What's with Roton Point? On the point just west of the village, where the land runs out into Long Island Sound, there once stood one of the great shore resorts of the region. From the 1880s into the years around the Second World War, Roton Point drew summer crowds by steamboat and trolley to a beach, a carousel, a roller coaster, and a grand dance pavilion — a Coney Island of the Connecticut shore. Most of it is gone now, the grounds long since a private association, but in its day Roton Point is how the whole country first learned to spend a summer Sunday in Rowayton.
European settlement came by way of Norwalk, founded in 1651, and the western shore where the Five Mile River met the Sound became a village of rocky farms and small wharves. For two hundred years it was known simply as Five Mile River — a working hamlet of shipwrights and oystermen, with a shipyard at what is now Pinkney Park and, by 1848, a hotel for the summer boarders who had begun to find the shore. The streetcar arrived in 1890, stitching the hamlet to South Norwalk and opening the summer trade wide.
Why People Visit Rowayton
Rowayton offers the Connecticut shore at its most relaxed and characterful — sailing, art, and quiet beaches in a village that has kept its scale and its salt-water soul. Visitors come for the harbor and the shore parks and stay for the unhurried, distilled village that Norwalk keeps at its edge.
