Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9412290004
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: G6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. LENGTH: Long
Come stomping into this town looking for trouble, I dare you. The Berkshire hills will roll pleasantly beneath you, Mount Greylock will rise gently on the horizon and the landscape will enfold you in springtime greens, winter-white flocking or a super-saturated autumn leaf scene of reds and oranges. Steeples, porches, red bricks, Colonial columns and clapboard walls will arrange themselves around you. The streets will be neat, the lawns trimmed, the 90-odd buildings of Williams College handsomely historic.
You can't even count on the students for disorder. During my three-night visit to this northwestern corner of Massachusetts last spring, I hiked out to the college's Cole Field and watched the graceful and fierce women of the Middlebury College lacrosse team destroy a team of Williams women, 16-7. After the clock ran out, the vanquished Williams women lay down their sticks, gathered in a circle and raised their voices. Here it comes, I thought, a little enmity, a little nastiness, a little ...
``Nice game, Middlebury!'' they chanted. ``Good job, officials! Good luck, J.V.!''
Good job, officials!? So goes life in Billsville, as its roughly 8,400 residents sometimes refer to it. The energy and menace of Manhattan lie just 155 miles to the south, and the traffic-packed side streets and dense neighborhoods of Boston boil about 140 miles to the east. Williamstown endures at a point three hours' drive from each - culture and nature its twin themes, its commercial core occupying a single city block.
To travelers from west of the Mississippi, Williamstown remains largely unknown, and is easily confused with Williamsburg, Va., another town dating back to Colonial days.
To travelers from the east, Williamstown is a well-known retreat. Some roll in for a few days of fall foliage admiration - a normally spectacular show that has the added advantage of being off more crowded leaf-peeper routes - or for visits to the community's pair of top-flight art museums, or for summertime music at nearby Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The main performing arts attraction in Williamstown proper is the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a 40-year-old series of summer productions headquartered behind the white columns and red brick walls of Williams College's Adams Memorial Theater. Since 1959, when playwright Thornton Wilder played the stage manager in a production here of his own ``Our Town,'' the festival has commanded great attention from New York theater folk and now draws about 50,000 playgoers each summer, about 90 percent of them from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut. The season runs from late June to late August. Tickets usually go on sale in early June, run $11-$30 for most shows and sell out quickly.
Workaday Williamstown is impressive, too, largely for its lack of real-life drama. In the town's last annual report, which covered the year ended June 30, 1992, Williamstown's various local agencies logged just one case of vehicular homicide and 17 cases of assault and battery, against 39,388 library books circulated, 1,144 hunting and fishing permits issued, 30 reports of barking dogs, six stray cats and one raccoon tested for rabies (negative).
With such high culture, low crime and splendid scenery around, Williamstown has grown a bit proud of itself. Though Williamstown is essentially contiguous with the down-at-the-heels, blue-collar burg of North Adams, white-collar Williamstown people seem to view that town at the other end of Main Street as merely a distant acquaintance. The official Williamstown motto, inscribed boldly on a white sign at the end of Spring Street, is ``the Village Beautiful.''
In the center of town, most of the oldest buildings belong to Williams College, which serves its 2,000 students on 450 acres. On Main Street alone, the college offers up the stolid gray tower of Thompson Memorial Chapel (1903), the piercing white steeple of the First Congregational Church (1869), the white columns of Chapin Hall (1912) and Adams Memorial Theater, and the red bricks and white clapboard of just about everything else. On the same street, the city's public library sits in an 1815 building and, a few blocks west of the main drag, the city's first burial ground occupies a hillside. Westlawn Cemetery, home to scores of 18th- and 19th-century gravestones, sprawls above a broad view of the town and distant hills.
The logical place to sleep in such a town is someplace drenched in tradition, and there are many options. Beginning in the middle of town with the Colonial Williams Inn and radiating out into the hills, there are more than 30 hotels, motels, inns and bed and breakfast operations in greater Williamstown, most of them assembled with traditional New England architectural sensibilities. At least three Victorian B&Bs date to the 19th century. I admired them all, and might well seek them out on another trip, but this time I stayed away.
Instead, I lodged at Field Farm, a strikingly modern home on a 254-acre farm about six miles outside town. It's a fascinating structure, full of picture windows, stark planes, rakish angles, blondish woods and modern art. Outside is a tennis court on one side and a big pond on the other. With its metallic door handles and window frames, the house seems very efficient, forward-thinking and respectful of nature, the kind of place Frank Lloyd Wright would put up next to Walden Pond.
In fact, the architect's name was Edward Gooddell, and the home's five bedrooms, each with private bath, are unusually expensive to heat.
Rooms run $90 nightly and breakfast is included. If you're willing to do without a phone in your room or free shampoo, it's a great opportunity to wake up in a sort of hypothetical 21st-century room and look out over an old New England landscape.
Spring Street, the town's principal shopping street, is lined with two-story buildings and handsome storefronts. There's a post office, an antique store, a college casual-wear shop, a pizza place, Pappa Charlie's sandwich shop, a pottery shop, the Berkshire Hills Market, sporting goods and stationery stores, a coffeehouse. Set back from the street, on Bank Street, is the Purple Pub, a student hangout. A block east on Water Street is Water Street Books, the best bookstore in town.
Midway between Spring and Water streets stands the neo-Colonial Williams College Museum of Art, whose collection is strong on American art of this century. (Admission is free.)
But the most prominent museum in town is the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, a short drive from the campus and Spring Street area.
The Clark, also free, was founded in 1955, thanks largely to family funds that came from the Singer sewing machine fortune. The museum's collection, much of it acquired in the 1920s, '30s and '40s by Robert Sterling Clark for his own enjoyment, is dominated by French Impressionists, including more than 30 Renoirs and some Degas, although works from Americans John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer are on hand as well.
by CNB