“Winchester Lately” Hammonasset Beach State Park, Madison, Connecticut
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s hard to beat shooting the Connecticut coast during wintertime. Many of the coastal elements that I’m interested in working with as a landscape photographer are unchanged whether it’s 35° F or 85° F, whether I’m shooting in short sleeves or bundled beneath three layers. There’s one big difference, though: when those cold winds are blowing I usually have the place to myself… an opportunity which is rare at most of Connecticut’s popular state park seashores during warmer weather!
I produced this piece, “Winchester Lately”, just this past weekend during a cold January morning. But let’s face it: if I told you this had been taken in August, you’d have no reason believe otherwise, right?
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“Savin Dawning” Bradley Point Park, West Haven, Connecticut
Beach grasses are deathly still with snow at their stems and frigid winter air creeping forth from Long Island Sound. But the incendiary spectacle upon the horizon, where the sun is just beginning to shine forth through the clouds, offers at least the prospect of some warmth come late morning.
Connecticut’s municipal beaches are usually not exceptionally well-known in the state outside of their host town or county, but owing to hundreds of years of recorded history along the coast, almost all of them were the backdrop for at least a couple interesting stories.
“Southwest Ledge from Afar” Southwest Ledge Lighthouse as seen from the shores of Bradley Point Park, New Haven, Connecticut
Bradley Point, for example, was for a short time the home of famous Beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac. His father had moved the family from Massachusetts to West Haven, Connecticut after securing work. Though their first dwelling in the city proved deplorably unfit, they finally settled on renting a cottage on the West Haven shoreline at Bradley Point. Biographer Paul Maher says of Kerouac’s time there that “he swam in the Sound, labored over his writings, and prepared for his sophomore year of college while his mother worked hard to make her new house a home.”
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Early May doesn’t generally present the most welcoming beach weather in Southern New England, but it’s far preferable to the biting, 15° F winds that I encountered at McCook Point before dawn during the first days of March this past winter.
Found along the Connecticut coast on the sandy shores of Niantic, McCook’s Point had been known instead as Champlain’s Point prior to the mid-1800s. It wasn’t until a theology professor out of East Hartford, Reverend John James McCook, began spending summers there in 1869 that the proverbial seed was planted for a change of names.
What probably cemented McCook’s name on the point was a legal battle with state government in the 1920s. A small, state-operated tuberculosis hospital had been established nearby and it quickly became clear that a larger facility was required. McCook and his family refused to sell their 16-acre property to accommodate the hospital expansion and even fought the state in court when an attempt was made to condemn the property. The McCook family prevailed and the state abandoned its efforts in 1930, just three years after old John McCook passed away.
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Five Mile Point Lighthouse, built from countless tons of locally quarried brownstone, was completed in 1845 to replace the original wooden lighthouse established on Morris Cove in 1805. But long before even that early lighthouse was built, the shores of this cove hosted a desperate battle which is remembered to this very day.
In 1779, as the American Revolution raged, British troops landed on this beach to launch an invasion of New Haven. Patriot forces fought back and the British are said to have buried their fallen troops quite close to where the lighthouse would eventually be constructed decades later. Although the redcoats managed to push forward and burn several houses and farms, they suffered such heavy casualties that the decision was made to abandon their advance on the city.
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Windswept coastal grasslands crowd a weathered boardwalk which ushers us towards the beachfront along the Connecticut coast. Out over the ocean, morning clouds stage a stirring display.
While the unspoiled beauty of coastal areas like Milford Point may be the prime draw for many sightseers, the most essential purpose of these protected beaches lies in providing breeding habitat for migratory shorebirds.
By the mid-1900s, some 120 million acres of waterfowl habitat had been lost to development in the United States. The federal government highlighted that very figure in a 1941 report, noting that “for many years most species of migratory game birds have been in a precarious situation”. Perhaps ironically, bird hunters of the era brought some of the earliest attention to problem, reporting dramatic reductions in available game compared to earlier decades. Luckily, these observations and subsequent studies spurred many early efforts to create a system of refuges to accommodate migratory birds, lest they decline to extinction. The work continues today.
