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.
The railroad changed everything. When the New Haven line put a station here in 1872, the village took the name of its beach and became “Sound Beach,” and the trains brought a new kind of visitor. Through the late nineteenth century the shore filled with summer hotels and seaside cottages, and wealthy New Yorkers discovered the coves and the sand. The handsome Old Greenwich Railroad Station, built about 1894 and now on the National Register, dates from those resort years — the depot that tied this quiet corner of the Sound to the city forty-some miles down the line.
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.
