The name caught up with the history in 1931, when Sound Beach was rechristened Old Greenwich — a recognition that this was, after all, the oldest part of the town. Through the mid-twentieth century it grew into the affluent commuter village it is now, a Metro-North ride from Manhattan, its small downtown gathered along Sound Beach Avenue. Yet the colonial homes, the old depot, the Point, and Binney Park endured, and the village kept the unhurried, deep-rooted feel of a place that has been lived in for nearly four centuries.
Through the colonial centuries it stayed a farming and fishing village on the Sound. The Ferris family held Elizabeth's Neck for more than a hundred and fifty years; small wharves shipped produce and shellfish toward the New York markets; and during the Revolution the open water that made the village prosperous also made it vulnerable, as raiders crossed the Sound in shallow “wheelboats” between the Connecticut shore and Loyalist Long Island. It was a modest, hardworking shoreline community, shaped from the beginning by the tides, the coves, and the long peninsula reaching out into the Sound.
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.
