The village has one gloriously improbable chapter: the first business computer was born here. In the old Farrell estate stables on Highland Avenue — "The Barn," part of the Rock Ledge estate listed on the National Register in 1977 — engineers of the Remington Rand Corporation developed the Remington Rand 409, the prototype that carried computing out of the laboratory and into the office, in the years when General Douglas MacArthur chaired the company's board. The stables became the Rowayton Community Center and Library in 1966; the village kept the story.
Today that character runs to art and sail as much as to oysters. The tradition is old — John Frederick Kensett, the great Hudson River School painter, worked this seascape in his later years — and it is living: the Rowayton Arts Center anchors a creative community on the river, Shakespeare on the Sound fills Pinkney Park each summer, Bayley Beach looks out on the water where the amusement park's carousel once turned, and the harbor stays busy with sailboats where the sloops once raked the beds. The Historic District along Rowayton Avenue, listed in 2009, keeps the shipyard century in plain sight.
Why People Visit Rowayton
Rowayton offers the Connecticut shore at its most relaxed and characterful — sailing, art, and quiet beaches in a village that has kept its scale and its salt-water soul. Visitors come for the harbor and the shore parks and stay for the unhurried, distilled village that Norwalk keeps at its edge.
