illegal with a permit for only 50,000 . But instead, the order was to help. Countless lives saved. The National Guard would have to be activated by executive order. I make a mental note to check who the president was at the time, and later learn that it was Richard Nixon.

I take a selfie with Charlie (another must in our post-hippie age) and make my way downstairs. Here, I am greeted by a special exhibit to celebrate Woodstock’s fifty year anniversary – “We Are Golden.”

The 2019 special exhibit “ We Are Golden ” offers a wealth of previously unavailable materials from the original Woodstock days. From the original posters supporting (and opposing) the festival to the items left behind on the field. Here too you’ll find instruments and musician memorabilia from the performers themselves. I walk around the rooms and learn about the performers, and how their lives were changed by the golden age of the hippie.

But of all the things to see at the “We Are Golden” exhibit my favorite is, no doubt, the photography collection . Featuring many unknown prints, the photography documents the reality of Woodstock in a way few other things can. I hold tighter to my camera and wonder about the impact our pictures create on the world.

In addition to celebrating and preserving the history of the sixties and the Woodstock festival, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts preserves the spirit . With a wide range of programs, from musical education to the arts, the center focuses on preparing the creators of tomorrow. Learners of all ages can take classes in photography, learn to play a musical instrument or pursue other artistic endeavors . The Museum also offers drop-in programs, many available on weekends in the summer.

And of course, it wouldn’t be the site of Woodstock without concerts! Every year you can attend a variety of musical performances at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts . This year, to help celebrate Woodstock’s fiftieth anniversary, the cultural center will host a variety of artists from Dave Mathew’s Band to Adam Sandler on its pavilion stage. Be sure to check the updated schedule and book early.

Finally, I work my way outside and the sun is blinding. The original field is just beyond the horizon and today the entire area is a part of Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. I slowly walk over a paved path. I remember learning that the stage was set up in an area of a natural elevation, and I recognize the space – not the least because it’s marked by a huge peace sign .

It is April 2019, almost 50 years after the original Woodstock festival. New York weather, as always, is invariably unpredictable. In early April, the seasons range from “where the hell did I put my ski pants” to “let’s have wine on the front porch.” Yesterday, these hills were covered with freshly fallen snow , but today the snow has melted and I see tiny blades of new grass. Yesterday it felt like this land would be forever frozen, but today I remember. I remember that it is always coldest before spring finally sets in. And that it is always darkest, just before the light.

2 Responses

I was there . only 16 but I remember it well..my whole life almost still revole around that Festival.. have tons of pictures.. Janice Joplin, her kissing my check..Jimi Hendrix..he gave me a brand new 1969 penny.. still have it..he had it in Plactic..he told me no human finger prints has ever been on it ..I don’t know? if he only had the one or not? Was in the movie at least 4 deffrent scenes..one of me NUDE lol.. Which all my girlfriend’s have loved down thru the years. I’m praying everyday everything works out for our 50 the year.. PEACE, AND LOVE, TO EVERYONE. ALWAYS, WILL BE ARE CRY.. UNTIL THE DAY WE DIE..BILL RAGLE.. ANDERSON IND.

What an incredible experience! Thank you so much for sharing William. Are you going to the Bethel woods celebration next month?

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: July 25, 2023 | Original: March 9, 2018

The Woodstock Music Festival began on August 15, 1969, as half a million people waited on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for the three-day music festival to start. Billed as “An Aquarian Experience: 3 Days of Peace and Music,” the epic event would later be known simply as Woodstock and become synonymous with the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Woodstock was a success, but the massive concert didn’t come off without a hitch: Last-minute venue changes, bad weather and the hordes of attendees caused major headaches. Still, despite—or because of—a lot of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and rain, Woodstock was a peaceful celebration and earned its hallowed place in pop culture history.

Woodstock Ventures

The Woodstock Music Festival was the brainchild of four men, all age 27 or younger, looking for an investment opportunity: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang.

Lang had organized the successful Miami Music Festival in 1968 and Kornfeld was the youngest vice president at Capitol Records. Roberts and Rosenman were New York entrepreneurs involved in building a Manhattan recording studio. The four men formed Woodstock Ventures, Inc., and decided to host a music festival.

Creedence Clearwater Revival was the first big-name talent to sign on and gave Woodstock the credibility it needed to attract other well-known musicians.

Where Was Woodstock?

The initial plan for Woodstock called for the event to be held at Howard Mills Industrial Park in Wallkill, New York.

Wallkill town officials got spooked, however, and backed out of the deal, passing a law that eliminated any possibility of holding the concert on their turf.

Woodstock Ventures explored a few other venues, but none panned out. Finally, just a month ahead of the concert, 49-year-old dairy farmer Max Yasgur offered to rent them part of his land in the White Lake area of Bethel, New York, surrounded by the verdant Catskill Mountains.

With the concert just a month away, the four frantic partners jumped at the opportunity and paid his asking price.

Woodstock Becomes a Free Concert

With a venue and talent secured, the partners turned to logistics. Fencing, entrance gates and ticket booths needed to be set up and a performers’ pavilion, concession stands, bathroom facilities and medical tents built.

But by the time people started arriving a couple days ahead of the concert, the fencing, gates and ticket booths still weren’t ready.

According to Lang, in an interview with The Telegraph , “You do everything you can to get the gates and the fences finished—but you have your priorities. People are coming, and you need to be able to feed them, and take care of them, and give them a show. So you have to prioritize.”

With no efficient way to charge concert-goers, Lang and his partners decided to make Woodstock a free event.

The Masses Arrive

Originally, about 50,000 people were expected. But by August 13, at least that number were already camped out on location and over 100,000 tickets pre-sold.

As an estimated one million people descended on Woodstock, its organizers scrambled to add more facilities. Highways and local roads came to a standstill and many concert-goers simply abandoned their cars and trekked the rest of the way on foot. Eventually, about half a million people reached the venue.

The Audience

The Woodstock audience was diverse and a reflection of the rapidly-changing times. Some were hippies who felt alienated by a society steeped in materialism.

In 1969, the country was deep into the controversial Vietnam War , a conflict that many young people vehemently opposed. It was also the era of the civil rights movement , a period of great protest and unrest. Woodstock was an opportunity for people to escape into music and spread a message of unity and peace.

Although the crowd at Woodstock experienced bad weather, muddy conditions and a lack of food, water and adequate sanitation, the overall vibe there was harmonious. Looking back, some people attribute the lack of violence to the large number of psychedelic drugs being used.

Others believe hippies were simply living out their mantra of “making love, not war.” In fact, more than a few couples at Woodstock took that command literally and made love whenever and wherever the mood hit.

Safety and Security Issues

Volunteer doctors, EMTs and nurses manned Woodstock’s medical tent. Most injuries were minor such as food poisoning and wounded bare feet.

It’s widely reported eight women experienced miscarriages. One teenager died after being run over by a tractor. Another person died a drug-related death.

Security was limited since off-duty police officers were banned. It’s estimated there were no more than a dozen police officers to keep an eye on 500,000 people.

Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm

To pick up the slack and help create a safe festival ground, Woodstock Ventures turned to the Hog Farm, a communal pig farm in New Mexico . Its leader, known as Wavy Gravy, threatened to douse people who got out of line with seltzer water or hurl pies at them.

The Hog Farm also set up a children’s playground, a free food kitchen and a tent to assist people “freaking out” on drugs.

Woodstock Performers

Thirty-two musicians, a combination of local and world-famous talent, performed at Woodstock. Around 5:00 p.m. on Friday, August 15, Richie Havens took the stage and played a 45-minute set.

Havens was followed by an unscheduled blessing by yoga guru Sri Swami Satchidananda. The other performers on day one were:

• Bert Sommer
• Ravi Shanker
• Arlo Guthrie

Baez famously played the end of her set in a torrential downpour. Day one wrapped up around 2:00 a.m. on August 16.

Day two officially began around 12:15 p.m. Day two’s line-up was:

• Country Joe McDonald
• John Sebastian
• Keef Hartley Band
• The Incredible String Band
• Canned Heat
• The Grateful Dead
• Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Janis Joplin
• Sly and the Family Stone
• Jefferson Airplane

Day two ended around 9:45 a.m. on Sunday, August 17.

Day three began around 2:00 p.m. Joe Cocker was the first musician to perform. The remaining line up included:

• Country Joe and The Fish
• Ten Years After
• Johnny Winter
• Blood Sweat and Tears
• Crosby Stills Nash and Young
• Paul Butterfield Blues Band
• Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix was the last musician to perform at Woodstock. Rain delays prevented him from taking the stage until early Monday morning and by the time he went on, the crowd had thinned to around 25,000 people.

Musicians who declined to perform at Woodstock included:

• Simon and Garfunkel
• Led Zeppelin
• The Moody Blues
• John Lennon
• Chicago Transit Authority
• The Rolling Stones

Legacy of Woodstock

Woodstock officially ended on Monday, August 18, after Hendrix left the stage. Leaving Woodstock wasn’t much easier than getting there. Roads and highways quickly became jammed again as festival-goers made their way home.

Cleaning up the venue was a mammoth task and required several days, many bulldozers and tens of thousands of dollars.

In 2006, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts opened on the hill where the Woodstock Music Festival took place. Today, it hosts outdoor concerts in its beautiful pavilion. There’s also a 1960s museum on site.

Many popular musicians have performed at Bethel Woods, including some who took the stage at Woodstock such as Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Santana, Arlo Guthrie and Joe Cocker.

Woodstock is perhaps best described by Max Yasgur, the humble farmer who lent his land for the occasion. Addressing the audience on day three he said, “…You’ve proven something to the world…the important thing that you’ve proven to the world is that a half a million kids, and I call you kids because I have children who are older than you are, a half a million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music and God bless you for it!”

1969 Fast Facts: Woodstock. Fox News Entertainment. Acts that Almost Made it to Woodstock. CBS News. Farmer is Little Known Despite His Historic Role. Poughkeepsie Journal. Interview with the Organisers of Woodstock Festival. The Telegraph. The Sixties and Woodstock Festival History. Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.

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Stepping Back in Time at the Woodstock Museum at Bethel Woods

From August 15-18, 1969, one of the most iconic events of the 20th century occurred in the Catskills of New York: Woodstock.

The festival was slated to be held near the summer arts colony in Woodstock, New York, but difficulties securing a venue necessitated it being moved to a farm 60 miles away in Bethel. However, the name Woodstock would forever stay as the name of the festival.

