Friday, October 25, 2013

Small Town, Foliage County, USA

This week I visited one of my dissertation advisers, who has a semester-long scholarly fellowship at the Erik Erikson Institute at the Austen Riggs Center, a US News & World Report Top Ten Hospital for psychiatry that specializes in a humanistic and psychoanalytic approach to "treatment resistant cases." These institutions are located in Stockbridge, Mass., a picturesque little town (pop. 1,900) at the heart of the Berkshires, the westernmost county in Massachusetts. "The Berks" are famous for Victorian/ Edwardian "cottages" (country estates), the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer music festival at Tanglewood, stunning foliage in the fall, and skiing during the winter at the higher elevations. Now a major tourist draw, this area was once home to Susan B. Anthony, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Norman Rockwell, and Arlo Gurhrie, among others. So there is a surprising number of things to do for such a sparsely populated area.

Click here to see an interactive map of the places we visited, plus some of the others that are available. Later I'll post more about what we saw.

The quintessential small American town = Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Norman Rockwell, Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas (1957-1967)
Image courtesy the Normal Rockwell Museum.

1 comment:

  1. I love the Norman Rockwell museum and have gone a couple of times now. They are constantly cycling their collection, so you get to see different paintings each time.

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