An old inn, Rockwell, a mental hospital and Arlo

The Red Lion inn (first part built in 1773), in Stockbridge.

“And in the quiet, rural middle of it {the Berkshires}, Stockbridge sits like nothing so much as a  living postcard from small town America. Standing at dusk on Main Street, looking at the row of seasoned old storefronts, the long, classic porch of the fabled Red Lion Inn wrapping around the corner, and the tree-studded ridgeline of the Berkshires creating a green and gold and backdrop to it all, a visitor might be put in mind of a Norman Rockwell painting. Which would be perfectly apt. Rockwell lived only a block away, and he painted that very scene.’’

-- From New England Notebook, by Ted Reinsteim

He might also have noted that Stockbridge is also home to the Austen Riggs  Center, a psychiatric hospital known for its celebrity patients. Its presence was a factor in Rockwell and his wife moving  to the town from Arlington, Vt.  Mr. and Mrs. Rockwell were both treated there for anxiety and depression. Stockbridge also hosts the Norman Rockwell Museum, which has many of the famous illustrations he did for the old Saturday Evening Post and other publications in the Golden Age of Magazines.

His Stockbridge studio was  on the second floor of a row of buildings; directly underneath Rockwell's studio was, for a time in 1966, the Back Room Rest, better known as the famous "Alice's Restaurant of song and movie fame, about a bunch of '60s Hippies led (sort of!) by songwriter Arlo Guthrie and their interactions with small-town life.

The Norman Rockwell Museum.

Colorized postcard of Stockbridge made in the early 20th Century.

Greater Boston forgets the Berkshires

Mt. Greylock, in the northern Berkshires.

"Remember that famous cartoon that spoofed the average New Yorker’s view of the world?  (Kansas city was just past the Hudson River and New Jersey; Las Vegas bordered Nebraska.)  It’s not entirely different for the average Greater Bostonian’s view which, when picturing  the west, undoubtedly imagines Chicago and LA before North Adams or Stockbridge.

"Mention Monterey to a Bostonian, and they will think of Pacific Route 1, not Massachusetts Route 23.

"Always been that way.  And in Monterey, North Adams and Stockbridge—as well as Lenox, Otis, and Pittsfield—they’re used to it.  It’s no mystery in Monterey, Mass., or anywhere else in the Berkshires.  They know the numbers: Fully two-thirds of the Bay State’s population lives in the Greater Boston area.  

“'Do you ever feel like second-class citizens in your own state?'  I once asked a woman in Great Barrington on that subject.

“'Out of sight, out of mind,' she sighed wistfully.

"When those in eastern Massachusetts do travel west to the Berkshires, it is almost invariably in the fall or, more likely, in the summer, to take advantage of the many cultural activities (Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, Shakespeare & Co., etc.) there.

"But I recently spent a couple of days on a story about the Berkshires in winter.

"And I can confidently report that, even long after the music stops and the lawn picnics are a distant memory, there is still life in them thar hills.  Good life, too.''

-- Ted Reinstein on the Web site of WCVB TV, Boston, in 2013. He's the author of the travel book New England Notebook.

The  general store in Monterey, Mass.

-- Photo by ToddC4176 at en.wikipedia

A proud town's ancient ball park

(See photo below.)

"Fenway Park, which opened in 1912, is the oldest Major League ball park. But forty miles west of Boston, there's another ball field that is older still -- by more than three full decades. In fact, the town of Clinton, Massachusetts, prides itself on being home to something virtually every other American city and town would envy like little else: the oldest baseball field. Anywhere.''

-- From New England Notebook, by Ted Reinstein