All told, 32 acts performed on stage at Woodstock to an estimated crowd of more than 400,000 people over the course of the festival. In the end, the festival would have a surprisingly large impact on American culture.

Today, fifty years after the original event, the site of the Woodstock Museum Festival has been preserved and is now known as the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. The center provides art programs and concerts throughout the year, but most visitors come to experience the fantastic Woodstock Museum at Bethel Woods.

While I am too young to have been alive during Woodstock, the festival and the music is legendary to me, so I was excited to step into the museum as well as to see the site where this great event took place.

The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is located on a bluff overlooking the festival’s stage area. Inside, you’ll find one of the most well-done and immersive museums I’ve ever had the privilege of visiting.

I have no doubt in my mind that no matter whether you were at the festival, lived through the 60s, or simply enjoy history, you’ll feel transported back into the 1960s while visiting the Woodstock Museum.

This immersive experience starts the second you walk into the main exhibition area. You are hit immediately with colorful signage that stretches to the ceiling and the music of Woodstock. A five-minute video is projected on the wall and gives a great overview of the Woodstock Festival as well as helping to set the stage for the rest of the museum.

After this introduction, the museums dives into a great overview of the political and social climate from the 1940s through the 1960s. With everything from music to clothing, the museum shows how life changed from the mid-1940s through the late 1960s.

This really does an excellent job showcasing the environment into which the Woodstock Festival was thrust. For those of us that didn’t live through the time, it’s a great overview of American history, and for those that did live through this time frame, it should be a fascinating walk down memory lane.

Much of the rest of the museum does an incredibly fantastic job covering all aspects of the festival. Whether you want to know about the planning of the festival, what life was like for attendees and the bands, or the impact of Woodstock, there’s a ton of information for you to soak in.

Of course, for me, I tried to soak everything in as I really found it all to be quite interesting. In places, it was a bit hard to figure out exactly which panel to look at next or which direction to turn as much of the museum is housed in one circular room. However, there probably isn’t really a wrong way to explore the Woodstock Museum at Bethel Woods.

What really brought the exhibits to life were the many videos scattered throughout the museum. These videos covered nearly aspect of the festival. Some were short and mostly consisted of short archival clips, while others were projected on large screens and had more of a documentary feel.

One of my favorites was shown inside of the large hippie bus with a psychedelic paint job that sits in the middle of the museum. The video, which was about how people got to Woodstock, was shown with a split-screen overlaying the front windows of the bus.

Next to the bus, a large theater featuring colorful lights and beanbag chairs showcases rotating clips featuring everything from live performances to clips of the crowd. Pull up a beanbag and experience what the festival was like.

Another great video is shown in the museum’s more traditional theater. This 20-minute film called “Woodstock: The Music” plays on repeat throughout the day. It intersperses narration with clips of many of the bands that played at the Woodstock Festival.

In addition to interesting signage and well-put-together videos and images, the Museum at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts also features many historical artifacts. These include ticket stubs, advertisements, and even a few musical instruments used by bands during the festival.

The final section of the main exhibition discusses the impact of Woodstock on American history and culture. What started as a simple music festival in the Catskills quickly became so much more than that. Ultimately, the Woodstock Festival was a seminal moment of the mid-20th century and changed the course of both American history and music.

After you’ve visited the mueum, make sure to take the short drive to the Woodstock Monument. This small park overlooks the field where the festival occurred. Take a few minutes to gaze over the site and think about the amazing festival that occurred here half a century ago.

During my travels, I’ve been to hundreds of museums, but the Woodstock Museum at Bethel Woods has to be one of my favorites. Not only does it cover an interesting subject, but it does a fantastic job highlighting not only the festival but also the events leading up to it and its effect on the world.

Whether you attended the festival, lived through the era, or simply love American history and the music from the late 1960s, you won’t want to miss this amazing museum.

Looking for more things to do in the area? Check out Stone Arch Bridge Historical Park , Beaverkill Covered Bridge , Tompkins Falls , and the community of Port Jervis .

Woodstock Museum at Bethel Woods

See map below for other area attractions., more nearby places worth exploring.

Hiking to the Ruins and Incredible Vista at Franny Reese State Park

Visiting Livingston Manor Covered Bridge in Sullivan County

Visiting Woodstock Waterfall Park in Ulster County, New York

Exploring Stone Arch Bridge Historical Park in the Catskills

Find more things to do in the catskills.

Jim Cheney is the creator of Uncovering New York. After spending 5.5 years exploring Pennsylvania, Jim discovered a love for New York and is excited to spend time exploring this great state and uncovering the best things to do here.

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Peace & Music: Visiting the Woodstock Festival Site

In the summer of 1969, 400,000 people descended on a muddy field in the Catskills, New York. They were there to enjoy “3 days of peace and music” at Woodstock. Although some of the events of that August are blurred by the drug-fueled haze, the music endures clear as a bell, by the entire world. Take a road trip to this hallowed turf and learn a little more about the festival Aquarian Expostion, that defined a generation.

Visiting the Woodstock festival site

The 1969 Woodstock site is now called Bethel Woods Center for the Arts . The 800-acre campus incorporates the legendary field where the event was held, plus an outdoor amphitheatre, museum and conservatory. The complex is used for arts education as well as hosting visitors to the Woodstock site, now enscribed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Museum at Bethel Woods walks through the social and political context of the time leading up to Woodstock, in addition to information, exhibits and videos of the Aquarian Exposition. We were fortunate enough to be guided through the Museum by an original Woodstock attendee. Following our tour, we took a walk out onto the grassy field where it all happened. Though there was a lot more peace than music happening the summer day we attended, I would recommend the experience to any music devotee.

Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is located at 200 Hurd Road, Bethel, New York, about 177km (110mi) from New York City. Depending on traffic, it should take you just over 2-hrs drive time.

Are you ready for those 5 things you didn’t know about Woodstock? Keep reading…

5 things you didn’t know about Woodstock

Here are 5 quick facts you’ll learn about Woodstock at the Museum at Bethel Woods:

1. Woodstock location, location, location

The namesake of Woodstock is the town of Woodstock, New York. The town was initially set to host the festival, but pulled their permit just months from the event, due to resident protests. The second location was Wallkill, but again residents opposed the plan. Finally, the festival found its place in Bethel, where dairy farmer Max Yasgur rented some of his land to festival organisers at the displeasure of some of his neighbours.

2. A rose by any other name

Though commonly referred to as Woodstock Festival, due to a pre-existing fête of that name, the music event was dubbed Woodstock – An Aquarian Exposition.

3. The Woodstock line up is a purple haze

Due to spontaneous changes to the line-up and its programming, the order bands played is to this day still unconfirmed and changes as new evidence comes to light. Richie Havens opened Woodstock because the scheduled band was stuck in traffic. He ran out of songs and ad-libbed “Freedom” now one of his most famous tunes.

4. Three days of peace and music

The recognisable Woodstock poster featured a catbird perched on the neck of a guitar and the tagline “Three Days of Peace and Music”. It was designed by Arnold Skolnick an artist and publisher from New York City. He was inspired to create the papercut design by a Matisse exhibit he had seen shortly before. He also drew from sketches of catbirds he had created on Shelter Island, New York. Skolnick was paid $6000 for his original design however has received less than $15 in royalties since.

5. Before text messages, there was a tree

Festival-goers pinned messages to a particular tree in order to communicate with each other, to arrange meeting spots, rides etc. That tree is still standing and is known as the Messenger Tree.

For our full road trip route including a detour to the Museum at Bethel Woods, see Your New England Summer Road Trip Itinerary.

Peace, love & inspiring travel,

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This Small Upstate New York Town Is The Original Site Of Woodstock, This Is What It's Like Today

Bethel, a small town with a big history, was home to one of the greatest music festivals the world has ever seen, and you can visit for yourself.

The Woodstock Music and Art Festival is perhaps the most famous music festival in history and it defined a generation of the counterculture. Woodstock is an easy drive from NYC in Upstate New York. Today the site is preserved and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Near the site is also the dedicated Bethel Woods Center For The Arts. For anyone looking for some great stops in an epic American Rock n' Roll trip, this is certainly one . Another must-see Rock n' Roll attraction is Graceland in Memphis - the mansion of Elvis Presley that anyone can visit .

The Woodstock Music and Art Festival

Woodstock was held from 15th to 18th August 1969 on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel (about 40 miles southwest of the town called Woodstock). While it was meant to be a 3-day concert, it was extended into the fourth day.

• When: August 15-18, 1969
• Audience: Over 400,000
• Acts: 32 Acts Were Performed
• Listed: On the National Register Of Historic Places

It is considered a pivotal moment in popular music history and iconic of the counterculture generation. Many of the most famous music bands of the time came to perform at the event (although others like the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and Led Zepplin declined).

The event was meant to have an entry fee, but organizers gave up selling tickets after the gates were stormed by the sheer number of attendees. It was so popular that people were turned away by the police. Even the New York State Thruway was reportedly closed down at one point, although some have said that the road was never closed. This massive influx of music goers created a massive traffic jam on the roads not designed for this.

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The facilities were not equipped to provide sanitation or first aid to so many people - problems made worse by the recent rains making the roads and fields muddy. At one point the New York Governor was thinking of ordering 10,000 National Guard troops to the festival, but this never happened.

Much More Than Cartman's Tree Hugging Hippies

While the event has become known for rock n' roll, and all manner of ruckus, it was much more than that. The event was also a testament to how half a million people could get together and just have fun and music. It showed how the counterculture had grown and repelled against the accepted norms.

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It should be remembered that the backdrop of Woodstock was the Vietnam War. As the guns of war fired across the seas, the Summer of Love was blooming back home in the United States. It was a powerful movement for peace - Eric Cartman quotes aside.

Woodstock was the event that culminated after a decade of radical transformation. The conservative (and arguably stifling) the Fifties had given way to the hippies of the Sixties and the result was Woodstock.

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Bethel Woods Art Center

Today the stewards for the historic site are Bethel Woods which opened in 2008. At the Bethel Woods Museum, one can relive the past and the journey that brought the world to Woodstock. Hear the echo of 450,000 people chanting "no rain" and read about the stories of those who were there.

