The town’s second century was quiet and prosperous in the way of Sound-shore towns. The Boston Post Road ran through it; the Stamford Advocate began printing in 1829 and calls itself the oldest business in the city; a steamboat line to New York opened in the 1820s, and the railroad arrived in the 1840s and never left. In 1820 the parish of Middlesex, on the eastern side, broke away as the town of Darien, and in 1830 the dense center around the harbor incorporated as a borough. Then, in October 1868, a young Philadelphia engineer named Henry R. Towne went into business with a lock inventor named Linus Yale Jr., and chose Stamford for the factory.
The city that replaced the Lock City is the one you see from the train. From the 1960s on, Stamford cleared and rebuilt its downtown and courted the corporations leaving New York, and they came; the skyline of office towers along Washington Boulevard and Tresser Boulevard is a product of that half-century. Metro-North’s New Haven Line makes Stamford station one of the busiest stops between Grand Central and Boston, and a great many people who live here spend their weekdays forty-five minutes west. By the 2020 census Stamford had passed New Haven to become Connecticut’s second-largest city, after Bridgeport, and among the largest in the state by land area. It is also, still, a harbor town: Cove Island, Cummings Park, West Beach and the marinas at Harbor Point face the Sound exactly where Turner’s deed said they would.
Why People Visit Stamford, CT
Stamford balances harbor and city — sailboats on the Sound, a downtown skyline, and four centuries of history from Rippowam to the rail line. It is a Gold Coast harbor town an hour from Manhattan, with the water, the parks, and that one-of-a-kind church on the hill. Increasingly it is also a town with a story to tell: the one that was asked to hang its witches in 1692 and signed a petition instead.
