New York Recentered by Kara Murphy Schlichting

Author:Kara Murphy Schlichting
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Sherwood Island and the Connecticut Shore

In 1914 Albert M. Turner identified 230-acre Sherwood Island as the best site for a state beach in Fairfield County, setting the stage for a showdown between the Connecticut State Park Commission (CSPC) and nearby estate owners who recoiled at the idea of thronging crowds in their midst. Turner knew the Connecticut shore intimately. He knew the rocky beaches of the narrow southwestern Sound, the modest sand dunes of its Rhode Island border, and the omnipresent pungent mud of its salt marshes at low tide. For three months in 1914, he hiked the coast from New York to Rhode Island. Hired by the newly minted CSPC, Turner surveyed the state’s 245-mile coastline for a large, scenic beach well removed from the polluted industrial ports of New Haven and Bridgeport. Turner’s report, one of the first state park surveys in America, became a foundational document of American state park ideology.73 Of the miles Turner walked, approximately forty-five were inside city or borough limits, including roughly six miles of city parks. Turner found seventy miles of the shore tightly packed with private beach cottages and an additional forty miles of large, costly residences. Only ninety miles remained available for state beaches.74

Connecticut’s park commissioners prioritized a state beach program because the majority of the state’s population lived in the state’s somewhat narrow and rolling coastal plain.75 In 1914, the state’s average density was 231 persons per square mile, but along the Sound this ratio reached 529 persons per square mile. Fairfield County’s coastal commuter corridor along the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad (NYNH&H) already housed a quarter of the state’s more than one million residents. “From the date of the first meeting of the Commission it has been plainly evident that the field most urgently demanding attention,” the CSPC said, was the “shore of Long Island Sound. Its popularity for purposes of recreation is almost universal, there can never be any more of it, and the rapid development of the last two decades has left very little of it accessible to the public.”76 The CSPC wanted to open five evenly spaced 2.5-mile-long beaches. Turner identified 230-acre Sherwood Island in Westport, a former farmers’ collective and tide mill site, as the only potential state beach in Fairfield County, the state’s western corner and the eastern end of the metropolitan corridor developing along the Sound.

Turner faced significant obstacles in his search for a state beach site. First, state law privileged private use of the beach over common public use. Connecticut allowed owners of upland property to use the foreshore for docks and other purposes without specific grants.77 Establishing the high-water line as the public-private boundary provided for the public status of the beach. Yet Connecticut’s law of land under water, found entirely in state courts’ decisions, favored riparian owners over public claims to access. Connecticut courts furthermore ignored recreation as part of the public’s right to use tidelands and limited these public rights to only unobstructed access for navigation.

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