As of the time of writing the museum is open at 25% capacity. Their opening schedule varies and their hours after October are not published on their website. The hours for October 2021 are:

• Hours: 10 am to 10 pm
• Days Open: Every Day, 10 am to 5 pm: Standard Pricing Includes The Main Exhibit and Special Exhibit
• After 5 pm: $5 Per Person (Main Exhibit Only) With a Valid PEACE, LOVE & PUMPKINS ticket
• Cafe Hours: 10:30 AM – 2:30 PM; 5:30 PM – 9 PM

One will be inspired at the museum by the most prolific three-day festival in history through their artifacts, films, music, and even a hippie bus.

• Cost Of Entry (Online/In-Person): Adults: $117/$19.60 | Seniors: (65+): $15/$17 | Youth: (6-18): $8/$10 | Children: 5 & Under: Free

It is recommended to purchase tickets in advance. Also, these are not timed tickets - only for a particular date, so one can enter anytime on that date.

More Than A Museum

The Bethel Arts Center has many events (including tours, auctions, and music performances), see their website for what's scheduled. They are only located 90 miles out of New York City on a lush 800-acre campus.

They boast their Pavilion Stage amphitheater that has seating for some 15,000 attendees. Additionally, they have a 440-seat indoor Event Gallery and a Conservatory for creative learning programs. They host culturally rich performances, popular artists, and educational programs every year (though they may be limited in the current pandemic).

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• LGBTQ+ History
• Women's History
• Collections

Remembering Woodstock

The weekend of August 15 through 18, 1969, approximately 400,000 revelers traveled from near and far to inhabit the rolling fields of Max Yasgur’s dairy farm near Bethel, New York. There, some of the country’s biggest music acts, along with rising stars, performed at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

Woodstock was the largest of the 1960s countercultural music festivals in the United States. It left an indelible impression on not only the artists and attendees but also on the minds of millions of young Americans who experienced Woodstock secondhand—through news media accounts, a widely seen documentary film, and the consumer products that soon followed.

Some objects in our collection tell a Woodstock history—one that stretches far beyond that New York farm.

The Festival

Woodstock was always intended to produce a profit. Organizers sold tickets in advance and began to punch them at the gates. However, ticket collection was quickly abandoned after throngs of attendees overwhelmed entrances and began entering through nearby gaps in fences. Organizers relented and ceased collecting tickets.

Ticketing abandoned, a huge crowd gathered. According to some accounts the festival was chaotic, and by others, ecstatic.

Photographer Lisa Law captured all this—from drenching rain and dwindling supplies, to awe-inspiring musical performances and expressions of community. Law even hitched rides in helicopters that were transporting food and medical supplies when the roads became impassable. From there, she captured the enormous scale of the festival.

Organizers of today’s music festivals generate much of their profit from selling a wide array of consumer goods onsite and online, including the ever-popular concert T-shirt. Organizers of the Woodstock festival provided T-shirts to staff and security; they did not sell them at the festival. Third-party vendors quickly filled the void, however, by selling clothing, posters, and other souvenirs.

Three Days in Woodstock, Forever in Our Memories

Though several hundred thousand people experienced the Woodstock festival firsthand, the idea of Woodstock greatly impacted the lives of millions of others. Many Americans came to know the festival through news coverage, stories from friends who made the trek, and through Woodstock , the festival’s wildly successful, three-hour long documentary film, which premiered in theaters only seven months later. The festival’s cultural impact continued to grow. Many young Americans expressed their affinity for the values they associated with Woodstock by purchasing records and movie and concert tickets; wearing T-shirts; and hanging posters on their walls.

Irene Clurman was amazed to discover in 1970 that the local J.C. Penney in Gallup, New Mexico, was selling fabric featuring a photograph of hundreds of Woodstock attendees in the grass. Clurman grew up in Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where she participated in political protests and gained an affinity for the neighborhood’s countercultural values. While she could not cross the country to attend Woodstock, she recognized the photograph, purchased the fabric, and made it into a minidress. She wore it “as a tongue-in-cheek celebration of love, peace, and rebellion,” she explained. “People only noticed the field of hippies when I pointed it out. If I didn’t call attention to the famous photograph, the message of the dress remained my secret.”

The fact that “Woodstock” fabric was on sale at a national department store chain less than a year after the festival demonstrates the extraordinary rate and degree to which Woodstock was commodified, rendered as a consumable for American shoppers. Yet Clurman’s use of the fabric—as a covert expression of her values—reveals that the meaning of Woodstock remained quite powerful, even when purchased, for those who saw its calls for peace and love as a sign of affinity and hope.

While some felt that Woodstock’s ever-expanding commodification and entrance into mainstream culture was at odds with the countercultural trappings of the festival, others considered this a victory—a demonstration that the simply expressed values of peace and love were beginning to deeply resonate in a country otherwise riveted by strife and unresolved social injustices.

As time went on, the meaning of Woodstock continued to be highly contested. For those debating the impact of the 1960s counterculture movements, it served as a flashpoint. Some saw the festival as the embodiment of a utopian movement comprised of young people who believed that living by the simple mantra of “peace and love” could serve as an effective antidote to social ills. They recognized the power of music to bring people together, and discovered that their values, branded as countercultural, in fact had a tremendous and ongoing resonance in shaping our national conversations. For others, Woodstock represented a lost opportunity—a display by mostly white, middle-class attendees of hedonistic self-indulgence, rather than a nurturance of political galvanization and renewed social justice activism. For others still, Woodstock represented all that had gone “wrong” with the United States during the 1960s—the loosening of sexual mores, the woeful acceptance of widespread drug use, and the gleeful embrace of antiauthoritarianism.

This year marks Woodstock’s 50th anniversary. 

50 years later, what does Woodstock mean to you?  

John Troutman is Curator of American Music in the Division of Cultural and Community Life.

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‘They Cleaned Up Pretty Well.’ What Archeologists Found at the Farm Where Woodstock Was Held

M ost people were pleased in the summer of 1969 at how quickly the debris was cleared away following that summer’s Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in upstate New York. When half a million people descend on a single, 600-acre farm in the midst of a hot, rainy, muddy August, you can expect a mess. But the town and the concert promoters made quick work of all that, returning the farm to owner Max Yasgur in more or less the same state in which they’d found it. Half a century on, not everyone is happy about all the post-festival tidying.

“Unfortunately, they cleaned up pretty well,” says Maria O’Donovan, a project director with the Public Archaeology Facility at New York’s Binghamton University. “If you see the pictures, it’s amazing that they cleaned it up at all.”

The unfortunately , of course, is the archaeologist in O’Donovan talking. What starts off as trash can become priceless artifacts, and the more that’s left to be buried and preserved for decades or centuries or millennia, the more descendant generations can learn about the ones that came before. But that’s not to say the Woodstock site—which isn’t in Woodstock at all, but 46 miles away in Bethel—was left absolutely pristine. As part of a team developing a reconstructed trail network and art installation timed for the fiftieth anniversary of the concert, O’Donovan and her team, under the sponsorship of the Museum at Bethel Woods and the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, have done impressive work learning what they can about the concert site from the little bit that’s left.

Easily, the most distinctive feature of the festival was the stage where The Who, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead and 27 other acts performed. The stage was roughly 60 feet long by 45 feet deep, protected (imperfectly) by a huge canvas tarp overhead. Two speaker towers—one of them the height of a seven-story building—projected the music that made all the history. With no foundations dug to support all that infrastructure, however, only a whisper of it is left.

“The stage was a reasonably heavy piece of construction,” says O’Donovan. “But it was built mostly on the surface—more than you would have expected for a stage. The only other support was provided by cables overhead.”

That doesn’t mean there is nothing remaining at all. O’Donovan and her team located a post marker for a fence that surrounded the stage. Working from aerial photos and old concert maps, they were able to begin at that point and frame the area that held the stage. Their work was made especially challenging since, unlike the rest of the 600 acres, which have retained their original topography, the site of the stage has been altered. “There was another concert there since,” O’Donovan says, “and you can see the evidence of grading and filling.”

Much easier to study was an area on the festival site that was informally known as the Bindy Bazaar. Located away from the main stage area, the bazaar was set aside to provide space for pop-up booths, where concertgoers could sell—or, this being the counterculture, barter—crafts and clothes and other collectibles. The booths were exceedingly temporary—”ephemeral,” as O’Donovan lyrically describes them—but they left their mark, mostly in the form of rocks, stacked or lined to provide support or to mark a plot. Such lasting signs of human intervention that would be unlikely to form naturally are exactly the kinds of evidence archaeologists look for.

“I imagine we’d find more if we excavated,” O’Donovan says, “but our work is related to what our sponsor wishes to have done.” For the Bethel woods community, excavation clearly falls outside that scope. O’Donovan did find a few wires hanging from trees in the area that might have been used to support the booths.

The concert’s planners mapped spots within the bazaar area for about 25 booths, and that was more or less the number the archaeologists found. But in keeping with an event that was all about convention-breaking, the precise locations of the booths strayed from the blueprints. “The Woodstock experience was very, shall we say, informal,” says O’Donovan. “It was non-corporate. This wasn’t Pepsi. It was just people with things to barter or sell.”

It’s always possible that a more thorough scouring of Yasgur’s farm will yield other artifacts. The Binghamton archaeologists did find a scattering of aluminum pull tabs from beer or soda cans—the removable kind that caused additional litter before the industry switched to attached pop-up tabs. “You can actually date those, since there’s a chronological sequence to when they were discontinued,” says O’Donovan. If there were clothes left behind that escaped the initial cleanup, the cloth would have long since decomposed, but buttons or snaps or zippers might survive underground. Lost shoes would too, as would any evidence of the abundant pipes and other paraphernalia used for the abundant pot that also characterized the concert.

“Archaeologists study humans and try to interpret the past from material remains,” says O’Donovan. “Those remains are constantly being deposited.” Fifty years is a nano-second in the arc of history, and the four days of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival were a tinier flicker still. But it was a flicker that helped define the nation at a turbulent moment, and its cultural marks—like its stacks of stones and abandoned pull tabs—remain.

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Bethel New York: Is It Worth Visiting The Real Woodstock?

Posted on Published: October 28, 2022  - Last updated: December 18, 2023

Categories New York , North America , Travel

Bethel New York is about an hour and a half from New York City , and it’s the real location of the 1969 Woodstock Festival.

Wait what? The Woodstock festival wasn’t actually in Woodstock New York ? I hope you didn’t already book a vacation in Woodstock in hopes of seeing the historical site of the festival.

The festival was about 60 miles away from Woodstock… in Bethel.

Today, you can visit the original site of the 1969 Festival, and learn about it in the Museum at Bethel Woods.

