Pleasure Beach Changing Fast

Sunlight breaks through the clouds over Bridgeport as seen from the shoreline of Long Beach West in Stratford.

 

This satellite image from Google Maps shows the thin thread of Long Beach West to the east and the thicker mass of Pleasure Beach to the West.

The barrier beach peninsula known variously as Long Beach West (on the Stratford-owned side) and Pleasure Beach (on the Bridgeport-owned side) has changed drastically in the last few years.

For over a decade after the only bridge burned down in 1996, efforts to revitalize the former tourist attraction stalled.

 

The wooden bridge that used to allow cars to cross to Pleasure Beach burned up in 1996.

Rusted nails stick out of what is left of the burned-out bridge.

But things are happening there again.

In 2009, Stratford voters approved a deal to let the U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife Service take control of their half of the land to restore it to its natural state. Gone are the iconic cottages that once brought so much enjoyment to a few wealthy summer sojourners – and so much consternation to firefighters when conflagrations engulfed some of the abandoned hulks shortly after the vote. As part of the deal, the area was made accessible to residents in perpetuity. This, ironically, has increased foot traffic.

 

Few traces exist of the cottages that were purposefully removed from the beach. However, charred debris lines the beach in the areas where cottages burned to the ground.

Bridgeport, meanwhile, has been working on bringing people back to its half of the land. Mayor Bill Finch said in March a pair of water taxis that could carry about 30 people were on order. At the time, the city expected the service to be in full swing by the 2014 summer season.

To make that happen, Bridgeport has begun rebuilding a pier at Pleasure Beach as well as cleaning up some of the dilapidated buildings.

 

Inside the auditorium at Pleasure Beach. Some parts of the roof and walls have collapsed, and the interior is caked with mold.

In the preceding years, numerous plant and animal species had taken over. Rabbits, turtles, owls, osprey, piping plover, prickly pear cactus, sea lavender – all these and more lived relatively undisturbed lives in the ruins people had left behind. The unchecked growth gave some areas an almost jungle-like feel.

Stratford and Bridgeport may have different visions for the peninsula, but both involve wresting back control of the landscape. And both are moving forward.

Already, a few of the animals are conspicuously absent. The rabbits, which used to be so prolific that one would spot dozens on a casual walk, are nowhere to be seen. The osprey had built their nests atop telephone poles, which they would defend menacingly against anyone who came too close. New poles were built specifically for the birds, but some chose instead to build nests inside the WICC transmission towers.

 

A pole built for osprey nests sits vacant...

...but the transmission towers are in use.

A management plan prepared for the Stratford Parks Department in January gave an extensive listing of the plant species on the beach. Many are invasive, and some were planted by the former cottage dwellers. The report recommends cutting some of the plants down, pulling some up, and using herbicides on still others.

A stand of invasive tree of heaven (ailanthus altissima).

A seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens) in bloom.

 

An evening primrose (Oenothera parviflora) stands tall amidst the surrounding invasive beach rose (Rosa rugosa).

A seaside spurge ( Euphorbia polygonifolia) fans out from the sand.

 

The closed umbel of a Queen Anne's lace (Daucus carota), a common flower on Long Beach West.

A patch of Eastern prickly pear (Opuntia humifusa), the only cactus native to Connecticut and a species of special concern.

Bridgeport has brought in construction materials. An owl that had lived in Pleasure Beach’s former restaurant for years has disappeared. The grass-grown parking lot was torn up, and the boardwalk leading from the restaurant is a skeleton. What was left of the roads are being turned into walking paths.

 

An auger used to drill holes for wooden poles along the gutted road leading to Pleasure Beach's restaurant.

The interior of Pleasure Beach remains largely untouched. Six-foot tall grasses and fallen trees still block some conduits. The carousel and bumper car buildings, which were knocked down seemingly by accident a few years ago, remain piles of rubble.

 

One pathway that hasn't been cleared.

Aside from a singularly appropriate act of vandalism, the ruins of the carousel have not been touched.