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In my newly-released piece, “West Beach Rugged”, the morning sun climbs through heavy, humid air and feathery clouds, ushering in one of the final days of summer along the Connecticut coast. Gentle waves lap at a sandy seashore nearby, breaking upon scattered boulders encrusted with barnacles and seaweed.
The unseasonably warm weather we’ve been having so far this March has me daydreaming about warm beaches already, but I’m sure we’ll get a reality check soon enough!
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Beneath pastel skies streaked with soft clouds, the waters of Long Island Sound gently rap at tidal flats and salt grasses of Old Greenwich. To the east, further stretches of the Connecticut coast loom on the horizon against the sublime glow of morning twilight.
Indigenous people of the Asamuck and Patomuck tribes gave this low-lying peninsula on the west end of Long Island Sound its earliest name: “Monakewego”. If the 17th-century settlers of the Connecticut Colony once knew what that term meant, any record has been lost over the centuries. Throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, the spit of land was part and parcel to a modest community at what is today known as Old Greenwich.
Throughout those early days, it would’ve been hard to imagine that the influence of New York City, some 20 miles to the west, would eventually swell to such immense proportions that the coastal town of Greenwich and the rest of Connecticut’s Fairfield County would become one of the most affluent places in the nation.
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When it was announced in late 2014 that Connecticut would be creating a new state park, I was all ears. After all, Connecticut’s diverse state parks are a treasure trove of publicly-accessible scenery which figure very prominently in my body of work. What I couldn’t have imagined was that this latest addition to the park system was, seemingly against all odds, a seashore park of more than 30 acres!
Dubbed “Seaside State Park”, this rocky stretch of beach where Long Island Sound laps at the Waterford mainland stands as the first new state-owned park along the Connecticut coast in more than two generations! That’s a big deal, folks, and I’ve been eager to experience this new place first-hand. As it would happen, it took more than a year before I finally stepped foot in the sand at Seaside State Park, but my visit earlier this month assured me that this unique landscape is a fitting addition to a state park system that boasts a marvelous range of variety. While you absorb my new work from Seaside, I invite you along to explore the origins and folklore behind this storied place.
If the creation of a new coastal state park in Connecticut is novel and a bit unusual in this day in age, then perhaps its a fitting installment in the equally novel and unusual history of Seaside State Park. While the crashing waves and panoramic views of the Sound rank high on the draws of this park, one cannot help but notice the massive, abandoned sanatorium that stands sentinel on higher ground just a stone’s throw from the water (see “Dunes and Echoes” above). The derelict building is at once beautiful and foreboding, its vacant windows peering out over the water from a gothic edifice which bears an eerie resemblance to the prototypical haunted mansion.
Known as “The Seaside” when it was constructed in the early 1930s on a magnificent beachfront in Waterford, the sanatorium would serve as Connecticut’s much-needed facility for treating children afflicted by tuberculosis. A noble cause for certain, but one which the medical knowledge of that era was ill-quipped to serve.
The treatment being administered was known as heliotherapy and consisted of little more than ensuring that the disease-stricken children got several hours of exposure to sunlight and fresh air each day. Coastal environments, of course, were the ideal place for such a treatment regimen. But while heliotherapy may certainly have succeeded in improving the morale of the young patients, it did next to nothing in the way of curing the terrible disease or significantly improving outcomes.
Thankfully, by the late 1940s, an antibiotic was developed which finally gave the medical community an effective tool to combat and cure tuberculosis. As the use of this revolutionary new medicine spread, mortality rates dropped off dramatically. The old concept of heliotherapy was abandoned and The Seaside sanatorium ceased to be medically relevant. The last tuberculosis patients to walk through its doors left in 1958.
The building was quickly repurposed as a healthcare center for the elderly, a provisional use which would last only a handful of years. It was converted to the Seaside Regional Center for the Mentally Retarded in 1961 and would go on to house and treat patients with intellectual disabilities right up into the 90s.