But is there anything else in Bethel? And is the museum even worth visiting? I’ll go over what the museum is like and if Bethel is a worthwhile detour for you to make.

Psst! This blog post contains affiliate links in it which sends me a bit of extra money if you use them… at no extra cost to you!

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Welcome To Bethel New York

Most people have heard of and even seen pictures of Bethel, without realizing it!

The small town of Bethel hosted one of the largest and most influential festivals of all time – Woodstock!

When I originally booked a random cabin in Bethel, I was completely unaware that it was within minutes of the original site of the festival. I was then very happy when I would actually have something to do during my weekend in Bethel.

Bethel is about an hour and a half away from New York City. I won’t lie, aside from the Bethel Woods Center For The Arts, there isn’t too much to do there . But, that being said, there’s quite a lot at the Bethel Woods Center For The Arts – including the Museum at Bethel Woods (a.k.a the Woodstock Museum Bethel NY).

The Bethel Woods Center For The Arts

The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is the MAIN attraction in Bethel. It’s home to the Museum at Bethel Woods (a.k.a the Woodstock museum Bethel NY), the historic site of Woodstock, and hosts a variety of events and festivals throughout the year!

P.S. Check here to see what’s happening when you visit.

At the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, you never really have to leave. You can spend an entire day here at the museum and exploring the grounds. They even have a café with a beautiful outdoor terrace for you to enjoy if the weather is nice.

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The Museum At Bethel Woods (A.K.A. The Woodstock Museum)

The Museum At Bethel Woods is the official Woodstock Festival Museum. This museum is all about setting the scene of the 60s and displaying everything there is to know about the festival.

P.S. If you book your tickets online you get a discount on the price.

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Visit The Historic Site Of Woodstock (& The Woodstock Monument)

You can see the historical site of the Woodstock festival from two locations. If you have tickets to the museum, you can walk out at the top of the hill.

You’ll be looking down to see where the stage would have been. It’s worth going to see if you’ve already paid for the museum, but I actually like the free view better . From the museum lookout, you’ll also get a fantastic view of Upstate New York though!

You can see the historic site and monument for free! From the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, drive (or walk down) to the base of the hill where there’s a small parking lot. This is where you’ll find the Woodstock Monument and you’ll have a better view of where the stage was. Did I mention this part is completely free !?

Bindy Bazaar Trails

At the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, you also get access to the Bindy Bazaar trails.

During the original festival, The Bindy Bazaar was a marketplace and tail system that connected two Woodstock fields. Along the trail is became a place to buy and trade handmade goods, and to escape the rain in the forest.

Today, as part of the restoration project, you can walk the same trail that was there in 1969. While you walk the trail, you can also enjoy the art exhibit Crocheted Connections.

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Festivals & Events

Even though this used to be just a farm in Upstate New York, today they actually have the infrastructure to host concerts and events.

They’ll host holiday themed markets during the day and themed family activities at night. Plus, don’t forget about the concerts they have throughout the year!

See what’s happening during your visit .

But Is The Museum At Bethel Woods Worth It?

I’ve heard of Woodstock, but I would in no way say that I’m a Woodstock fanatic. From someone who has grown up hearing about this festival, it was very interesting to delve deeper into the history and logistics. I never really understood the weight that his festival carried and why it was so famous.

That being said, the museum is definitely a bit much to handle. When you first walk in, I had sensory overload and didn’t really know where to go and what to read.

It’s a lot of colours – a lot of noises – a lot of text – and a lot of artifacts from the time. All around – it’s a lot, especially when you first walk in.

How Long Is The Museum

This all depends on you. When we asked an employee how long it is she said people typically spend about 2-2.5 hours . Google backs this up and says the same thing.

We spent under an hour .

It’s not a very big museum but there is a lot of information and a lot of things to look at and watch. We were really just interested in the festival and certain aspects of it so we kind of skimmed the beginning and the end.

In my opinion, the videos on the small screens are the most informative . You get all the information from these that you would want and you don’t have to stand for 5 minutes reading something. But that’s just me!

Advice: Avoid Popular Visiting Hours

We visited the Museum at Bethel Woods in the fall on a Saturday afternoon and I couldn’t imagine it with any more people. It’s not a large space, and they have a lot of films to watch and excerpts to read that are quite lengthy.

Both of those things mean that people don’t move very quickly! You’ll most likely be waiting behind people to be able to read or watch or see the artifact. Or you’ll opt to cut your losses and try to skip ahead.

If you are interested in visiting the museum, I would try to time it for when it’s not busy . Google will be your best friend here. They will actually tell you the least and busiest times of the day. It seems that going early in the morning might be your best bet! But you’ll have to check closer to when you’re visiting for the most accurate estimates.

Ticket Options

A general adult ticket to the Museum at Bethel Woods is $20 ( see updated prices here ). This gets you access to the permanent Woodstock Museum, the temporary exhibit, and the grounds.

If you aren’t interested in the museum, you an also opt for an augmented reality tour of the historic sites. You can also add it to your ticket price – see your options here . This is an audio-visual guide to the fields with video and audio footage from the 1969 Festival.

If you time your visit to be on the weekend, you can also add a guided Docent tour to your visit – see times here .

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What Else Can You Do In Bethel (Or Nearby!?)

I won’t lie, other than the museum, there isn’t much else to do in Bethel.

You can go to the Bethel Market Café for breakfast or lunch (or both). And head to the Catskills Distillery at night. That’s everything that’s in the town!

But, Bethel is surrounded by a few other small towns and things to do in Upstate New York that are worth exploring…

The Delaware River

Less than a 15 minute drive away from Bethel is the Delaware River. If you’re interested in water sports, you can kayak or canoe along the river, or maybe go fishing here.

But there are also a few hikes that give you incredible views! Like the Tusten Mountain Trail is a popular hike and it starts with a beautiful stone bridge. The entire hike is a bit long though, about an hour and a half to three hours.

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Visit Narrowsburg

If you’re bored of the Bethal Market Café for meals, head to Narrowsburg for lunch. It’s a small town (but still bigger than Bethel) with some local stores to shop at.

You have to eat at one of the restaurants with a view of the Delaware River once you’re here. Like The Laundrette for pizza and an unbeatable terrace to enjoy. If you’re looking for a quicker meal, or just a coffee, head to the Tusten Cup (they also make some really delicious sandwiches).

P.S. From Narrowsburg you could also cross the bridge to Pennsylvania if you wanted to cross it off your list!

So Is It Worth Visiting Bethel Woods New York?

Absolutely! I had a great time visiting Bethel New York. I wouldn’t spend a week here, but one or two days is perfect to get a taste of the area.

It’s very interesting to learn about the real location of the Woodstock Festival!

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Need A Place To Stay In Bethel New York?

There aren’t too many places to stay in Bethel itself. Like I said, it’s a very small town in Upstate New York – which is all the more reason why having the Woodstock Festival there was insane!

Anyway, let’s get back on track on where to stay in Bethel New York.

The most popular types of stays in or near Bethel are cabins (for obvious reasons – there aren’t really any large hotels here).

We stayed in a VRBO in the nearby town of Cochecton. It was beyond perfect – clean, cozy, and only a 5 minute drive to the Museum at Bethel Woods. My favourite part about staying here was the sun room for game nights, and the giant backyard for our friends dog to run around in. See the property on VRBO here .

If you’re interested in staying on the waterfront, check out the Luxe Lakefront Family Cottage on Booking.com. It has everything you need for the ultimate weekend getaway – foosball and ping pong table, lake views, and even room for 16 people to sleep! See it on Booking.com here!

For more accommodation options in New York State, click here .

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For those who were there, Woodstock was a weekend like no other

For three days in August 1969, it seemed like the Age of Peace and Love might just take hold.

The Woodstock love-in was no drive-in: Festivalgoers abandoned their cars miles from the concert grounds.

Carl Porter strode to a grassy rise overlooking the sweeping natural amphitheater where, 50 years earlier, more than 400,000 young people grooved to the sounds of their generation at a music festival billed as “An Aquarian Exposition.”

He threw his arms out, wing-like. As a gentle breeze tossed his curly gray hair, it seemed for a moment he might start spinning, like Julie Andrews on her mountaintop.

Indeed, these hills really were alive with the sound of music as the three days of Woodstock unfolded here a half-century ago. Today that music, and the spirit of one of the most raucous weekends in American history, still echoes in the hearts of those who were there, those who wish they were there, and those who say they were there but might have come up more than a few miles short.

Organizers expected about 150,000 music lovers. Nearly a half-million showed up.

“For 10 days before the music even began, I sat right here with my friends,” said Porter, indicating the spot where we stood. “Every once in awhile I’d walk down there to help build the stage.”

Of the nearly half-million kids who blanketed this hillside like a psychedelic quilt August 15-18, 1969, Porter seemed an unlikely prospect for ushering in the Age of Aquarius. He’d spent half his childhood in a farmhouse barely 10 miles from this spot—but his family also had a place in New York City, where he’d grown up frequenting the smoky coffee houses of Greenwich Village, soaking in the last of the Beat musicians and the first of the folk/rock crowd.

Faced with being drafted into the Vietnam War, Porter enlisted in the Air Force and was trained in Texas as an intelligence officer. He was set to ship out to the Far East in early September—giving him just enough time to drive home for this Woodstock concert he’d been hearing a lot about.

Porter and about 20 friends staked out their spot on this hillside—and then came the crowds.

“They swarmed over that hill back there,” he said, gesturing to the south, in the direction of the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts , a museum celebrating both Woodstock and the 1960s. "It was like an army of ants. Pretty soon, if you moved your foot, another foot would take its place and you’d have to step down somewhere else. For the rest of the weekend, I never saw my friends again. But it didn’t matter. I had 400,000 other friends all around me.”

For weeks prior to the concert—as word spread about the sheer size of the expected crowd—the good people of Bethel and the surrounding communities in Sullivan County generally assumed a sense of mounting dread. The region, tucked into a rolling corner of New York’s Catskills, had for decades been known mostly for staid Borsch Belt resorts like Grossinger’s and The Concord. One look at the Woodstock posters informed them that Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin were not from the same universe as Henny Youngman and Joan Rivers.

“Some people were positively terrified,” said Roswell Hamrick, co-owner of the Stickett Inn , a small hotel just down Route 55 (the cheeky name indicates just how much things have loosened up in these parts).

