BirdBlog — December 2024

The story of Alice's Restaurant is well known. ( If you don't know what I'm talking about, listen to the song.) Even the Library of Congress has a page about it.

Much of the story takes place in the towns of Great Barrington, Stockbridge, and Lee, in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts. I visited many of the locations mentioned and photographed them. Enjoy! (All of the photographs on this page or linked to, except for ones embedded in other pages, are mine, and all with the obvious exception of the Whitehall Street pictures were taken in those towns in the Berkshires.)

Our story starts in Stockbridge, where the restaurant was located. Of course, that wasn't the name of the restaurant, only the name of the song… (Sadly, Alice died shortly before Thanksgiving 2024.) But there really was a restaurant there, though it's now gone. It really was around the back, and, per the map, about half a mile from the railroad track.

There was even a train station then in Stockbridge.

The plot, though, begins at the former church that Alice and her husband lived in. It's now the Guthrie Center, complete with red VW Microbus.

Note the railroad crossing sign at the left of the last photo—that's the same train line that ran near the restaurant. In fact, the Van Deusenville station was once right across the road; you can still see the remains of the foundation of the station. (Could Alice have commuted by train to her restaurant? It seems unlikely. In 1964, passenger service on that line was cut back to two trains per week. Also, while I haven't been able to learn when the Van Deusenville station was abandoned, the last timetable for passenger service, in 1971, does not show that stop.)

After the Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, Arlo and a friend cleared a lot of garbage out of the church and tried to take it to the Stockbridge town dump—but it was closed for Thanksgiving. The dump is now

permanently shut: it's been converted to a solar farm. From a current topographic map, the area is marshy; by the standards of the time, that would have made it a perfect spot for a dump. (The church was in Great Barrington; why try the Stockbridge dump? In 1965, Great Barrington's dump was apparently south of downtown and the church was well north. There is a slight mystery, though: the linked-to document lists the dump as being on South Main Street, but as best I can tell there is no such street and never has been. Sheffield, the town to the immediate south of Great Barrington, has a South Main Street, but that isn't where its dump was.)

I haven't been able to get to the place where the garbage was dumped, and I don't even know the exact location; the best clue I have is here. An examination of the contour lines on a 1959 topographic map of the area suggests that most likely location for a cliff would have been the south side of Old Meeting House Road. Apparently, there's now a house on that spot. A current topographic map does show houses south of that road. Maybe the Garbage Trail Walk goes there.

Well, Office Obie took them to the police officers' station in Stockbridge:

(The current police officers' station started housing the town's offices in 2004. Amusingly enough, I was tipped off to the change by seeing an oil painting, "Home for Christmas" (1967), at the Norman Rockwell Museum when I was there to see an exhibit on Mad Magazine.)

The trial, the case of American blind justice, was in a courtroom in Lee.

Our story, of course, ends at 39 Whitehall Street, New York.

Alas, the facade of the building has changed.