Popular folklore suggests that this final appropriation of The Seaside was concluded in 1996 when it was quietly decided by state officials that decades of terrifying patient abuse and a peculiarly high mortality rate among its residents simply had to be stopped. Yet, after conducting my own cursory research, I’ve come to the conclusion that these claims are likely to be false or, at best, wild exaggerations. It is true that, in the early 1970s, some current and former staff members claimed that the facility superintendent, Fred Finn, was mismanaging funds and abusing patients. Eleven employees of the facility testified against him at an official hearing. But the matter was complicated by the fact that many facility employees vouched for Finn; even the parents of many patients supported him, insisting that he was doing an excellent job. The official investigation considered the evidence and ultimately cleared the superintendent of all allegations.
And while we can speculate as to whether or not Finn was really innocent, the fact remains that this seems to have been the only real scandal involving The Seaside during more than 35 years of otherwise satisfactory operation as a mental health facility. Its closure in 1996 had nothing to do with sinister activity, but was instead the result of layoffs and budget cuts as the governor shifted the focus of mental health care from regional institutions to community-based solutions. So where did all of these stories of terrorized patients and staggering death tolls come from? Well, I guess that every “haunted sanatorium” needs a scary story, even if that story needs to be mostly fabricated. The vast majority of deaths at the facility occurred during its earlier use with tuberculosis-afflicted children who were claimed by a terrible and largely incurable disease; far from being abusive, doctors of that era were doing everything they possibly could.
You may remember that I described The Seaside earlier as both beautiful and foreboding. It’s beauty, in particular, is a point of great concern among those who feel that the crumbling building ought to be preserved in one way or another as part of this new state park’s development. The architect was none other than Cass Gilbert, a fairly famous individual whose designs include the prestigious G. Fox Building in Hartford, Connecticut and even the US Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. While The Seaside may not have been among his more famous creations, it certainly bears his characteristic refinement and attention to detail. But with the buildings having sat unused for almost 20 years now, its difficult to say if a rehabilitation project is feasible or cost-prohibitive.
As yet, no firm plan has been established for how Seaside State Park will be developed in the coming years. The fate of the old sanatorium is just as uncertain as that of the earliest tuberculosis patients that it housed so long ago. But the seashore itself is, and will probably remain, much like it has been from the beginning. As the waters faithfully rap away at rock jetties during sunrise, its easy to be lulled into a contemplative tranquility by the uncomplicated beauty of The Sound. But we must not forget the droves of unfortunate souls who once called The Seaside home. These were the reassuring summertime vistas to which they arose in the morning… this was the tempestuous coast whose storms sometimes kept them awake at night. For some 60 years, this place was the abode of those who were dealt a rough hand; most have been forgotten, but they remain bound up in these sands and waters and their stories are whispered in the hush between breaking waves.
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Remember how cold it was last winter? Or did you already block that memory out? Well, my latest releases were produced during the waning weeks of winter this year along the wind-swept coastline of Old Saybrook and feature the Saybrook Breakwater Lighthouse perched on the far end of a serpentine, granite jetty beneath a twilight sky streaked with foreboding clouds.
Known sometimes as the Saybrook Outer Light to distinguish it from the Lynde Point Lighthouse on the mainland nearby, the Saybrook Breakwater Light was built in 1886 roughly 1/3-mile offshore at the terminus of a long, granite breakwater. The massive stone jetty had been created to prevent the formation of dangerous, shallow sand bars at the mouth of the Connecticut River which had plagued shipping traffic for years.
I titled one of my new works (at top), “Keeper Woods’ Lament”, based upon the story of Joseph Woods, who was tending the lighthouse in 1917 when he submitted a grievance to officials regarding the rigors of his job. “I am on duty twenty-four hours out of twenty-four hours and the only relief I get is when my wife begs of me to rest while she stands watch.” All he asked was that an assistant be posted at the lighthouse so that he might have time to relax on occasion. His request was denied.
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In my new piece, “Judson’s Post”, I bring you to the shores of Long Island Sound where calm waters lap at boulders in the shallows. Facing inland, we see the Stratford Point Lighthouse standing tall upon the distant hill behind a seawall of piled rip-rap and a white picket fence. Although the current Stratford Point Light was guiding sailors near the mouth of the Housatonic River since the late 1800s, the history of Stratford Point as the site of a maritime beacon stretches back much further.
