Greenwich's stories run to the shore and the easel. They'll tell you the town took its name from Greenwich, the royal borough of London — which is why it shares a name with so many places it has nothing else in common with. They'll tell you the Impressionists chose Cos Cob because the afternoon light came off the harbor just so, and that the lilacs still blooming at the Bush-Holley House were planted in the colony's day. And every account of the Revolution here circles back to one steep hill and one general who would not be caught. Greenwich's neighboring villages — Cos Cob, Old Greenwich, and Riverside among them — each keep their own corner of that history along the same stretch of Sound.
By the 1890s, painters were boarding the train to Cos Cob and lodging at the Bush-Holley House, a circa-1730 colonial saltbox above the harbor. There John Henry Twachtman taught what are believed to be among the first American Impressionist painting classes in the country, and artists including J. Alden Weir, Theodore Robinson, and Childe Hassam gathered to paint the marshes, the harbor, and the light. Their Cos Cob Art Colony, Connecticut's first, ran into the 1920s and helped shape American art; the house is now a National Historic Landmark cared for by the Greenwich Historical Society. In the twentieth century Greenwich became the flagship town of Connecticut's Gold Coast — wooded estates above the Sound, a celebrated avenue of shops, and an elegance that has always preferred restraint to display.
Why People Visit Greenwich Connecticut
Greenwich draws people who love art, history, and the coast in equal measure. It is the birthplace of an American art movement, a Revolutionary-era town with its founding legend on the seal, and a Gold Coast shoreline of harbors, marshes, and beaches on Long Island Sound. Visitors come for the rare combination — fine-art heritage you can walk through, colonial history you can stand on, and a refined coastal town that wears its wealth quietly, all an easy train ride from New York.
