The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Want to cool off at the beach? Good luck with that
Summer Saturdays when I was a kid we would get up before dawn and load into the car for an hour-long ride. Our destination — the beach.
Why so early? My father wanted to get to Hammonasset beach before the state park opened so that he wouldn’t have to pay the entry fee. It couldn’t have been much back then, $1 a car comes to mind. He was cheap, oh yes, but mainly he wanted to make a point that the beach should be free.
So the sun would come up as my parents and their three daughters puttered along from Plainville to Madison, then lug our blankets and cooler of sandwiches to the Meig’s Point end of Hammonasset and wait and wait for cousins, aunts and uncles, also from mid-Connecticut, to arrive.
I can still hear my Uncle Harry singing “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” floating on his back in the gentle waves as we kids held onto his toes. When Auntie May-May’s family came from New Britain around noon, we’d say smugly to ourselves that they missed the best part of the day — the whole morning.
We grew to love the beach, the sand, the salt, the smells; the waves’ rhythm an ancient call and part of our DNA.
Those summer memories are on my mind this week for two reasons.
Hammonasset Beach State Park, two miles along the Long Island Sound, opened 100 years ago, on July 18, 1920, and immediately became popular. More than 75,000 visitors came that first season, according to state history. (The Native American word Hammonasset means “where we dig holes in the ground,” and though it first referred to farming along the Hammonasset River, today it conjures images of kids scooping and creating sand castles.)
In a typical summer — and this summer is anything but typical — about 1 million people will come to Hammonasset beach.
Now because of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing requirements, parking is limited to 25 percent of capacity at all state parks. Once that level is reached, others are turned away. It’s impossible to know what time of day that will happen, so check this website before leaving home.
If a state park is closed early, you’re mostly out of luck for getting to the beach on the weekend in Connecticut — if you don’t live near one.
That’s the other reason triggering long-ago beach memories: the news this week that some towns and cities along the shore are closing their beaches to out-of-towners.
While my head understands the reasoning, my heart feels this is somehow ..... wrong.
Places, such as Norwalk, want to give residents first, and only, dibs on its beaches where social distancing limits the capacity. I get that. If I lived in Norwalk, then I’d want to be able to go to my taxsupported beaches. Mayor Harry Rilling is banning out-of-towners on weekends all the way through Oct. 15, though beaches will surely be less crowded after Labor Day.
I live in Bethel. I am welcome to come spend money at the SoNo Collection mall in Norwalk, or get take-out at any restaurant, but don’t even think about cooling off at Calf Pasture or Norwalk’s two other public beaches.
Any of Fairfield’s five town beaches? Parking is only for town residents with stickers; no walk-ins on weekends. Compo Beach in Westport? Good luck if you could have gotten a pre-pandemic $775 season’s pass for outof-towners; now only Westport and Weston resident with “parking emblems” can enjoy the beach. And so on along the coast.
This all feels exclusionary.
If you live in a coastal suburb, you can cool off in the surf. If you live in a land-locked city, forget it.
It’s an uneasy throwback to earlier times in our state.
By the late 1960s, all but seven of the state’s 253 miles of coastline and 72 miles of beach were either in private hands or limited to town residents, wrote University of Virginia history professor Andrew W.
Kahrl.
Enter Ned Coll, a Hartford activist who founded The Revitalization Corps and dramatized the lack of open beachfront by bringing loads of inner city Black children to “invade” the beaches.
“For several years starting in 1971, Coll gathered busloads of North End kids and drove them to beaches from Old Lyme to Madison to Greenwich, challenging officials to keep them from the cooling waves,” veteran journalist Tom Condon wrote in a 2018 article for ctmirror.org. “Coll walked the whole shoreline to garner publicity for his efforts. He landed on a couple of beaches in a rubber raft — the land below the high tide line is open to the public.”
Condon knew what he was talking about. As a reporter for the Hartford Courant, he was there and saw people’s reactions.
“I was mildly amused to see some defensive — to put it mildly — owners and officials get their britches in a twist for an afternoon,” Condon wrote. In his article, he also was reviewing Kahrl’s book, newly published at the time, “Free the Beaches, The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline.”
“What Coll really wanted to do,” Condon said, “was shake up the suburbs and get them involved in the cities, to attack ‘the passive prejudices and corrosive indifference toward the black urban poor among New England’s white middle class.’”
How ironic that this summer — when the horrified reaction to the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day at the knee of Milwaukee police and the Black Lives Matter movement are finally awakening people to systemic racism — is the scorching hot summer when local beaches are closed to those who don’t live there.
What Coll could not accomplish in the ’70s, two decades later a Stamford law student did. Brenden Leydon sued after he was stopped from jogging on Greenwich Point Park town beach. Coll was a witness; Leydon won. In 2001 the state Supreme Court ruled that Connecticut municipalities cannot ban out-of-towners from their beaches — except in extreme circumstances.
We are in “extreme circumstances” now and no one wants unsafe, crowded beaches. But towns should look for a more equitable solution.
I’ll end on an upbeat note. Connecticut State Parks — including Hammonasset beach — are free to anyone driving a car with a Connecticut license plate. Since 2018, a $5 annual fee is added to vehicle registrations to pay for the parks’ upkeep instead of charging entry fees.
My father would feel vindicated.