The Saugerties Town Board recently announced that there would be no concerts happening this summer at the Winston Farm site that Woodstock ’94 promoter Michael Lang is planning to reactivate as a home for traveling and weekend-long mini music festivals.
“We pulled the plug for this year a while ago,” Lang said this week. “Things are looking good for next summer.”
Lang said that following a series of public meetings with town officials and news stories about his plans last autumn and winter, he and the Schaller family, which owns the 800-plus acre Winston Farm, located opposite the southbound entrance/exit from the New York Thruway, decided they simply hadn’t given themselves the time to do what they want this year.
Nevertheless, the famed rock promoter – who rose to fame with his epochal 1969 Woodstock Festival – said that site preparations were continuing to proceed accordingly.
“We’ve completed an assessment of site needs,” he said. “We took down some barns that we determined were safety hazards; we’ve assessed what needs to be done to activate our roadways and how to update the electrical grid there. And we don’t need to deal with plumbing now.”
As for the future… the promoter said that what had been planned for this year, including several weekend-long rock festivals, were currently being scheduled for 2014, along with more shows.
“We’re hoping for a more diverse array of music,” he added.
With the New York Philharmonic looking for a “Summer Home” (a la Tanglewood for BSO), it’s really surprising to me that nobody seems to have thought to partner these two initiatives together.
Winston Farm is better situated than any of the candidate locations NYP is talking about, and is already in talks to become an amphitheater type location, but it doesn’t even appear on the list of locations they’re considering. If we end up with two of these type facilities – one in Dutchess County and one in Ulster County, you can bet that they’ll divide up the concerts and events between them, and both will be hurting financially.