pleasure beach

Pleasure Beach was a small beach community and amusement park with land owned by two neighboring towns located in Connecticut. From 1892-1958 it was home to a rather popular amusement park and was only accessible by ferry or by a wooden bridge for cars. The land of Pleasure Beach was surrounded on 3 sides by water and had a small sandbar connecting it to the mainland which could be walked up for a few miles.

On Father’s Day in June of 1996, a crowd gathered at the local Polka Dot Playhouse both from the cottages and the mainland to view a children’s play. Suddenly someone ran into the building and announced that the wooden bridge to the island, the only way to access the grounds by car, was on fire. Firefighters worked to extinguish the blaze, but the chemicals on the wood to prevent rot actually acted as a fire accelerant. When all was said and done, the bridge was unusable. Suddenly Pleasure Beach residents and those from the mainland were trapped on the island except for rowboats and walking along the sandbar. Long Island donated its ferry for use to allow cars to be brought back to the mainland, and residents were allowed to bring some possessions, but there was a limit to how much they could bring. The town never rebuilt the bridge, and as a result the small community of 45 beach houses sits cut off from the rest of the world to this very day.

There is an ongoing battle between the residents of the cottages and the towns of Stratford and Bridgeport, because while the residents own the cottages, the towns own the land the cottages sit on, and so as the town fights to remove the few stubborn individuals who return to the island and linger, nature has begun to take over the grounds. Streets are cracked and filled with crab grass. Some beach houses have been boarded up by their owners, but vandals have ripped of the boards, broken windows, and basically vandalized and looted anything of value at this point. The state is unsure of what to do with the property- it is cut off from any kind of fire or police assistance and so is unsafe to inhabit, and a few kinds of endangered birds consider the beach to be their nesting grounds.