The railroad-era resort years gave the village its Victorian layer. Through the late nineteenth century the shore filled with summer hotels and seaside cottages, and city families discovered the coves and the sand. The handsome depot of about 1894 — now on the National Register — dates from those years, the tie that bound this quiet corner of the Sound to Manhattan forty-some miles down the line, and the reason the village center grew up along Sound Beach Avenue between the station and the water.
Two gifts shaped the village that visitors know today. In the 1880s the banker J. Kennedy Tod built his "Innis Arden" estate out on Elizabeth's Neck, with a stone mansion, a boathouse, and gardens along the peninsula; in 1945 the town acquired the property, and the point became Greenwich Point Park — the beloved town beach, with its tidal ponds, walled garden, and holly grove, that everyone simply calls "the Point," or Tod's Point. Inland, the pond and lawns of Binney Park were given to the village in 1928 by Edwin Binney, the co-inventor of the Crayola crayon, who summered nearby — the village's second great green space, known for its model-sailboat races and fall color.
Why People Visit Old Greenwich
Old Greenwich offers the Connecticut Gold Coast at its most low-key — a real shore village with a beach peninsula, a pond park, and a handful of streets of shops, plus the quiet distinction of being where Greenwich began. Visitors come for Tod's Point and the Sound, the founding history, and the unhurried village pace, and stay for the beaches, the coves, and the deep-rooted New England feel. It is refined, historic, and genuinely Connecticut.
