Site of Alice's Restaurant

Alice's Restaurant — the eating establishment made famous by Arlo Guthrie's 1967 talking blues song — was located in a deconsecrated church on Van Deusenville Road in Stockbridge. The song, a comic epic about a Thanksgiving garbage-dumping arrest and its consequences for Guthrie's Vietnam draft status, became an anthem of the counterculture era and is still played on Thanksgiving on radio stations across the United States.

The original church building was later converted to private use. A nearby plaque marks the connection. For Arlo Guthrie fans, the area around the original site is a pilgrimage stop; for everyone else, it is a pleasant reminder that beneath Stockbridge's Norman Rockwell surface, the 1960s happened here too.

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Arlo Guthrie's 18-minute 1967 song 'Alice's Restaurant Massacree' is based on a real Thanksgiving arrest in Stockbridge in 1965. Guthrie was arrested by the local sheriff for illegally dumping garbage — because the town dump was closed for the holiday — and the absurdist legal proceedings that followed became the song. The officer who arrested him, Officer Obie, became a Berkshires legend.

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