If you go to Woodstock, NY searching for the site of the historic 1969 Woodstock Music Festival, you won’t find it. That’s because it wasn’t held there.
That was the originally planned location, hence the name. Organizers chose that small town 100 miles north of New York City because musicians like Bob Dylan recorded albums there.
The music festival was conceived and announced in early 1969. But Woodstock residents said no. They didn’t want the concert held in their town.
Even so, the name stuck.
A second venue location was secured at Winston Farm in Saugerties, NY (800 acres). Organizers thought they had a deal, but after miscommunication the property owner turned them down.
The third choice was Mills Industrial Park in Wallkill, NY (300 acres). A lease was signed during the springtime. Advertising continued to call the festival Woodstock. Bands started committing to the concert dates.
The first group to sign on was Creedence Clearwater Revival - one of the few bands who attended but never appeared in the film Woodstock. They specifically did not want to be recorded.
In early July, the Wallkill town council passed an ordinance that any gathering larger than 5,000 people required special permits. Those permits were nearly impossible to acquire. By mid-July, construction at the Wallkill site stopped.
Promoters insisted the festival would see only 50,000 people. Yet by July they’d sold over 180,000 tickets. And they suddenly had no venue.
Finally, they secured a site: Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, NY (only 15 acres). It was 60 miles southwest of Woodstock in the Catskills Mountains along a small two-lane road, far more remote than any of the previous potential locations.
However, promotional posters cited White Lake, NY as the concert site. That was close enough. White Lake and Bethel border one another.
Then Bethel town board members and the festival organizers got into a dispute over building permits. That caused further delays.
Eventually, work on building the stage, sound system, and lighting commenced.
But with time incredibly tight and mere days until the concert date, organizers told their construction crew they had a choice - work on a fence or build the stage. There wasn’t enough time or money to do both. They made the obvious choice. But that meant than random people were free to wander onto the festival grounds without being stopped.
The stage was still being constructed right up to and even during the show as Richie Havens, the first act, began his performance.
So, you’ll have to travel to Bethel if you want to visit the 1969 Woodstock concert site. It’s located next to the much more modern Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, an outdoor amphitheater that has featured numerous musical acts for decades - including musicians who performed at Woodstock.
Now, the Woodstock site is a grassy open field with no stage, and it’s in the National Register of Historic Places.
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