Britain’s Incredible String Band performed on day two of Woodstock. The group’s singer/songwriter, Christina “Licorice” McKechnie, disappeared while hitchhiking in the Arizona desert nearly 20 years later.

John Sebastian wasn’t booked to play at Woodstock, but he happened to be backstage when organizers needed an acoustic artist to go onstage during a rain delay.

A transplanted former New York set designer, Hamrick was born the year Woodstock happened. But here in the hotel’s rustic lobby bar he has for years heard stories of how Bethel’s gentry hunkered down ahead of the expected Hippie onslaught.

“There’s a fellow just down the street from here; he was a teenager at the time, and his father literally boarded up the house,” said Hamrick. “He did that for two reasons: to keep the hippies out, and to keep his son from sneaking off to Woodstock.”

In one corner of the bar, we overheard a group of six young people from Canada earnestly discussing Janis Joplin. “It’s been 50 years,” Hamrick says, “and Woodstock is still in the air.”

The exhibits at the Bethel Woods Center—a handsome building that hugs the highest spot from which concertgoers could have seen the stage, nearly a quarter-mile away—paint a primarily jubilant picture of the concert. Still, in one corner of the Woodstock exhibition stands a large vintage hand-painted sign that fairly spits vitriol. “Local People Speak Out,” its blood-red letters read. “Stop Max’s Hippy Music Festival. No 150000 Hippies Here.”

The sign gets a few things wrong. First, Max Yasgur, a local dairy farmer, did not sponsor the event, but he did agree to rent Woodstock’s producers his sloping alfalfa field (for a reported and then-astronomical $50,000). Second, Woodstock attracted a lot more than a mere 150,000 music lovers.

Also, despite the populace’s fears, there were barely any hippies to be found.

“Take a look at the photos,” said Wade Lawrence, director and curator of the museum. “These aren’t hippies. They’re kids from Long Island; 15-to-20-year-olds with hair that’s barely touching their ears.”

They were also woefully ill equipped to spend a weekend roughing it in the mountains. Few brought food. Or changes of clothing. Or enough money to get back home.

Lawrence and I were in the museum lobby, watching Boomer pilgrims hand in their tickets to pay their respects.

“A good portion of that audience was draft age,” he said. “They saw what happened to Martin Luther King, and the race riots. They took it to heart that there was inequality in the world. Until that weekend, they’d been sitting at home thinking about those things, perhaps feeling they were the only ones who felt this way.

“Then they came to Woodstock. They looked around, and for as far as the eye could see, there was a mass of their peers that had been thinking the exact same things. Woodstock empowered kids everywhere with the idea that the world could be changed.”

Some of Woodstock’s most famous photos are of traffic jams. For miles around Yasgur’s Farm, abandoned vehicles lined streets, clogged intersections, and angled onto people’s lawns.

The kids had never seen anything like it. But oddly enough, for longtime area residents the jams were a throwback to the good old days—when Jewish families from New York clogged the narrow roads on their way to the 500-plus Catskills resorts that once dotted the landscape.

“Back in the heyday of the Catskill resorts, in the 1940s and ‘50s, Route 17, the main highway, was just a two-lane road,” said Debra Conway, a former area newspaper reporter who grew up in the shadow of Grossinger’s and still lives nearby. Most of her family members worked at the resort, until jet travel all but killed the Catskills’ tourist industry in the 1960s.

As the hot, humid days wore on, a pond near Yasgur’s farm became the place to bathe or just chill out.

Debra and her husband John, the official historian of Sullivan County, joined me on the dining deck of a restaurant on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, a few miles south of Bethel. The rolling, densely forested Catskills rose above the rushing water like a green curtain. Even today, those hills offer only a few paved routes from the outside world.

“In those days, on a busy weekend the roads didn’t look much different than they did for Woodstock,” Debra said.

But there was one main difference: The resort-bound families didn’t abandon their cars on someone’s lawn and walk the rest of the way.

Besides severely underestimating the traffic problems, Woodstock’s organizers had failed to plan properly for the amount of food, water, shelter, toilets, and medical care they would need. Reports from the time relate how area residents, upon hearing the kids at the concert were hungry, cold, and thirsty, came to their rescue with sandwiches, milk and water—and even opened their homes to some who needed hot showers.

But that didn’t mean the Age of Aquarius had magically descended upon Upstate New York. Ever practical, the people of Sullivan County realized if they didn’t do something fast a full-blown humanitarian crisis could have erupted. Already, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller was considering sending in the National Guard to break up Woodstock and send everyone home.

“I think had Woodstock happened anywhere else in New York State, the National Guard would have come in,” said historian John Conway. “Luckily, because of their experience with the Borsch Belt resorts, the people in Sullivan County knew how to handle crowds.”

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Like stragglers following a military campaign, Woodstock’s youthful army filtered out of Bethel after the show was over.

Most of them, anyway. Duke Devlin, a 27-year-old New Jersey guy who’d detoured to Bethel while traveling from Texas to Alaska, stuck around to join the work crew cleaning up tons of trash from Max Yasgur’s field. Then someone hired him to paint houses.

Fifty years later, Devlin—his chest-length beard intact but a lot grayer now—is still there.

“I’m not really a hippie, but after I stayed on here everybody in town called me a hippie,” he said. “They’d say, ‘Hey, buy the hippie a drink!’ So I answered to it. That Thanksgiving I was invited to six or seven homes. And I went to all of ‘em!

“When you think about it,” he added with some amazement, “Woodstock was just a weekend. But it changed so many lives.”

If the folks in Bethel were okay with one remnant hippie, however, they did not want to see a return engagement of Woodstock. Almost immediately, the town passed laws outlawing mass concerts.

And there was lots of bitterness toward the man who’d made Woodstock possible, Max Yasgur .

How do you get home after three days of peace and love? You hitch a ride in an open trunk.

“Max was a great guy, and he took a lot of heat,” recalled Devlin, whose license plate reads “Yasgur69.”

“People were mad at him. His dairy farm even lost school contracts for his milk.” Devlin gestured around the interior of the Bethel Market Café, where we were having breakfast. “At the time, this was a general store, and the owner put out a sign: ‘What Establishment Is Responsible For This Mess?’”

It didn’t help that Max had actually taken the stage at Woodstock and, to deafening cheers from the youthful crowd, declared, “You’ve shown…that a half a million kids can get together and have three days of fun and music, and nothing but fun and music, and God Bless you for it!”

Devlin shook his head. “Max died three years later, at 53. A heart attack. He always had a bad heart, but all the resentment didn’t help.”

For decades, Sullivan County seemed determined to erase all memory of Woodstock, bitterly resisting any attempts to stage anniversary events. Even the notion of a historical sign was dismissed. As the shells of extinct Borsch Belt resorts crumbled in the mountains, officials stubbornly refused to capitalize on the one brand that could conceivably bring the crowds back.

Slowly, nature began to erase all evidence of those three days in August. The exact location of the stage was forgotten, and surrounding forests overtook the site of Woodstock’s Bindy Bazaar, where vendors sold bartered goods. (A recent archaeological dig by students from New York’s Binghamton University rediscovered the spots.)

Then, in the late 1990s, cable billionaire Alan Gerry—who’d started out repairing TVs in Bethel and eventually created the corporate giant Cablevision—bought the Woodstock site. He established the Bethel Woods Center For the Arts, which includes the original field, the museum, and a state-of-the-art amphitheater that hosts acts ranging from symphony orchestras to performers who sang and played that rainy weekend in 1969.

Just about the only local establishment that hasn’t changed since Woodstock is Hector’s Inn—a friendly dive bar that had already been standing for 20 years when the guitar amps at Woodstock were fired up a mile or so away.

Stepping into Hectors, even before my eyes had adapted to the darkness, I heard the voice of Nancy LaColla greeting me. She doesn’t work at Hector’s; she just wanted a newcomer to feel welcome.

“I was 13 when Woodstock happened,” said LaColla, who remains a little jealous that her brother got to go and she had to stay home. Still, she says, she enjoyed the roaming concertgoers who swarmed over her family’s property, swimming in the pond out back.

“You didn’t have to go to Woodstock to go to Woodstock,” she said.

LaColla left Bethel in her 20s and eventually became a city councilmember in Newburgh, New York. But she knew someday she’d return to the place where the spirit of Woodstock lived on.

“For me, it was as if someone handed me a script when I was 24,” she said. “The script said I’d get married and raise children and wear the Donna Karan suit. Then, at age 44, I decided to throw that script away. And that, I think, is a lot of what Woodstock was about: Throwing away the script.”

A gala 50 th Anniversary Woodstock festival had been planned for Watkins Glen Raceway, 150 miles west of here. But as happened the first time around, the venue backed out.

As I headed back out to the parking lot, LaColla called to me from Hector’s porch. “Come back for Hippie Thanksgiving!” she said. “August 15 every year, right here. Hippies everywhere. It’s unbelievable!”

I have no doubt it is.

Standing on that hilltop, Carl Porter and I noticed a very dark rain cloud emerging over the tree line to our west—much like the vicious storm that famously nearly washed out Woodstock 50 years earlier. We hustled back toward the Bethel Woods Museum.

As we leaned into the wind, Porter recalled all the elements that combined to make Woodstock the unique moment it was: an unpopular war, a generation of young men being forced to fight in it, the sexual revolution, the maturation of rock music as an art form and medium of social commentary, the tsunami of the Boomer generation’s first wave into early adulthood.

The paint job on this Mustang took a beating, but the motorist drove home his message of Aquarian peace and love on the way to Woodstock.

“All those currents, all those waves,” said Porter. “And they all intersected here, right here on this field.”

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Woodstock Festival Location Becomes Official Historic Site

By Ryan Reed

The location of the 1969 Woodstock festival is now an official historic site. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday that Bethel Woods Center for the Arts – a cultural nonprofit in Bethel, New York – is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, CBS News reports.

Cuomo called the festival a “pivotal moment in both New York and American history.” 

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair was described by the promoters as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music.” It took place August 15th to 17th in 1969 at Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm. The iconic festival was famously documented in Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary, Woodstock.

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The Bethel Woods Center, located roughly 90 miles north of New York City, opened in 2006, with the aim of preserving the festival’s historic location. The center’s CEO, Darlene Fedun, said the honor helps advance educational and cultural initiatives at the museum and surrounding grounds that preserve the “spirit of the Sixties.”

