Newsletter #175 - The Sticker Box
and the Woodstock Message Tree
At the Woodstock musical festival site in Bethel, NY, there is an electrical box covered in stickers.
As an avid sticker collector, I was immediately enthralled when I first came across this box last year.
I don't know about you, but I love stickers.
I've come to believe that stickers might be one of our greatest communication tools. They're simple, yet remarkably effective. They are the perfect analog technology in our digital era.
To me, what makes stickers particularly special is how they blend permanence with impermanence. They're durable enough to withstand the weather for years, but not so permanent that they feel like serious defacement. Each sticker’s message lingers, but does not dominate. It’s a perfect middle ground.
And they’re accessible. From bands to brands to politics, anyone can make a statement through a sticker.
They are communication distilled to its essence: visual, immediate, and unfiltered. In a world where we're constantly bombarded with notifications and alerts, there's something refreshingly honest about a sticker—it just sits there, quietly making its case to whomever happens to notice.
What makes this sticker-covered electrical box even more interesting is its location. It sits right across the road from the former site of the Woodstock Message Tree.
During the Woodstock festival in 1969, the Woodstock Message Tree was used as a bulletin board onto which people attached messages—on scraps of paper, cardboard, paper plates—in order to find friends, leave notes, and share information.
The tree remained a historical landmark until September 25, 2024, when it was taken down due to safety concerns.
I watched the whole tree come down.
It's really sad when we cut down old trees.
I’m not sure how many people notice the Sticker Box, as I like to call it. It stands there, just like the tree once did, overshadowed by the great big field that most people come to look at for a few minutes before getting back in their car and leaving, checking it off their bucket list.
In a way, the Sticker Box is a perfect replacement for the Message Tree. A silent message board where people try to communicate with others who pass through the same location.
Hopefully, decades of stickers will be placed here. And then someday, like the tree, the box too will be deemed obsolete and removed—another layer of our communication history gone and eventually forgotten.
DO YOU LIKE STICKERS?
Consider joining my The Hotline Show Patreon. Subscribe at any level (as low as $4 a month, cancel anytime) and get a couple of stickers in the mail. Plus, other fun stuff. Maybe!
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Kristen Neufeld visited the site of Woodstock '99.
Zach Vitale doesn’t like the sticky residue stickers leave behind.
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Next level product placement.
Count me among the sticker lovers.