pleasure beach

A middle-class Hamptons is vacated on Town's orders

By Alison Leigh Cowan

June 6, 2007 - New York Times

STRATFORD, Conn., June 4 — Up and down a sandy road here, hard to find even with a map, residents were emptying their weekend homes as fast as they could on Friday to beat the tide. Cars have been scarce on this scruffy peninsula since the bridge to the mainland burned in 1996. But suddenly, moving trucks, having arrived by boat, were as plentiful as rose hip bushes.

Access to the peninsula has been limited to boat or foot since 1996.

New York has the Hamptons. Massachusetts has Cape Cod. This elbow-shaped clod of earth, nestled between a shimmering bay and Long Island Sound, was the middle-class answer to those rarefied retreats, a taste of the good life at an unbeatable price. “Stratford’s own Shangri-La,” Kent Miller, an aide to the mayor, called it.

It was, indeed. After an 11-year court battle, the owners of the 45 timeworn bungalows that sprang to life each summer on 28 acres at the eastern end of the peninsula known as West Long Beach were under orders to leave by May 31 by the town of Stratford, which owns the land.

“We knew it was a risk,” said Liz Bolick, whose family lives in Greenwich and paid $30,000 for a cottage in 1988, gambling that the city would continue leasing the property. “We figured it was worth the risk because it was such a magical place. It was something out of the 1950s. Our kids were safe. They’d go walking and the moms would all sit on the porch.”

An adjacent 63-acre section of the peninsula — owned by Bridgeport, Stratford’s mainland neighbor — had been home to a longtime amusement park called Pleasure Beach. A theater, a ballroom, a restaurant and an old-fashioned carousel also came and went.

Since the bridge burned, the area has been accessible only by boat or by foot, for those willing to make the long trek across a rocky finger of land that on many maps appears to be underwater.
For residents, that meant lugging supplies without a car, but more privacy. For Stratford, it meant fresh headaches about how to provide services or how to reach residents in an emergency.

Residents sued the town in an effort to have it build a new bridge; the town later countered with eviction notices. Despite the standoff, life on the peninsula retained its languid pace. Days filled with waterskiing, barbecuing and fishing were followed by nights that included a front-row seat for firework displays along the sound. At one house on Friday, a woman in flip-flops said she would miss the Monarch butterflies that descended each September like a thick blanket.

Replacing what they lost, residents said, was out of the question. “It just doesn’t exist,” said Ms. Bolick, a juggler who runs an event-planning company with her husband, a magician. “We’re working-class people. There’s no waterfront property in Connecticut, certainly nothing I could afford.”

This spring, a State Superior Court judge cleared the way for the town to oust the homeowners, some of whom had cottages in their families for generations. The town agreed to give the community one last Memorial Day, to forgive unpaid lease balances and $325,000 in unpaid property taxes, and to absolve residents from having to remove their homes. Residents had until Thursday to pack up for good or forfeit whatever was left behind; the town looked the other way when the moves spilled into the weekend.

“If I had a cottage out there, I wouldn’t want to leave either,” said Mayor James R. Miron of Stratford, who visited Pleasure Beach as a child and said he wanted to keep the area accessible, for light recreation.

“Listen, if you were one of the lucky families that got a cottage, and most of these were passed down through the generations, then you were one of the lucky ones,” he added. “But you could certainly argue that there’s a better and higher use than allowing 45 families, most of whom don’t live here, to enjoy this land at cut-rate prices.”

On Friday, the little strip had the feel of a lost civilization. A deflated volleyball sat outside a crumbling garage. A pirate flag flapped jauntily in the breeze. Street numbers that once guided the letter carrier dangled in midair.

For those who had put off packing till the end, tough decisions lurked everywhere: Grab the bucket of sea glass, the stuff of memories, or more practical items, like the refrigerator?

Over at Robert Sullivan’s cottage, one of the fanciest on the strip, friends were straining to lift a pool table and rocking chairs into a van. They left a case of wine and boat shoes behind. “Whatever we don’t take in the next five minutes is staying,” Mr. Sullivan said.

A former landing craft that once hauled trucks and tanks for the Navy arrived a few minutes past 1 p.m. on Friday, its fourth touchdown that day.
When the vessel was a few feet from shore, its off-ramp dropped like an outstretched arm from the prow and a moving van rumbled off the 74-foot-long deck onto the sand. The vessel cost the homeowners’ association about $2,200 a day. The family who had rented the van would have an hour or two to fill it up and make the return trip. By 2:30 p.m., the onset of low tide would make it hard for the landing craft to approach, and lollygaggers would run the risk of getting stranded or having to squeeze on to the last runs slated for Saturday.

Summer regulars spoke in terms of “would haves.” John Toth, a renter, said “this would have been my sixth summer.” The woman in flip-flops said, “this would have been my 12th.”

Holly Kessing, 36, a Stratford resident, was surveying the exodus with her dog. Her parents rented a West Long Beach cottage for 10 summers until 1981. So Ms. Kessing spent her early childhood exploring the peninsula, begging her parents for rides on the carousel and relishing the remoteness.
“Just barbecuing on the beach and having this on either side of you,” she said, pointing to the water, made this the ultimate middle-class getaway. “That’s exactly what this was, and there’s no place like this anymore.”

Mr. Toth was determined to enjoy the finale without bitterness. “Hamburger or cheeseburger?” he asked a reporter who arrived without notice as he tended a barbecue near Japanese lanterns, which lent a festive air. “It’s not the end of the world.”

Mayor Miron said the town may let Mr. Toth, who lives in Shelton, stay on as a caretaker to keep the buildings, last valued by the town in 2004 at $2.1 million, and land, valued in 2004 at $2.9 million, from being vandalized.

“I’d like part of my legacy to be that I protected this land forever,” said Mayor Miron, who said he would consider selling the property to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, perhaps running tour boats from Stratford’s shoreline to this part of the sound.

But in Bridgeport, which owns about two-thirds of the peninsula, the talk is of something more lucrative than a nature preserve.

“Everyone says a casino,” said Officer Vincent Lariccia of the Bridgeport police, who patrols the area by boat.

“Once people get out here and see how beautiful it is, my hope is they’ll want to fix it up,” he said. “Any other town in the country would die to have property like this. It’s gorgeous.”

 

Disclaimer: This article is featured on designedbreakdown solely for entertainment and educational purposes. Neither the publication nor this website are affiliated with one another in any way. Any photos featured within the article are chosen from galleries of photos on designedbreakdown.com unless noted otherwise.