The landmark event drew nearly half-million attendees with its genre-blurring musical line-up, which included Santana, Joan Baez, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, the Who, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Most famously, Jimi Hendrix’s set with short-lived band Gypsy Sun and Rainbows included his psychedelic  electric guitar rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

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Visit the 1969 Woodstock Concert site - The Museum at Bethel Woods

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• The Museum at Bethel Woods

A little young to remember it all but what fun! Many past tickets, and keepsakes from the past, Not... read more

Though we've been to Bethel Woods several times , this was the first time my husband and I (yes... read more

Visit the 1969 Woodstock Concert site

Wonderful Museum to learn about the 60's and the events of that era - full of visual and audio experiences - helpful and knowledgeable guides - best to leave children under 12 at home!

Having been at the original festival in 1969, i have to say they captured allot of the way it was. Well worth visiting, just for the music if nothing else.

A couple of very close friends and I went there last summer for the wine tasting. It was a blast. Not as much fun as 1969, but what would you expect.

This museum is fabulous. You have to come check it out. It tells the whole story of the Woodstock Festival, with all the music & they have many items from the original festival. All extremely interesting things. Great events also planned, as far as special events in the museum as well.

Though we weren't there in 1969, we felt like we were. It's not only a museum about the Woodstock Festival but about that era. They also had an exhibit downstairs with items from the Grammy museum in LA. Lots of costumes, guitars, hand written lyrics. That was great also. The hippie bus in the middle is awesome. You need at least 4 hours to see everything & you don't want to miss anything. The down side & it's a HUGE one is that you aren't allowed to take any photos. They said because they don't own the rights to anything. You can take photos outside though & make sure you visit the memorial which is at the entrance before you get to the museum.

The museum is outstanding. To walk on the grounds and stand on the area where the stage was - well; you can't describe the feeling. They did an amazing job with everything.

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Where was Woodstock held? 5 myths about the famous festival

FILE - In this Aug. 15, 1969 file photo, concert goers abandon their trucks, cars and buses as thousands try to reach the Woodstock Music and Art Festival at White Lake in Bethel, N.Y. Although Arlo Guthrie famously announced from the festival stage that “The New York State Thruway is closed, man,” that wasn’t exactly the case. Police closed at least one thruway exit east of the festival to stem the source of a blockbuster traffic jam around the site. The New York Daily News reported on Aug. 16 that cars were being delayed by as much as eight hours between New York City and the concert site - a distance of less than 100 miles. (AP Photo)

FILE - In this Aug. 15, 1969 file photo, concert goers attend the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival held on a 600-acre pasture in the Catskill Mountains near White Lake in Bethel, N.Y. The famous concert poster with a bird perched on a guitar neck advertised “three days of peace and music,” spanning from Aug. 15-17. But Woodstock lasted more than three days. Thanks to delays, it bled into the morning of Aug. 18. (AP Photo/File)

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Woodstock is surrounded by myths, legends and misperceptions. Here’s the real story about five of them.

1. WOODSTOCK WAS NOT HELD AT WOODSTOCK

It made sense that co-organizer Michael Lang wanted to have the concert in Woodstock. The Catskill Mountains town was already known for being an artists’ colony and Bob Dylan’s rural hideaway. But key people in the town wanted no part of the concert. The festival was going to be held a bit south of Woodstock at an old industrial site in Wallkill, New York. But those plans fell through about a month before the show, sending Lang scrambling to find a new site. He was driving through farm country in Bethel, New York, when he spied a gently sloping alfalfa field. He struck a deal with the farmer, Max Yasgur.

2. THE NEW YORK STATE THRUWAY STAYED OPEN

“The New York State Thruway is closed, man,” Arlo Guthrie famously announced from the festival stage. Not exactly. Police closed at least one thruway exit east of the festival to stem the source of a blockbuster traffic jam around the site. How bad were the roads? The New York Daily News reported on Aug. 16, 1969, that cars were being delayed by as much as eight hours between New York City and the concert site — a distance of less than 100 miles.

3. BABIES WERE (SORT OF) BORN AT WOODSTOCK

This one could be true depending on how you define “at Woodstock.” The concert’s medical director told reporters at the scene of the festival that there were two births: one at a local hospital after the mother was flown out by helicopter; the other in a car caught in traffic. Wade Lawrence, the director of what is now the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts at the festival site, recently confirmed the helicopter story with the medevac pilot, who said the mother gave birth at the hospital.

4. MAX YASGUR WAS NOT A COUNTRY BUMPKIN

Yasgur told the young crowd massed on his field he was a farmer not used to speaking to groups. Self-deprecation aside, he ran a large dairy operation with a large herd, trucks and its own plant. Nephew Marty Miller said that he warned his uncle months earlier that Woodstock’s organizers might come knocking, and that Yasgur was ready when it happened. Lang in his memoir describes Yasgur as a “sharp guy.” Miller said that beyond rent money, Yasgur benefited from improvements to the field, such as wells. “Max was an astute businessman, very sharp. He was nobody’s fool,” Miller said.

5. WOODSTOCK WAS NOT EXACTLY THREE DAYS OF PEACE AND MUSIC

The famous concert poster with a bird perched on a guitar neck advertised “three days of peace and music,” spanning from Aug. 15-17. There was undisputedly music at Woodstock, and many attendees reportedly spent the weekend blissed out. But Woodstock lasted more than three days. Thanks to delays, it bled into the morning of Aug. 18. Jimi Hendrix came on stage after the sun came up, after a large portion of the crowd had left.

• Entertainment
• Nation & World

Where was Woodstock held? 5 myths about the famous festival

Woodstock is surrounded by myths, legends and misperceptions. Here’s the real story about five of them.

1. WOODSTOCK WAS NOT HELD AT WOODSTOCK

It made sense that co-organizer Michael Lang wanted to have the concert in Woodstock. The Catskill Mountains town was already known for being an artists’ colony and Bob Dylan’s rural hideaway. But key people in the town wanted no part of the concert. The festival was going to be held a bit south of Woodstock at an old industrial site in Wallkill, New York. But those plans fell through about a month before the show, sending Lang scrambling to find a new site. He was driving through farm country in Bethel, New York, when he spied a gently sloping alfalfa field. He struck a deal with the farmer, Max Yasgur.

2. THE NEW YORK STATE THRUWAY STAYED OPEN

“The New York State Thruway is closed, man,” Arlo Guthrie famously announced from the festival stage. Not exactly. Police closed at least one thruway exit east of the festival to stem the source of a blockbuster traffic jam around the site. How bad were the roads? The New York Daily News reported on Aug. 16, 1969, that cars were being delayed by as much as eight hours between New York City and the concert site — a distance of less than 100 miles.

3. BABIES WERE (SORT OF) BORN AT WOODSTOCK

This one could be true depending on how you define “at Woodstock.” The concert’s medical director told reporters at the scene of the festival that there were two births: one at a local hospital after the mother was flown out by helicopter; the other in a car caught in traffic. Wade Lawrence, the director of what is now the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts at the festival site, recently confirmed the helicopter story with the medevac pilot, who said the mother gave birth at the hospital.

4. MAX YASGUR WAS NOT A COUNTRY BUMPKIN

Yasgur told the young crowd massed on his field he was a farmer not used to speaking to groups. Self-deprecation aside, he ran a large dairy operation with a large herd, trucks and its own plant. Nephew Marty Miller said that he warned his uncle months earlier that Woodstock’s organizers might come knocking, and that Yasgur was ready when it happened. Lang in his memoir describes Yasgur as a “sharp guy.” Miller said that beyond rent money, Yasgur benefited from improvements to the field, such as wells. “Max was an astute businessman, very sharp. He was nobody’s fool,” Miller said.

5. WOODSTOCK WAS NOT EXACTLY THREE DAYS OF PEACE AND MUSIC

The famous concert poster with a bird perched on a guitar neck advertised “three days of peace and music,” spanning from Aug. 15-17. There was undisputedly music at Woodstock, and many attendees reportedly spent the weekend blissed out. But Woodstock lasted more than three days. Thanks to delays, it bled into the morning of Aug. 18. Jimi Hendrix came on stage after the sun came up, after a large portion of the crowd had left.

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Preservation of the historic site of the 1969 woodstock festival, as stewards of the historic site, bethel woods continues to discover, develop, and preserve the integrity of these sacred grounds., cultural landscape report.

In 2014, The Museum at Bethel Woods commissioned a Cultural Landscape Report to serve as a guide for stewardship and interpretation of the Woodstock festival historic site. Historic landscape architecture firm Heritage Landscapes, LLC performed studies of the site to create the report, which summarizes the history, current conditions, and recommended treatments of the historic property. Following the report, Bethel Woods is working to preserve a landmark of popular culture and bringing the place to life as an exciting destination for visitors to explore.  You can view a copy of the report  here . 

Funding for the CLR was made possible in part by grants from Jeff Bank Foundation; National Trust for Historic Preservation; The A. Lindsay and Olive B. O’Connor Foundation; and Preservation League of New York State; and generous support from Jeffrey Allison and James Lomax, Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Boyd, Mr. and Mrs. Ric Coombe, Donald F. Dembert, Robyn Gerry and children, the Grillo Family, the Fishman Family and Majestic Drug Company, Steve and Sue Marton, and Mr. and Mrs. Howard Schor.

National Register

In 2017, the site of the 1969 Woodstock festival was officially placed on the  National Register of Historic Places , a formal acknowledgment of the significance of the site’s heritage. Members of the National Register benefit from protections and grant opportunities for preservation as well as historic recognition, joining the ranks of national treasures such as the Empire State Building, the Grand Canyon, and the Statue of Liberty. 

Archaeology Preserves Woodstock festival Site

In 2018, a team of archaeologists from the Public Archaeology Facility at Binghamton University led a series of micro-excavations to establish the location of the stage, sound, and light towers from the festival. Using computer-assisted design maps, archaeologists sought out soil disturbances, discolorations and other evidence to pinpoint the outline of key festival landmarks, including the main stage, performers’ footbridge and the towers. Click  here  to watch a video on their efforts from The Associated Press . 

Bindy Bazaar Reborn

In 1969, the  Bindy Bazaar   was a marketplace and trail system that acted as the heart of Woodstock, connecting two major areas of festival grounds.

In the woods, attendees sold crafts, bartered for goods, avoided the rain, and reunited with friends. In 2014, as stewards of the historic site, Bethel Woods commissioned a report to recommend ways in which to better preserve and interpret the site for guests.  Landscape historians and architects produced an enlightening and detailed  Cultural Landscape Report , which describes the natural and human-made features of the landscape, which remain remarkably similar to its historic condition. The report makes 21 concrete recommendations for how the site can be better preserved, interpreted, and made more authentic.  One such faction was developing the trails within the Bindy Bazaar woods.