Stone and metal lighthouses generally came about beginning in the early 1800s, replacing a generation of earlier wooden lighthouses that had been built during the later 1700s. But colonists and merchants had been navigating the New England coast since the early 1600s and, in an era before lighthouses, they too needed some means of avoiding coastline hazards or locating harbors from afar.
During the earliest colonial years, a great bonfire was lit on Stratford Point during foggy nights whenever a ship was expected to arrive. At some point, an iron hearth was attached to the top of a tall post, elevating the fire above ground level for increased visibility. It wasn’t until 1822 that a true, 28-foot wooden lighthouse was built on Stratford Point. And if that sounds like a long time ago, recall that the settlement of Stratford was already almost two centuries old at that point. The current cast-iron tower replaced the decaying wooden lighthouse in 1880 and has stood on Stratford Point ever since.
I titled “Judson’s Post” (photo at top) in honor of Theodore Judson, who was in his early 30s when he assumed the duty of lighthouse keeper at Stratford Point in 1880. He was just shy of age 70 when he finally retired in 1919, having manned the lighthouse for almost four decades. A truly impressive run by anyone’s standards!
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In my new piece “Lynde Point Seascape” (above), the Lynde Point Lighthouse stands sentinel on Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Connecticut River, its column of neatly stacked windows peering towards the sea from a 65-foot brownstone tower. Foreboding clouds loom overhead, while large slabs of wave-thrown ice batter the nearby seashore.
This is just one of my newly-released works featuring the stately Lynde Point Lighthouse in the context of a frigid New England winter. Built in 1838 to replace an older, dilapidated wooden tower, the present beacon at Lynde Point has remained an active aid to maritime navigation for more than a century and half, even as the land surrounding it transitioned from farms and pastures to lightly-wooded suburbs and sizable beachfront cottages.
But just as captivating as the lighthouse during my visit were the chunks of ice drifting on the waves and settling upon the seashore. From jewel-like bits to massive slabs more than 10 feet across, these bergs drifted down the Connecticut River from the state’s interior, only to quickly wash up on the seashores at either side of the river’s mouth.
Days tossing about in the ocean water left some of the ice slabs beautifully polished, their burrs and edges having melted away to reveal a smooth, glassy finish which glistened even in the faint light filtering down through the heavy morning clouds.
As you can see in my panoramic piece, “Saybrook Vista”, the conditions on this particular morning didn’t exactly offer stunning sunrise colors or dramatic side-lighting. Instead, I was offered some moody, exquisitely-textured cloud cover and only the faint, cool-toned light that was able to filter through. Sure… it’s not the sort of glorious morning that makes you want to lay out a beach towel and stay the afternoon. Then again, would we really expect that sort of idyllic day in late Winter? This is true New England in all of its elemental glory; these are the somber, overcast skies and cold, wind-swept beaches that were part of everyday life for Connecticut mariners of old.
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“It is said that time is unrelated to everything else. It goes on and on, unnoticing of our actions, our falls, our triumphs. Who’s to care then, if time does not remember us? It flies by, fleeting, inattentive and disinterested in any occupants of this earth. What are we, then, if time thinks so little of everyone it passes?”
—Alexia Purdy, “Disarming”
Abandoned places possess a unique allure for those who are receptive to the stories that resonate in the hollows of their vacant buildings and crumbling foundations. Few places in Connecticut so strongly embodied the “post-apocalypse” aesthetic as Pleasure Beach, a deserted amusement park and cottage village which stood vacant for nearly two decades at the end of a two-mile peninsula on Long Island Sound. My newly-released work features the quiet landscapes of this ghost town and seeks out untroubled beauty in a place where the rhythms and sounds of mankind have been extinguished.
Beginning in the late 1890s, Pleasure Beach emerged as a modest amusement park and beach cottage community situated at the end of a long peninsula that extended westward from the coast of Stratford into Bridgeport Harbor. Although it was initially accessible only by ferry, a swing bridge was eventually constructed in the 1920s which connected Pleasure Beach to the coast of Bridgeport and permitted easy access for pedestrians and automobiles alike.
