great barrington
best small town in America
Clodkwise from top left: Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, Berkshire Busk! jazz quartet performance, friends gather on Railroad Street after dinner.
It’s the Rome of the South County. Home to 7,100 people, Great Barrington is the southern Berkshires’ business and cultural hub. Visitors come for the fun shopping, superb restaurants, world-class entertainment, year-round outdoor recreation, and the recreational (and medical) cannabis dispensary that opened a year and a half ago Theory Wellness. The dispensary, which was the first such shop to open in the Berkshires, has been a hit (so to speak) with customers who like their weed legal and carefully sourced—and there are millions of them within driving distance who lack legal access to this popular herbal remedy in their home states. In the past year, four more have opened in Great Barrington. Three of them—woman-owned Calyx, Farnsworth Fine Cannabis and Great Barrington Recreational Cannabis are right downtown on Main Street, and a fourth—Rebelle—is on Route 7 just south on town. Not all residents are happy about the “Best Small Town in America,” as Smithsonian Magazine named it in 2012, becoming “the pot capital of the Northeast.” Others point to the millions of
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dollars that have flowed into town coffers from a 3% municipal tax and a 3% community impact tax on cannabis sales. Great Barrington was founded in 1766, and its historic districts and quaint residential neighborhoods are within walking distance of open spaces. This is the birthplace of civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, and an outdoor interpretive trail at his boyhood homesite is open to visitors. Great Barrington is blessed with a number of lively performing spaces which makes the town into an entertainment mecca. The Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, is the anchor for the cultural life of the town with a full schedule of music, theater, films and other events. Church-turned-performancespace Saint James Place is now open for gatherings, events, and performances. The Guthrie (as in Arlo) Center on Division Street, a place to enjoy intimate folk concerts, still has a limited summer schedule. The Triplex Cinema downtown, where three screens have grown into four, is open again. Great Barrington is home to Bard College at Simon’s Rock, an innovative fouryear liberal arts “early college” plus Bard Academy for ninth more news and features at theBerkshireEdge.com
