Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Great Barrington is a medium-sized moutain town with about 8000 permanent residents in rural Massachusetts. It also happens to be the home of Simon's Rock College of Bard.
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2 Food and Entertainment 3 Local Projects |
Geography
The city is located in the Berkshire Hills and is known for its scenic beauty and natural environment. This location is largely wooded and is part of the Appalachian Trail. Opportunities abound for hiking, mountain biking, paddling, and rock climbing. For skiing, there's Butternut Basin near town, and Berkshire East is an easy drive.
In town, choices for entertainment are limited. The Triplex is a small but pleasant theater that generally shows non-Hollywood movies and documentaries. Helsinki is a beautifully decorated, but expensive, tea house/cafe/bar/club. The Cove is a bowling alley that's usually open until one or two in the morning, and is a favorite hangout for college students. Also in town are a photo store, a few outdoor equipment stores, a record shop (White Knight), multiple banks (Lee Bank and Berkshire Bank), a few coffee shops (Berkshire Roasting Company, Woggafer's, both close early), a bateria dance group, and various other places. Great Barrington also offers a popular used book store, Yellow House Books, and Threads, the local hippie clothing/accessories store.
Food and Entertainment
Being a tourist town, Great Barrington has a lot of restaurants and overpriced stores, but there are some cheaper places. La Choza has the biggest burritos in town (or the state, for that matter), starting at $3, while Baba Louie's serves gourmet organic sourdough pizza. When it comes to Asian food, there is an abundance of good sushi and Thai food. For groceries, options are Big Y, Price Chopper, Guido's Fresh Marketplace (a gourmet foods market, kind of a farmer's market/Trader Joe's hybrid), the Berkshire Food Co-Op, a Latin market, and a few other small food stores. Local Projects
One of the very nice things about Great Barrington is the Railroad Street Youth Project, which is a youth center run by local residents, most in their teens or twenties, and provides a spot for youth to go hang out, have meetings, and work on projects. They just finished a huge grafitti mural in the center of town all about W. E. B. DuBois and his life; it's a project by some local teen artists. Railroad Street also hosts meetings for a local teen GLBT group, Narcotics Anonymous, some other teen groups, and BADD (Berkshire Alliance for Direct Democracy, a local anti-authoritarian group).
