The Colony Hotel opened in 1929. It was the tallest building in town, and served as a stopping point for visitors who were on their way up to the Overlook Mountain House. While they stayed, they’d dine and listen to big bands in Colony’s great room.
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We’ve been living in Woodstock since 2006 and have always heard about the old days of Woodstock with great music in multiple venues every night of the week. There are of course, many reasons why things changed over the years, but we truly believe there is still a very large group of people in the area that still want to come out and see quality live music in a great room. The audiences are there if you get the room right.
The Colony is a beautiful building and each time Lex and I went to see music or comedy, we always pictured the ballroom as how, “We’d do it this way.” We simply wanted Colony to be the world-class room it was meant to be—timeless like the Dome in Paris or Tosca in San Francisco. The hope was to make it feel old and eternal, like it’s always been there unchanged, but well-loved since 1929.
The town of Woodstock, along with the vast array of creatives who have lived and worked in this hamlet since the beginning of the last century, has been a little overshadowed and overwhelmed by late-60’s nostalgia. We hope Colony can cut through that and be a place that pre-dates the 60’s experience just as the building does. We want people to get here and feel like it’s the place they’ve been hanging out at forever, the place that their grandfather hung out, and the place that their parents met. It may seem silly but that’s our vision.
We hope our restoration and rejuvenation of the Colony can be a big part of the energy flowing back into Woodstock. Offering the community a sense that new life is coming back to town and folks are going out again. That there’s places to go and eat, drink, see great music and art. We want the Colony to be an anchor of the Woodstock music and art scene and to be the spot where all the artists and bands can come together as a vibrant whole to cross-pollinate, collaborate and create a new experience just as this exciting new Catskill Renaissance is taking hold.
-- Lex & Neil Howard