Guests can now explore the woods and see evidence that details the ways in which they were used during the festival.  “The restoration of the Bindy Bazaar Trails celebrates our historic location and further illustrates the lasting impact the 1960s has on the modern era,” said Darlene Fedun, Chief Executive Officer of Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.  “It is our hope that families will visit Bethel Woods to engage with nature and cultivate creative personal experiences,” she continued.

Carol Hummel Art Installation

To celebrate this aspect of festival history and bring to life the art, craft, and sense of joy embodied by the Bindy Bazaar and the Festival itself, Bethel Woods presents  a large-scale public art installation  located in the historical footprint of the Bindy Bazaar Trails.  Artist Carol Hummel's  work  highlights the use of textile and color celebrated in the era through an expression and technique representative of today.

Carol Hummel stitched together colorful crocheted shapes that organically wrap, hug, and embrace the trunks and branches of trees along the walking path in Bindy Woods, creating an ever-changing environment vibrating with color, light, shape, and form. The project emphasizes the use of textile and color celebrated in the era, juxtaposed with a technique unique and representative of contemporary times.

The Future of Preservation

Plans for future projects include restoring the landscape contours of the field where the Woodstock stage stood and marking the footprints of the stage and other key structures on the field. Expansion of the Bindy Bazaar trails is also in the works. The addition of interpretive signage to the site will enhance the visitor experience and provide key facts about Woodstock and its place in the landscape.

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A 12-Year-Old Wins Astonishing Spell-Off at Scripps National Spelling Bee

In a dramatic finish, Bruhat Soma, from Tampa, Fla., defeated Faizan Zaki, a 12-year-old from Plano, Texas, in the competition’s second spell-off ever.

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Emmett Lindner

A fast-paced spell-off capped the night: Takeaways from the spelling bee.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday came down to its second-ever spell-off, a fast-and-furious tiebreaking round that rewards speed as much as accuracy. Given 90 seconds to spell as many of the announced words as possible, Bruhat Soma and Faizan Zaki, the two remaining spellers after 14 rounds, stood tense over a blue buzzer as they flew through words difficult to comprehend even at conversational speed.

When the results were tallied, Bruhat — a 12-year-old from Tampa, Fla. — came out on top with a superhuman total of 29 correct words, seven more words than the previous spell-off winner in 2022. As the confetti fell from the ceiling, Bruhat smiled widely, held the trophy high above his head and shook hands with Faizan.

If you weren’t able to watch the finals on Thursday night, here are three takeaways.

The schwa and homonyms were a tough hurdle.

The difficulty of the finals was immediately apparent: The first speller onstage, Rishabh Saha, misspelled “desmotrope,” a chemistry term. As an eighth-grader, Rishabh will not be eligible to compete in the 2025 Scripps Bee.

The schwa — the “uh”-like sound that can be represented by any vowel in the English alphabet — tripped him up, much like it did for several spellers in 2023. He added an “a” in place of the first “o.”

Shrey Parikh also fell to the schwa with the word “kanin,” a kind of boiled rice used in the Philippines. He spelled it as “kanan.” Shortly after, Ananya Prassanna misspelled “murrina,” a word of Spanish origin, as “marina.”

YY Liang got tripped up by “immanent,” a homonym of “imminent,” and was the second to be eliminated. Kirsten Santos was taken out next by another homonym, “apophasis,” which she spelled “apophysis.”

A trend of the night: Indigenous vocabularies.

The 13th round featured several Indigenous words. Shrey correctly spelled “Jumano,” a group of Native Americans that lived in the Southwest and South Plains between until around 1700. He asked twice for an etymology, but judges told him that it had none, given the dictionary. No matter — he nailed the spelling.

The next competitor, Aditi Muthukumar, was asked to spell Lillooet, a Salishan people of the Fraser River valley in British Columbia. The word also did not have a language of origin listed, and it knocked Aditi out of the finals.

Immediately after Aditi came Bruhat, the night’s eventual champion, who correctly spelled “Okvik,” from an Alaskan geographical name.

Texas, almost always home to finalists, could not clinch a win.

Texas holds the title of being home to the most Bee champions, with 16 spellers from the Lone Star State holding the trophy under clouds of confetti. Out of the 20 Texans who made it to the nationals this year, only two remained by the finals.

Faizan, who is from the Dallas area, came in second place after spelling 20 words correctly in the spell-off.

The eight finalists spanned the United States, with spellers from California to New York.

Aimee Ortiz and Alexandra E. Petri

Bruhat Soma was on a mission to win after a disappointing loss last year.

When Bruhat Soma lifted the ceramic Scripps National Spelling Bee trophy in a blizzard of confetti as cheers erupted from the audience late Thursday night, he was shocked but he also knew that, finally, he had achieved his goal. He was the champion.

“I’m really happy that I won,” Bruhat said during a phone interview on Friday morning. “It’s like a dream come true.”

The 12-year-old from Tampa, Fla., won in a spell-off round — just the second one to be held in the history of the competition. Bruhat rattled off a head-spinning 29 correctly spelled words in 90 seconds, including heautophany, nachschläge and puszta.

Bruhat’s spell-off sprint on Thursday night won him the competition’s trophy, the Scripps Cup, and a grand prize of $50,000. He far surpassed his competitor, Faizan Zaki, a sixth grader from Dallas who correctly spelled 20 words, and also the bee’s previous spell-off record of 22 correct words in 2022, according to Bee officials.

The spell-off came easily to Bruhat, who said he had prepared for this exact moment for six months. His father, Srinivas Soma, would prepare a daily list of 30 words for him to practice spelling out in 90 seconds, leaving him “kind of nervous, but I knew I had prepared” once the big moment arrived.

In addition to studying with his father, Bruhat said he used SpellPundit, a popular tool among top spellers, and the dictionary to get ready for Scripps. He also worked with a spelling coach and practiced his vocabulary by making his own list of words to study, focusing on his trouble spots.

“I’ve worked really hard,” he said.

The 12-year-old said that while some people studied with music, in the company of others or while snacking, he said he preferred to do it alone in a quiet environment.

“Quality of studying is also important,” he said, noting that if someone studied for a lengthy time but didn’t have the focus required to learn the words, “there’s really no point.”

Bruhat was eliminated last year in the first round of the quarterfinals, tying for 74th place. “I was pretty disappointed by my performance, and I knew I had to work harder,” he said in a recorded interview that aired during the show.

But his failure to make the finals last year drove him to study even more for this year’s competition, Bruhat said on Friday morning.

“Instead of going down, I decided to be really motivated by that,” he said, adding, “so don’t be discouraged by failure.”

Bruhat went into Thursday’s competition with a goal in mind and the confidence that he knew what he was doing, because he had worked for it.

“I feel like working for it is the hardest part,” he said. “But I was able to do it because I really wanted that trophy, and now I finally have it.”

The 12-year-old also competed in 2022, when he tied for 163rd place.

Bruhat’s first word of the night was habitude, which means one’s “usual disposition or mode of behavior or procedure.” He steadily conquered words like Okvik, an Alaskan geographical name, and hoofddorp, a Dutch word, as the competition progressed in intensity and difficulty. He remained poised onstage, rarely seeming nervous and often thinking through the words by mock-typing out the letters in the air.

After his win, Bruhat was joined onstage by his parents and two siblings, who expressed pride and elation at his achievement.

In a recorded interview aired during the show, Bruhat — who is tall for his age — said that he also enjoys basketball. His favorite player is LeBron James, according to his bio on the Scripps National Spelling Bee website. He also enjoys reading, Ping-Pong and badminton, and he plays the snare drum in his middle school band.

While competing, his forehead was marked with a vermilion tika, a Hindu symbol of power and purity. His parents said that Bruhat memorized about 80 percent of the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita.

Now that he’s won, Bruhat is unable to compete again for the Scripps Cup, which means he gets to relax this summer, play some basketball and maybe go on vacation.

“I guess I’m done,” he said.

But the future looks bright for the newest champion speller. He said he hoped to be a doctor some day, but he’s not quite sure what kind.

“Probably in high school, I’m going to look at all the options and choose,” he said. For now, though, summer awaits.

Emily Schmall , Maggie Astor and Emmett Lindner contributed reporting.

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Aimee Ortiz

Here are a few key moments, and words, from this year’s Scripps spelling bee.

The long road to a champion speller is littered with schwas and arcane words, but after 244 eliminations, there was finally a winner on Thursday: Bruhat Soma, a seventh grader from Tampa, Fla.

For many, the words are the star of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Here are a few key moments that helped shape the competition:

Desmotrope: a form of a chemical element related to another

The first word of the night took out the very first speller, Rishabh Saha, a 14-year-old from Merced, Calif., who used an A for the first O. Grace Walters, 22, a spelling bee coach and a recent graduate of Rice University, said in an interview that Saha “maybe overthought it because it’s the finals and he didn’t expect a word to follow the rules like that.”

Apophasis: the raising of an issue by claiming not to mention it (as in, “We won’t discuss his past crimes.”)

Kirsten Santos, this year’s only repeat finalist, was knocked out by the word, which has a homonym: “apophysis.” Kirsten, a 13-year-old from Katy, Texas, looked crestfallen when she heard the bell indicating that she had gotten the word wrong. Cole Shafer-Ray, 23, a former professional spelling bee coach, recent Yale University graduate and the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee runner-up, said the word was “one of the first words that’s as hard as a typical finals word. The fact that it’s a homonym makes it harder.”

Kanin: boiled rice

Shrey Parikh, a 12-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., was taken out by the word, which he spelled “kanan.” Dev Shah, 15, the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, said that “asking geographical words at a spelling bee is like spelling at a geography bee.”

Nicuri: a Brazilian palm

Faizan Zaki, a 12-year-old from Plano, Texas, tore through this word without asking any questions and kicked the competition into an exciting spell-off, the second in the history of the bee.

Emily Schmall

Bruhat’s forehead was marked with a vermilion tika, a Hindu symbol of power and purity. His father said he had memorized 80 percent of the Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita.

Standing with his wife and daughters next to his spelling champion son, Bruhat’s father said in a television interview that it was “the proudest moment for the family.”

