Woodstock at 55: How much hippy spirit is left in upstate New York?

There are many misconceptions about the 1969 Woodstock Festival, but for something as safely installed into popular culture myth as this, a little fallacy and legend is sometimes a good thing. After all, if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t really there, man.

Then there are the misunderstandings that need setting straight. First of all, the Woodstock Festival was not in Woodstock. Secondly, the festival was not the end of the hippy dream – we’ll leave that to the Rolling Stones (with a little help from the Hell’s Angels) at Altamont Speedway some months later. Thirdly, it wasn’t an absolute catastrophe of organisation… well, not at first, anyway. Organisers told local authorities to expect about 50,000 people. Privately, they expected 100,000. One and a half million tried to get in; 450,000 succeeded. The toilets stopped working on the first day, and the relief trucks unable to access the site. OK, so maybe the third ‘misunderstanding’ was true.

Myths mostly busted, 55 years later, I touched down at New York’s JFK with the intention of driving upstate to see if any residue of hippiedom still resides. Does ‘peace, love, and music’ still echo among the rolling hills of the Catskills?

The greenery quickly took over from the concrete of NYC – an escape from 82 per cent humidity in the city. The Catskills were always a summer escape for well-to-do New Yorkers, the month-long holiday camps mainly frequented by rich NYC Jewish families, birthing the terms ‘The Yiddish Alps’ and ‘The Borscht Belt’; Jerry Seinfeld and Joan Rivers cut their comedy teeth in these places.

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I pulled into my accommodation on the outskirts of Woodstock. With the luxe and the rock ‘n’ roll turned up to 11, Hotel Dylan themes its characterful, bougie rooms around former Woodstock town residents Dylan and Baez, and festival headliners such as Hendrix. This is where return to our first busted myth. Up to a month before, organisers were planning to hold the festival near the town, until locals rejected the application. But Woodstock was bohemian way before the 1960s. In the hills above is the Byrdcliffe Guild, an artistic community established by moneyed New Yorkers in 1902; think of it as a US equivalent of the Bloomsbury Group. These were the original bohemians…