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The new Bethel Woods center is inspiring a mini-gold-rush. Judith Maidenbaum, a Manhattan psychoanalyst and a cafe owner in Kauneonga Lake in Sullivan County, recently paid $100,000 for a handsome Colonial-era house she intends to turn into a B&B, anticipating that the area might finally take off. "No one knew Woodstock was going to be Woodstock," she said.

But the Woodstock ethos remains deeply ingrained. Barbara Hahn, now 70, whose living room is a riot of Hummel figurines, sat with her Shih Tzu, Mickey, on her lap, and recalled being a nurse in the "bad-trip tent." With a grandmotherly demeanor, she recalled as if it were just yesterday how she lifted off from Grossinger's airstrip in an Army helicopter, bearing thousands of tetracycline tablets.

"My first patient dove into shallow water and split his head open," she recalled. "I asked, 'Are you still tripping?,' and he said, 'The trip is over.' "

The festival site has become a Graceland-style pilgrimage stop, its reverential gathering spot the 5½-ton monument erected by a local welder. Duke Devlin, the site's gray-bearded unofficial greeter, who came to the festival and never left the region, waggishly refers to the marker as "the Tomb of the Unknown Hippie."

Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Tulane University, said the site would only grow in historical significance. "It was where a generational wave gathered and broke," he said. "It is the one spot a hundred years from now that will be identified with the 60's."

When Mr. Gerry's foundation bought the site in 1996, a small fraternity of preservationists rallied to protect it. The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation determined that it was "nationally significant" and asked that permanent construction not be placed within the natural amphitheater where the original concert was held.

In deference to history, the museum will look out over the sacred slope. Mr. Barrie and the exhibition team are on the prowl for coveted artifacts, like the yellow legal pads on which the co-producer Michael Lang scribbled the original site layouts.

Some purists argue that the complex should have been completely concealed. "The big preservation issue is, 'What is the true site of Woodstock?' " said Michael William Doyle, an associate professor of history at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., who consulted with one preservation group. "Is it the staging area or the place where 400,000 to 500,000 troops massed all the way to the thruway?"

The end result is "bittersweet," he said.

"The site has been kept true to its original purpose," he said, although it no longer replicates the exact visual experience of 1969. That would be impossible: the Woodstock festival became free when gate-crashers famously dismantled the chain-link fences; Mr. Gerry has miles of elegant split rail.

Indeed, the litany of rules for Saturday's opening — no hibachis or coolers, no lawn chairs at pop-music concerts, only one "factory-sealed" plastic bottle of water per person — has sparked amused contempt among the aging flower children who still populate these hills, their drug of choice now Advil.

"It's the antithesis of the original spirit," said Jeryl Abramson, who with her husband, Roy Howard, has hosted an alternative Woodstock gathering since 1996. "Six-dollar water and no lawn chairs for the geriatrics!"

Blue, 55, whose real name is Robin S. Hallock and who was featured in a 1969 Life magazine article wearing love beads and what she called "three days of mascara," said, "Woodstock was beautiful, pure, sacred and natural." Now, she added: "I picture limousines on one side and us old hippies on the other. It doesn't sound like much fun."

But Country Joe McDonald, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., and whose "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" was an antiwar anthem, said he thought it was "wonderful" that the site would again be used for outdoor music.

"I got no dog with the guy who bought it, even if he is a capitalist pig," he said. "It's not a sacred piece of land to me; the event is sacred. Woodstock happened. It will live on."