Two estates shaped the village that visitors know today. In the 1880s the banker and railroad financier J. Kennedy Tod built his “Innis Arden” estate out on Elizabeth's Neck, with a stone mansion, a boathouse, and gardens along the peninsula; in 1945 the town acquired the property, and Tod's Point became Greenwich Point Park — the beloved town beach, with its tidal ponds, walled garden, and holly grove, that locals still simply call “the Point.” Inland, the pond and lawns of Binney Park were given to the village in 1928 by Edwin Binney, the co-inventor of the Crayola crayon, who summered nearby.
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.
