After working 15 years as a moving image archivist for a remote Library of Congress facility 70 miles west of Washington, D.C, Andrea Leigh retired in 2023 and moved 490 miles with her two cats from a house in Culpepper, Virginia, to a two-bedroom condo she bought in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Why Pittsfield? Leigh majored in theater arts at UCLA and worked at Walt Disney and the Creative Artists Agency before returning to UCLA to earn a master’s in library science, with a specialty in moving images. Now, she planned to fill her retirement years with the arts.

Pittsfield, an aging factory town of 43,000 in western Massachusetts, 40 miles southeast of Albany, New York, is at the center of both the scenic, rich-in-trails Berkshire Mountains and a world-class culture scene—music, dance, theater, museums. The offerings are so varied and robust that a study by Southern Methodist University ranks Pittsfield 11th in the country for arts vibrancy, just behind Boston, but ahead of such other acclaimed and more populous centers as Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Seattle.

“I never get bored here,” says Leigh, 66, who first visited Pittsfield in the summer of 2012 and was hooked. She currently serves as the president of the Los Angeles-based Association of Moving Image Archivists and had considered returning to Los Angeles with its heavy arts scene for retirement, but decided, “I was done with big city life.”

Pittsfield is one of 25 places honored on Forbes’ new list of Best Places To Enjoy Your Retirement. The roster identifies terrific spots to follow a half-dozen retirement passions: arts/culture, fine dining, lifelong learning, outdoor activities on water, outdoor activities on land, and golf. While we don’t exclude places from the list on the basis of cost (some, in fact, are pretty pricey), eight of our 25 picks have home prices under the national median of $422,000. Pittsfield, which made the list for its arts/culture and outdoor land activities, is the third cheapest place to buy on the list, with a median home price of just $313,000, 26% below the national median.

For your first year. Renews at $135.99 annually

Subscriptions renew automatically. Taxes added at checkout. You may cancel your subscription at any time.

That’s one of the reasons that Anne Stuart and Ken Parker, now both 69, moved in 2024 to Pittsfield from the close-in, pricier Boston suburb of Braintree. She was winding up a long career in........

© Forbes