Woodstock Festival Site — Bethel, New York

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair took place on August 15-18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm near Bethel, New York — not in the town of Woodstock, which is about 60 miles northeast. An estimated 400,000 people attended what became the defining cultural event of the 1960s counterculture. The lineup included Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and dozens of others. Hendrix's distorted rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at dawn on Monday morning became one of the most iconic performances in music history.

The festival was plagued by logistical chaos — roads were impassable, food and water ran short, rainstorms turned the fields to mud — but the spirit of communal goodwill held. There were no reported incidents of violence among the crowd. The event was intended as a commercial venture by promoters Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, Joel Rosenman, and John P. Roberts, but it became something far larger: a symbol of an entire generation's aspirations, and a high-water mark that the counterculture would spend the next decade trying to recapture.

The site is now the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which opened in 2006 and includes a museum dedicated to the 1960s and the Woodstock festival. The original field where the stage stood is preserved, marked by a monument, and is open to the public. The rolling hillside that served as the natural amphitheatre is still clearly visible, and the setting retains a powerful atmosphere.