They paved paradise, and put up a Woodstock museum

It's been years since Duke Devlin traded the motorcycle he rode into Bethel for the electric golf cart that gets his creaky body around the world's most famous alfalfa field.

Devlin, his thick arms adorned with Harley-Davidson tattoos, his once-blond beard and ponytail now snow white, looks out across the verdant, rolling hills of New York's Sullivan County on a cloudless May afternoon and mutters, possibly not for the first time, "Yes, this is God's country."

Which is literally true: The name of this town in the southwest corner of the Catskill Mountains translates from Hebrew as "God's house."

It meant something not so different to the hordes who motored up the New York State Thruway and jammed Route 17B in August 1969 for the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, three rain-soaked days and nights of "peace, love and music" that tattooed a generation.

Now they have, to quote Joni Mitchell, who wrote the definitive song about Woodstock, paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Also a music shed and, opening Monday, a state-of-the-art museum with de rigueur interactive exhibits, a psychedelic bus and, of course, a gift shop.

Thankfully, they left untouched the sloping natural amphitheater that farmer Max Yasgur rented to the festival's organizers.

Woodstock revisited

Devlin, 65, made his way to the "Aquarian Exposition" from Amarillo, Texas — and never left. His business card at the $100 million Bethel Woods Center for the Arts reads "Site Interpreter."

Not that I need much help: On this acreage I, waterlogged and pharmaceutically enhanced, celebrated my 17th birthday. I was here, listening to Richie Havens improvise the song "Freedom" before the opening-day crowd that soon would swell to "half a million strong," as Mitchell sang it.

Even back then, Sullivan County, the schmaltzy heart of the Borscht Belt, with its kosher resorts and striving nightclub comics, was in eclipse. In the late '90s, Alan Gerry, a local mogul-turned-philanthropist, saw the Woodstock legacy as the region's ticket to financial rehab.

Through his family foundation, Gerry quietly began buying up local parcels, scoring his biggest coup in July 1996, when he paid $1 million for the historic piece of Yasgur's farm. With the original organizers retaining rights to the Woodstock name, the site was dubbed Bethel Woods.

"The county has gone through a terrible recession period," Gerry said in a recent interview. "Those resorts are essentially gone, and the area has changed to second homes. What we have now is something to bring people to the area all year-round."

Gerry has committed $85 million to the project, with the state kicking in another $15 million or so. (When Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer tried to get the federal government to earmark $1 million toward the museum last fall, Sen. John McCain seized on the "hippie museum" as a boondoggle and the allotment was killed.)

The first part of the project, the music shed, opened two years ago, offering eclectic programming that runs from the New York Philharmonic to, coming up on June 21, Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band.

Form your own interpretation

Now comes the Museum at Bethel Woods, commemorating the Woodstock era. "This is not your grandmother's museum," said Mike Egan, the museum's director. "We've taken interpretive text panels, photographs of the period, film, interactive exhibits and objects from the period and meshed them together to tell the story of the '60s and of Woodstock."

You can watch films describing the advent of rock music, the British invasion, the clothes and art of the period. You can revisit the civil rights and antiwar movements on video and film, sit in a psychedelic bus, recall the Kennedy assassinations and the moon landing. Some 70 oral histories were commissioned and filmed by documentary filmmakers, and the ones I viewed were entertaining and informative about politics, culture and fashion. There's also a 21- minute film of unreleased concert coverage from the festival that I found tighter and more compelling than the Woodstock film itself.