It’s hard to say what lays in store for the beach over the coming decades. A return to nature on one side could be offset by a return of tourism on the other. Or the general increase in human activity could force much of the wildlife out for good. It’s also possible that some equilibrium will reestablish itself, though it will by necessity be a managed equilibrium, not the post-apocalyptic-like wilds that dominated throughout the 2000s.

Whatever the case may be, there’s no going back.

All photos by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Groundhog Goes to Work

Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

There is a fenced-in gulley where I work that runs parallel to the parking spaces. This morning, I heard a shuffling noise on one side of my car. I turned the corner and came face-to-face with a groundhog who gave me a curious look and scurried down the embankment.

While the groundhog attempted to bury itself in the brush, I retrieved my camera and crouched to take a picture from afar. By the time I had adjusted the zoom, however, the furry interloper apparently changed its mind about hanging around. Instead, it began heading along the bottom of the gully back toward me.

I thought I was going to lose the shot entirely. Then, just as the groundhog got to the area in front of my car, it rose up on its hind legs and stared me directly in the lens – just long enough for this portrait.

I did not have the chance to ask the groundhog if it was there to apply for a job.

Connecticut's Religiously Intolerant History, Pt. 2

Anglican Infiltration

A sign outside Christ Episcopal Church in Stratford touts the parish’s distinction as the first permanent foothold for the Anglicans in Connecticut. Early efforts to gain followers in the state were met with discrimination from residents and officials.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Part 1: Fairfield’s Last Witch Trial

The rise of Puritanism in England was from the beginning an attempt to reform the Church of England and disentangle it from the whims of the monarchy. Like Martin Luther’s protest against the Catholics in the 1500s, the Puritans felt that religious practices should be based primarily on the Bible; they sought to “purify” the church of bureaucracy and human fallibility.

To some extent, keeping the church pure required keeping it separate from government. Different groups of colonists disagreed over how exactly that should be accomplished.

The Rev. Thomas Hooker sparked one of those disagreements. He arrived in the thriving Massachusetts Bay Colony from Holland in 1633 after fleeing his native England, where he had been persecuted for his Puritan theology.

Hooker set up at what is today Cambridge, but quickly found himself at odds with the influential pastor John Cotton over rules determining suffrage. The church hierarchy in Massachusetts Bay first had to approve freemen through a thorough interrogation of their religious experiences before they could vote. Hooker thought that suffrage should be extended to all freemen.

Hooker took his congregation south, founding Hartford in 1636. He gave numerous political sermons, expressing his view that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.”

Hooker’s sermons would become the basis for the Fundamental Orders, the 1639 document that established a framework for the colony’s government and has come to be recognized as one of the earliest constitutions in the world.

Just because there was an official distinction between church and state, however, did not mean that the two were separate. Indeed, the entire reason for keeping them apart was to avoid sullying the church.

The government’s role was still ultimately a religious one: to produce and enforce rules that shaped society so it best reflected Biblical dictates. Though no individual church was in charge of the colony, Congregationalism was the government-sanctioned religion, and legislation was devised to protect that purity.

Along with the rule punishing witchcraft by death, the twelve Biblically inspired laws establishing capital offenses that were put on record in Connecticut in 1642 included other punishments for religious transgressions. The first two on the list said:

- “If any man or woman shall have or worship any God, but the true God, he shall be put to death. Deut. xiii. 6. xvii. 21. Exodus xxii. 2.”

- “If any person in this colony shall blaspheme the name of God the Father, Son or Holy Ghost, with direct, express, presumptuous or high-handed blasphemy, or shall curse in like manner, he shall be put to death. Levit. xxiv. 15, 16.”

According to Benjamin Trumbull’s 1898 “Complete History of Connecticut, Civil and Ecclesiastical,” lower courts around the colony had already been punishing unmarried adults who engaged in sexual relations or “wanton behavior” by fining the convicted parties, whipping them, or forcing them to marry. Trumbull writes that the General Court approved of these practices, “and authorised them [the lower courts], in future, to punish such delinquents by fines, by committing them to the house of correction, or by corporal punishment, at the discretion of the court.”

