Yale died that December, weeks after the papers were signed, and Towne reorganized the firm as Yale & Towne Manufacturing. The pin-tumbler cylinder lock Yale had perfected, the one with the small flat key that still opens most of the doors in America, was made in Stamford’s South End for the better part of ninety years. The works grew into the largest employer in town, more than 3,000 people after the Second World War, and the city grew around them: Lock City, people called it, with the works whistle setting the hours. Stamford incorporated as a city in 1893, ran town and city governments side by side for fifty-six years, and finally consolidated into one city on April 15, 1949. Yale & Towne began cutting its Stamford workforce in 1948 and closed the plant in 1959. The brick sheds stood on for decades; the neighborhood around them is now Harbor Point.
Two landmarks from either end of that story still stand on the water and on the skyline. Out past the breakwater, on Chatham Rock, the Stamford Harbor Ledge Light is a sixty-foot cast-iron sparkplug tower set on a caisson in 1882, the kind of lighthouse that looks like it was screwed into the Sound. It was automated in 1953, sold to a private owner in 1955, and has been privately held ever since, which is why you can see it from Cummings Beach and Shippan Point but not climb it. In town, the First Presbyterian Church on Bedford Street is Wallace K. Harrison’s Fish Church: a sanctuary shaped like a fish in plan and profile, its concrete walls set with more than 20,000 pieces of faceted glass, dedicated in 1958, with a 260-foot carillon tower beside it. It was named a National Historic Landmark on January 13, 2021.
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.
