Famous Beer Town Fighting To Keep Vibe

You may have never been to Woodstock, Vermont, but you know exactly how it feels to be there. At least, you know how the tourist version feels…in a town that didn’t especially want a “tourist version” of itself out there in the hearts and minds of interested travelers.



Woodstock, you see, is the home of the Budweiser Clydesdales … at least on TV. Remember those charming Christmas commercials with the namesake horses trotting through the town? Yep, that’s Woodstock, all that glorious snow providing the idyllic backdrop for a “Tis the Season” sip of brew.
Now the town that everyone in the country knows is fighting to keep its sense of self. The town fathers and longtime residents want to keep the iconic window shutters that helped define Woodstock as one of the quintessential images of New England village life.

But those shutters have been there a while, and some are becoming eyesores. Some property owners want the right to pull them down and not replace them, but local ordinances don’t allow this. That reality has created a clash of perspectives. One man’s picturesque vision of small town America is another’s home remodeling headache.

One property owner who wants rid of that headache took the town to court. He lost, and now he’s having to cough up the cash to install something on his own building he doesn’t even want. The guy is still objecting, and he has a group of like-minded residents on his side. But the town planning department is having none of it.

City planners have gone to great lengths to make sure local architecture looks a certain way, creating rules that force new technology to be hidden by classic accents. They say they don’t want one property owner’s request to create a slippery slope that destroys the ambiance of the town.

Despite this, an increasing number of residents are pulling down old shutters and refusing to install new ones. If the city can’t manage to win them to their way of thinking somehow, they will soon lose the argument to the sheer force of numbers. At present, though, they don’t seem to have an answer other than the slippery slope idea.

Residents, at this point, are not buying that one, so either the town goes back to the drawing board, or more shutters will be taken down with nothing going up to replace them, and the town will change by default.

Phil Shawe is an entrepreneur based in New York.