In practice, the attempt to keep Connecticut’s religious landscape pure could never fully succeed. Quakers almost immediately began settling in the area, forcing the colony to enact a number of laws during the 1600s to prevent the sect from gaining traction.

By the turn of the century, an even more worrisome development was taking shape just over the border in Rye, N.Y. An Anglican missionary group called The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was set up in 1701 to provide English colonists with greater access to Episcopalian churches and services. Rye was chosen as a strategic entry-point to Connecticut, where the group was especially interested in breaking the stranglehold that the Puritans had on religious life.

The Rev. George Muirson, who headed the Rye mission, took a trip in 1706 along the coast to the edge of the Housatonic River in Stratford, bringing along Col. Caleb Heathcote, an ardent Anglican living in Westchester. They reportedly baptized about 24 people for the church. Muirson and Heathcote were encouraged by this journey, and reported back to England that they expected to have success establishing new parishes in the communities.

They almost immediately ran into trouble, however. Heathcote derided Connecticut’s “odd kind of laws, to prevent any from dissenting from their church, and endeavor to keep the people in as much blindness and unacquaintedness with any other religion as possible….”

A year later, Muirson was invited by some of the people of Fairfield to preach there. He wrote after the trip that the people had been threatened with imprisonment and a fine of five pounds for coming to the sermon. He also noted that the Anglicans in Fairfield had been locked out of the meetinghouse to prevent them from holding services there, despite the fact that they had paid taxes for the building.

Progress came slowly. In Stratford, there were enough Anglicans to start their own church. In 1707, they elected a vestry, thus making them the first organized Episcopalian group in the colony. They asked Muirson to settle with them in the town, but he died before being able to respond.

For the next decade, Connecticut Anglicans languished. Missionaries continued to travel through the area, winning over converts. But there were no ordained ministers residing in the colony, and no physical spaces for Anglicans to meet.

In the meantime, the Puritans saw their vision for a religiously pure society unraveling. The Anglicans’ constant complaints to England concerned Connecticut officials for political reasons. They enjoyed the most autonomous government of all the colonies, having won near-independence through the charter that King Charles II had awarded them in 1662. But they also knew independence could be reversed; it had almost happened in the 1680s, when a brief attempt by English authorities to set up a “Dominion of New England” brought an appointed governor named Edmund Andros to Hartford to take over from the colonists, resulting in the famed “Charter Oak Incident.”

To relieve tensions with the crown, the General Assembly passed the Toleration Act of 1708, which ostensibly gave citizens the right to dissent from the Congregational church, as long as they continued to pay taxes for its support.

In practice, though, the Toleration Act resulted in little tolerance. In 1721, the General Assembly passed a slew of laws to enforce the standards of the Congregational church and prevent other religious groups from gaining further ground. Citizens would be fined if they did not attend an approved church on Sundays. They would be fined if they traveled on Sunday to or from anywhere other than an approved church. They would be fined if they attended any unapproved public gatherings, including unapproved church services. They would be fined for making any kind of disturbance (including loud talking) near a place of worship.

These and related statutes essentially placed minority churches under the authority of the Congregational churches, because these churches controlled local elections, record-keeping and other aspects of law enforcement.

Nevertheless, the tide was turning. In 1722, Connecticut got its first resident Anglican minister. Rev. George Pigot came to the colony, settling in Stratford and splitting his time between that town and Fairfield. Several colonists opened their homes to fellow Anglicans for Pigot’s sermons. The congregations continued to gain clout.

Despite the Tolerance Act, Pigot faced as much discrimination as Muirson and Heathcote had. In a letter to the Secretary of The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts dated Oct. 3, 1722, Pigot wrote:

“I now inform you Sir of what obstructions I met with in my ministry, & they are several, viz.: that of Lieut. Governor Nathan Gold, who is a most inveterate slanderer of our Church, charging her with popery, apostacy, & atheism,—who makes it his business to hinder the conversion of all whom he can, by threatening them with his authority—& who as a judge of the court here, disfranchises men merely for being Churchmen…they have boldly usurped to themselves, & insultingly imposed on the necks of others, the power of taxing & disciplining all persons whatsoever, for the grandeur & support of their self-created ministers.”

