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(BETHEL) - The bombshell announcement that billionaire Alan Gerry of Liberty had purchased the hallowed Woodstock Festival site in Bethel and about a thousand acres all around it for roughly $2.6 million has yet to effect other lands in the town, the people who live on them and those who draw their livelihoods from them.
Alan Gerry of Liberty, the founder of Cablevision Industries and Sullivan County's most prominent entrepreneur, announced last week that he had purchased the 1969 Woodstock Festival site in Bethel for at least a million dollars along with hundreds of acres around it. He told an excited group of county leaders and businessmen that he planned to turn it into a major recreation destination.
The announcement, which was greeted with very favorable reaction by most Sullivan County citizens, ended speculation about the recent purchase of properties near the Bethel site, all of which were related to the New York City law firm of Rubin, Baum, Levin, Constant, and Friedman with offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Among the properties purchased were a five-acre purchase in last September by the Capital Hiking Club for $160,000, an 87-acre purchase last October by the Mid Town Rod and Gun Club for about $900,000, a 32-acre purchase in December by Nott Street Farms of Schnectady for $336,000, and a 55-acre purchase earlier this year by Perry Road Country Properties for $216,000.
Only time will tell whether the purchase of these properties will raise assessments in the town.
Gerry and his development team paid tens of thousands of dollars an acre for the lands they wanted, many times the market price, but the rest of Bethel is still assessed at about a thousand dollars an acre except for those choice properties along Hurd Road, Pucky Huddle, and West Shore, according to assossor, Marguerite Brown.
Some property near the site have already taken an added value because of access rights to Filipinni's Pond (since Woodstock '69 known as 'Woodstock Pond') and the Lake Superior Park, she noted. They're assessed at between $3,000 and $10,000 an acre, but they're a special case, and they were long before the Woodstock Festival and the notoriety it brought to Bethel was a fact of life.
As for the 37-acre Festival site on Hurd Road, itself, she continued, the town had assessed it for $250,000 long before Gerry bought it for roughly one million, four times its rated value.
"Actually, that site was particularly hard to assess," she said. "Who really knows what it's worth. How do you put a value on Gettysburg or some other unique historic place?"
Only two hours from New York City, Bethel is the kind of town people come to settle down or to relax in their second homes, the life resident observed. And they're still coming despite all the recent hoopla.
"They're the quiet ones and they like it that way," she said.
Has she seen any rush up to buy up lands near the proposed Woodstock recreation destination Gerry has in mind? "No," she said, "at least not yet."
As for dairy farmers like Harold Russell and others who raise horses, cattle, and turkeys on nearby lands, the impact of Gerry's purchases and plans has yet to touch them either.
They weathered the crowds, the clogged roads, the foraging fans and all other inconveniences of the original Woodstock bash and they'll weather whatever the newest Woodstock venture will be.
Since the festival site lies in an agricultural zone, they'll have a lot to say about how it will be developed so that they, as farmers, won't suffer from whatever commercial development takes place.
County officials are now in the process of redesignating farm land in such a district, which lies in part around the Woodstock site and includes most of Western Sullivan County.