Bruhat clearly was determined. He first competed at the national bee as a fifth-grader in 2022. That year, he tied for 163rd place. He rose up the ranks the following year, finishing tied for 74th place. This year, he held the trophy over his head, as the crowd roared with applause.

“I can’t describe it,” Bruhat said in a television interview on stage as the confetti rained down. “I’m still shaking.”

As the confetti fell from the ceiling, Bruhat smiled wide and held the trophy high above his head. A Bee official said that he set a new record for the number of words correctly spelled during a spell-off; the winner of the only other spell-off in the bee’s history had 22 correct words.

Maggie Astor

Bruhat’s reaction at the moment he was declared the winner was a bit muted, almost like he was in shock — understandable! He smiled and shook Faizan’s hand.

Bruhat’s spell-off performance was mesmerizing to watch. Twenty-nine words in 90 seconds, including such monsters as “heautophany,” “nachschläge” and “puszta.”

And the winner is… Bruhat Soma, with 29 correctly spelled words in 90 seconds! Faizan Zaki correctly spelled 20 words.

One of the officials is now tormenting — I mean, complimenting — Faizan and Bruhat by talking about how awesome they are. I’m sure all they actually want is to know who won.

Before beginning, Faizan took a few deep breaths with his eyes closed, lifting his fingers to his face. He then raced through the words, stumbling a few times, but persevering until the 90 seconds were up.

Faizan Zaki didn’t get as far down the list as Bruhat Soma did, but before we have a declaration of the winner, the judges have to confirm how many of the words each of them spelled correctly.

Cole Shafer-Ray, a former spelling coach, said that a “bee that works like it should (where the best spellers generally win) hinges on having a read on what makes a word difficult.” He added: “This year’s competition has probably had the most examples ever of Scripps’ word selection reflecting blatant misunderstanding of word difficulty. I think if they ever want to fix this — which they should — they need to have former spellers pick the words. Recent ones.”

Shafer-Ray said that spell-offs are exciting, “but I think it should probably be a last resort, since it’s testing an entirely new skill.”

Bruhat Soma just BLAZED through about 30 words in an unbelievable performance. Faizan Zaki is up now, and he asks for and receives a few moments to take deep breaths.

Alexandra E. Petri

Bruhat is like the runner in a race whose whole strategy is to hang back and then let it absolutely rip in the last mile.

Each speller will receive the same words in the same order. (The other person will of course be sequestered while the other spells, so they can’t hear it.) Whoever spells more of the words correctly in 90 seconds will win.

We’re heading to a spell-off for only the second time in the history of the spelling bee! The two remaining contestants, Faizan Zaki and Bruhat Soma, will have to spell as many words as they can in a short period of time, rather than taking their time to spell a single one.

The crowd goes wild, chanting, “Spell-off! Spell-off! Spell-off!”

Wow, Faizan Zaki just instantly spelled “nicuri” after asking not a single question.

Ananya Prassanna is out on “murrina,” a disease of Central American horses and mules, which she spells “marina.” We’re down to two.

Bruhat Soma correctly spells “hoofddorp,” a Dutch word.

Shrey Parikh is out, and we’re down to three. He covered his face with his hands and looked from side to side nervously as he thought and asked questions. The word was “kanin,” and he spelled it “kanan.”

As Shrey walked off the stage, Faizan walked over and gave him a hug.

Dev Shah, last year’s champion, said that tagalog words like to use “k” and that “personally, asking geographical words at a spelling bee is like spelling at a geography bee.”

Ananya Prassanna correctly spells “tennesi,” which she seemed uncertain about, and she is clearly delighted. Next up is Faizan Zaki, who correctly spells a word with a homonym: “daena,” referring to “the moral life of humankind.”

Bruhat Soma correctly spelled “Okvik,” from an Alaskan geographical name. He asked multiple times for the part of speech, an adjective, which could have misled him into ending the word with “ic” but didn’t.

Aditi Muthukumar’s word, Lillooet — “a Salishan people of the Fraser river valley in British Columbia” — also has no language of origin listed in the dictionary. She misspelled it “Lillowet,” and we’re down to four.

Cole Shafer-Ray, a former spelling coach, noted that “it’s getting significantly more difficult now. These kids are impressive.” He added that Lillooet, which knocked out Aditi Muthukumar, "was probably the toughest so far.”

She was visibly shaken at first, but left the stage smiling, flashing a heart sign with her hands.

Shrey Parikh gets a tricky one: “Jumano.” He asked for the language of origin twice, but it had none given in the dictionary. He got it right anyway.

The jury convicted Trump. Here’s what could happen next.

A guilty verdict for Trump in the New York trial means a mix of routine court processing and extraordinary logistical considerations, legal experts say.

On Thursday afternoon, after more than a day of deliberations, a jury in Manhattan convicted Donald Trump on all 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment.

During the seven-week trial, Trump complained of the indignities of a cold, uncomfortable courtroom. The former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee may now face other conditions he may consider insulting, including a required inmate review by the New York City Department of Probation.

The probation office on the 10th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse prepares presentencing reports for judges. There, Trump would be interviewed about his personal history, his mental health and the circumstances that led to his conviction.

Lawyers say the process is humbling.

“If you think the courtroom is dingy, just wait until you go to the probation office,” said Daniel Horwitz, a white-collar criminal defense attorney in New York and former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Trump guilty verdict

Former prosecutors sketched out a mix of likely experiences for Trump, who is now a felon. Trump was convicted of charges relating to $130,000 in payments made to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election to keep her quiet about a sexual encounter she said they had.

The routine processing of felons into the New York criminal justice system would include the timeline of a potential appeal. But with Trump, there would also be extraordinary considerations — such as how the Secret Service would protect the former president if he were sent to prison and whether he would be allowed to travel to campaign events if sentenced to home confinement.

Legal experts said incarceration appears unlikely for Trump, 77, who has no criminal record.

The Class E felony charges are punishable by 16 months to four years in prison. Among the key issues to be determined would be whether Trump faces some form of incarceration, either in a government facility or a private location, or a less-restrictive experience through probation.

New York Mayor Eric Adams said this month that the city’s Rikers Island jail complex and Department of Corrections were prepared if Trump were ordered to serve time.

His conviction does not disqualify him from running for office or serving as president if elected, constitutional experts said.

During the trial, which began April 15, prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said Trump falsely recorded the payments involving Daniels as legal expenses and alleged they were improper campaign expenditures. Defense attorneys said Trump, who pleaded not guilty, made personal payments to protect his family from an embarrassing disclosure.

The jury, which heard closing arguments Tuesday, unanimously agreed to convict on all counts after hours of deliberations spread over two days.

Trump’s punishment is now up to New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan , who will receive input from the prosecution and defense in the presentencing report. Though jail or prison are unlikely , the former prosecutors said, alternatives such as probation or home confinement would create logistical challenges and potential political concerns.

If he is sentenced to probation, for example, Trump would be required to clear any out-of-state travel — such as to campaign rallies and fundraisers — with a probation officer. If Trump were to serve home confinement at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., New York authorities would probably have to work with counterparts in Florida to accommodate him, the experts said.

Such arrangements are not uncommon for felons, experts said, but probation officers must approve the details.

“If you have a probation officer, you are not supposed to travel without permission. Your home is subject to random search because you don’t have a Fourth Amendment right to your home being private. You can get drug-tested, potentially. Travel outside the country is difficult,” said Matthew Galluzzo, another former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

“That would be super awkward for someone on the campaign trail, but not impossible,” Galluzzo said. “If he had to go to a debate against Biden, he probably could go, but you’re supposed to make that request far in advance.”

Trump and President Biden have agreed to two debates . The first is scheduled for June 27 in Atlanta, before Trump’s sentencing, which Merchan scheduled for July 11. A second debate is planned for Sept. 10 at a yet-undisclosed location.

The probation office will put together a presentencing report for Merchan. As part of that process, Trump must be interviewed by a probation officer, who will produce a biography of him of about five or six pages, legal experts said. Such documents are confidential, intended only for the judge and the lawyers.

Trump has called his prosecution politically motivated and denigrated Merchan, Bragg and others , leading the judge to fine him 10 times for a total of $10,000 during the trial for violating a partial gag order . How Trump would react to questions from a probation officer about the case could get him into more hot water with the court. Legal experts said his attorneys probably would advise him not to discuss the case.

Convicts are “expected to tell the truth. If they are convicted and then say, ‘No, it’s a lie, it didn’t happen,’ that will go back to the judge. And that’s not good,” said defense lawyer Jeremy Saland, who also served as a Manhattan prosecutor.

The prosecution and Trump’s legal team also are expected to submit recommendations about the sentencing.

Because he was charged with nonviolent crimes, Trump is unlikely to be detained in prison as he awaits sentencing, said the experts, who added that it is also unlikely that Merchan would impose bail as a condition for his release.

Trump’s team has 30 days to file notice of appeal and six months to file the full appeal.

A key question is whether the court would agree to stay Trump’s sentence pending an appeal, a process that is likely to last well beyond the Nov. 5 presidential election. Former prosecutors suggested such a scenario is plausible given that any punishment of Trump could be short enough in duration that the sentence would be fully carried out before a legal appeal is litigated.

The legal experts said Merchan could grant Trump a conditional discharge tied to the requirement that he not commit another legal offense. Merchan also could impose a financial penalty or require Trump to do community service or undergo counseling, some legal experts said.

If the judge were to impose a more onerous penalty, such as home confinement, Trump could still find ways to continue campaigning, even if he were not on the road.

“He could be confined but go to Mar-a-Lago and hold a news conference every day, be on TV, hold rallies remotely,” Horwitz said. “There’s a lot he can do as a candidate while under home confinement.”

Trump New York hush money case

Donald Trump is the first former president convicted of a crime .

Can Trump still run for president? Yes. He is eligible to campaign and serve as president if elected, but he won’t be able to pardon himself . Here’s everything to know about next steps , what this means for his candidacy and the other outstanding trials he faces .

What happens next? Trump’s sentencing is scheduled for July 11. He faces up to four years in prison, but legal experts say incarceration appears unlikely. Trump has 30 days to file notice of an appeal of the verdict and six months to file the full appeal.

Reaction to the verdict: Trump continued to maintain his innocence , railing against what he called a “rigged, disgraceful trial” and emphasizing voters would deliver the real verdict on Election Day.

The charges: Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records . Falsifying business records is a felony in New York when there is an “intent to defraud” that includes an intent to “commit another crime or to aid or conceal” another crime.