In the same letter, Pigot reported on the greatest success – and controversy – his sect had seen so far. The month before, he had been invited to New Haven by the rector at Yale College, Rev. Timothy Cutler. While there, Cutler and several other clergy members at the college declared that they had begun to doubt the validity of Congregational doctrine, and wanted to learn more about joining the Episcopacy.

It was the first time that members of the Puritan clergy had dared to defect. And what a defection! Cutler was one of the most prominent pastors in the colony, in the top position at Yale, the very institution built for the training of the colony’s Congregational ministers.

Later in October, Yale’s Board of Trustees voted to dismiss Cutler and his colleagues. The defectors didn’t mind – three intended to travel to England to receive ordination.

One of those men, the Guilford-born Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson, would return from his trip overseas to Stratford in 1724, taking over for Pigot, who had moved on to Providence, R.I. On Christmas day of that year, the Stratford Anglicans got the gift they had waited so many years for: a wooden church that would come to be called Christ Episcopal Church was dedicated in the town, with Johnson as its resident priest. He led the parish for the next 39 years.

It would be another 60 years before the formal diocese would be set up in Hartford, and even longer before Congregationalism would lose its legal sway as the state-sanctioned religion. But one thing was for sure: the Anglicans were in Connecticut to stay.

- Part 3 (Coming Soon)

Sunrise on the Housatonic

The sun rises over the opposite banks of the Housatonic River from the Stratford boat launch as clouds roll across the sky, refracting the light. The reflection turns the waters a purplish hue, streaked by birds plying the river in the distance. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Community Colleges Benefit Everyone: Letter

A painting in the HCC cafeteria celebrating the college's diversity. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

I wrote this letter to the editor in response to an opinion piece by Housatonic Community College President Anita Gliniecki arguing that cutting funding for community colleges is a proposition that is "penny wise and pound foolish." My letter appeared in the Oct. 26 edition of the Connecticut Post:

Housatonic Community College President Anita Gliniecki should be applauded for her defense of community college funding.

I worked my way through HCC, paying for classes out of pocket with the money I earned at a full-time job. It was only because of HCC's low cost that I was able to afford to go back to school.

This spring I graduated with highest honors, a 4.0 GPA and a broad range of new skills. My efforts paid off in the form of scholarships and awards that allowed me to afford to transfer to the University of New Haven.

My experiences at HCC also instilled in me a strong connectedness with the wider community. Community colleges may be better equipped for this than private colleges, because nearly everyone enrolled comes from surrounding municipalities. They share a common stake in the region.

HCC has grown by thousands of students in the past five years. During every year in that same period, state block grant funding has stayed flat or been cut.

An economic impact study completed in 2008 showed that the college contributes $283.9 million each year to the economies of Fairfield and New Haven counties, far more than it receives in state funds.

Having HCC in downtown Bridgeport has made a huge difference in revitalization. Recall what it was like in 1997, the year that HCC relocated to Lafayette Boulevard.

We should all be grateful for the opportunities offered by community colleges. Short-term cuts will only lead to long-term losses for everyone.

More: Read Anita Gliniecki's letter.

Memorial Day Parade Comes to Stratford: Photos

Stratford veterans wave at onlookers from atop an eagle-adorned float.

Members of the Stratford High band.

Students from Wilcoxson Elementary School carry the fifty states across Stratford.

Cub scouts ride down the street in their pine-box derby racers.

The line of parade marchers passes under the train tracks.

The parade is an advertising opportunity for some local businesses.

Street vendors spend every Memorial Day trekking up and down the streets.

The Creek tribe’s representatives toss candy to children waiting on the sidelines.

The Kickapoo tribe’s bubble machine.

Kids scramble for candy as the parade moves on.

All photographs by Brandon T. Bisceglia