The next five decades proved tumultuous for the amusement park. Throughout the years, it would enjoy periods during which it was wildly successful, only to grow run-down and be sold off when shifts in economy or culture led to declines in attendance. But whenever Pleasure Beach reached the brink of abandonment, it seemed that another owner would step up and take the reins for some number of years. When a fire ripped through the park in the 1950s, its days as a proper amusement park were numbered, but a beer garden, dance pavilion, playhouse and other disparate attractions remained and continued to draw some visitors for another two decades. When the dance pavilion succumbed to fire in the 1970s, and with the rest of the structures beginning to show their age, the 80-year legacy of Pleasure Beach finally came to a close.
For owners of the dozens of cottages adjacent to the defunct amusement park, though, the closure may perhaps have been a welcome source of quietude. After all, they continued to enjoy their seaside properties for another two decades, accessing them via the same old, trusty swing bridge that once serviced Pleasure Beach. But even this lingering human presence would not last. In an all too common scenario for Pleasure Beach, fire engulfed the mid-section of the bridge in 1996, destroying the only road to the cottages. With municipal emergency vehicles no longer able to access the area, the cottagers were evicted. They hauled away whatever of their belongings they could by barge and the entire neighborhood of cottages, alive with summertime joy just a year earlier, quite suddenly became Connecticut’s largest ghost town.
My piece, Dominion of the Gulls, was taken upon the stub of the decaying swing bridge that still extends from Pleasure Beach towards the Bridgeport mainland (the charred mid-section of the bridge was directly behind me). Ever since Pleasure Beach was abandoned almost two decades ago, clever herring gulls have been cracking open clams, oysters and snails by dropping them upon the bridge decking from dozens of feet in the air. Some of my other works above, such as What Remains of the Joy (top) and A Wall Overtaken, portray further ruins such as broken lamp posts and crumbling seawalls which are commonplace along the beaches.
But despite the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the abandonment of Pleasure Beach, there’s no doubt that nearly two decades of isolation from the densely populated mainland has returned this barrier peninsula to a wild state. My pieces, Dawn Over Lewis Gut and Lewis Gut, Tide Withdrawn, celebrate the natural beauty that has persisted at Pleasure Beach even as time and vandalism took its toll upon the structures. For the benefit of the inquisitive, it’s worth mentioning that Lewis Gut is the narrow cove which separates Pleasure Beach and the Long Beach Peninsula from the mainland of Stratford. The term “gut” for a cove or bay always struck me as somewhat odd, though I’ve come to discover that it is in no way without precedent.
For sure, the story of Pleasure Beach could’ve ended with its abandonment in 1996, but both Bridgeport and Stratford have shown renewed interest in the land over recent years. For its own part, Stratford went ahead and demolished the dozens of decaying cottages adjacent to Pleasure Beach back in 2011, eventually selling its stake in the peninsula to the federal government for preservation as valuable breeding habitat for shorebirds. Bridgeport has gone a different direction, reopening the grounds of Pleasure Beach as a town park. In fact, as of June 28, 2014, ferries began shuttling visitors back and forth between the mainland and the newly-constructed dock on the tip of the peninsula.
Between reanimating the peninsula with sounds of summertime joy and setting aside a large swath as conservation land, one could hardly imagine a more positive direction for the latest chapter in the story of Pleasure Beach. That being said, I would be lying if I didn’t admit at least a hint of regret that Connecticut’s most distinctive ghost town —and, for that matter, one of its most peculiar wildland areas— has suddenly become quite a bit more tame and pedestrian. In this day in age, as Connecticut is further developed and quiet, out-of-the-way places seem to be vanishing, the notion of a modern ghost town of any sort existing in the state seems preposterous. For better or worse, civilization in Southern New England abhors a vacuum and one would think that such a large expanse of beachfront property would have been swallowed up by a developer long ago. Indeed, its remarkable that Pleasure Beach persisted so long in its barren state in spite of the hustle and bustle on the nearby mainland. For well over a century, though, Pleasure Beach has been characterized by change and by ever-repeating patterns of renewal and exhaustion. Seeing this place revived from its ruins may be bittersweet in a certain sense, but its a fitting addition to the saga of Pleasure Beach.
For those who are curious, the photographs seen here were produced in March 2014, roughly three months before Pleasure Beach was reopened for the first time in 18 years.
