Others carry yoga mats, bags of farmers market produce, books, CDs, double espressos and all the other stuff it’s hard to find in surrounding Berkshire Mountain villages like Stockbridge and Lenox.Ĭompared with them, Great Barrington (pop.
The road becomes Railroad Street there, right of way to pedestrians stalled in the crosswalk trying to decide whether to have sushi or chimichangas for dinner.
You’ve got to slow down when Route 7 leaves behind the wide-open valley of the Housatonic River to enter Great Barrington. And being reminded of that is fun.īig-city smart meets New England natural in an art-rich mountain setting. It reinforces the truth that big cities and grand institutions per se don’t produce creative works individuals do. But to have your horizon shifted in a town of 6,000 by an unheralded gem of a painting or a song belted out from a band shell on a starry summer night, that’s special. Fabled overseas locales, world-class metropolises-you expect to be inspired when you go there. There is, we think, something encouraging about finding culture in small-town America. We also tried to select towns ranging across the lower 48. But we focused on towns with populations less than 25,000, so travelers could experience what might be called enlightened good times in an unhurried, charming setting. To help create our list, we asked the geographic information systems company Esri to search its data bases for high concentrations of museums, historic sites, botanic gardens, resident orchestras, art galleries and other cultural assets common to big cities. We think any best place worth traveling to should have one quality above others: culture. There are lists of the best places to get a job, retire, ski, golf and fall in love, best places lists for almost everything.
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