|
|
| |
|
| ||
(LIBERTY) - On July 30, 1996, about a million dollars changed hands from local businessman Alan Gerry to Woodstock site owner June Gelish. The Hurd Road property became his. With that transaction, kept secret for nearly a year, began an odyssey for the man who built Cablevision Industries from an appliance store to an entity that sold for $2.6 billion in 1995.
Details are still sketchy on Gerry's newest venture, the 37{1/2}-acre site and the 1,000-adjacent acres Gerry now owns. Wednesday, Gerry spoke publicly at length for the first time since he announced last week that he bought the property for the purpose of making a ``yearround, first-class performing arts destination.'' ``The goal is to create something that's going to have an attraction to the full range of the population,'' he said.
Current plans, although yet-undeveloped, call for keeping the original concert site as it is, while building on land around it. Gerry says he is considering a year round concert site as well as an outdoor band shell, a restaurant and a museum of American music. The property, roughly rectangular in shape, would have room for parking and could contain some sort of train used for transporting people from place to place.
``We're not talking about Disneyland,'' he said. The planning would take up to six months, and the actual construction could be done in two years from now, he said. Gerry also said he was going to discuss his plans with the state, not so much as to ask for assistance, but to keep them informed about what he is doing.
``We're going to start with the governor and work our way down,'' said Gerry, who is no stranger to politics. When he ran CVI, it was an industry severely regulated by the federal government and he was constantly talking to the nation's lawmakers.
Gerry's first taste of Woodstock was not pleasant. He never went to the concert, but his 16-year-old daughter Annelise did. ``She was told emphatically she was not to go,'' Gerry said yesterday. ``Four days later, she came back.'' Gerry's brother, a professional photographer, shot the site from the air, so Gerry got to see what it looked like. Even today, he considers the event to be a ``war zone.''
Recently, Gerry's daughter Robyn started talking about how it would be great if someone were to buy the site and develop it. Gerry, whose own tastes run from classical to jazz with the occasional forays into '60s rock and roll, began to notice the success of other concert sites. Tanglewood, for one, a classical music mecca in the Berkshires.
And then there's the Olympic arena in Lake Placid, four hours to the north. Several years ago, Gerry attended a near sell-out crowd for Willie Nelson. If a concert that was in the middle of nowhere could attract so many people, why not Sullivan County, two hours from the biggest city in the country? He took the plunge in July, but somehow managed to keep it secret until all the critical land purchases had been made. Even Gelish went along with the ruse - in August, a month after Gerry bought her property, she told state troopers she wanted them to keep people off her land. Gerry said he needed to keep it secret so the value of the land around the site would not go up. Over the next nine months, Gerry's New York City law firm began buying up parcels of property. They are still buying, including a recent purchase of 40 acres for $279,000.
And, what about this summer, when the usual crowd of Woodstock pilgrims flock to the site? Gerry promises it will be different than last year, where State Police closed off all roads and barred camping and fires at the site. Gerry says he is not sure how different it will be, but it won't be a free-for-all.
``It cannot be a mob scene,'' he said. ``It cannot be an issue where you're going to allow anyone to take advantage of anybody else's safety or destroy any body's property. There certainly has to be some rules and regulations for this thing to go forward.''
Gerry won't say how much he's spent on the project so far. Profits, he said, are not his main interest at the moment.