Lisa Prevost

<h1>(Living In): Before moving into their Federal-era home in the river town of Essex, Connecticut, Pam and Tom Carroll demolished an addition in back and gutted the interior. The three-bedroom house, for which they paid $500,000, fronts Main Street in Essex Village and has backyard views of a cove off the Connecticut River. But it was in “sorry shape” when they bought it, said Pam Carroll, 57, an interior designer.</h1>

The renovation took a year, and the Carrolls frequently drove up from their home in Southport to check on the project. But it wasn’t until after they moved in, in 2017, that they realized their neighbors on and around Main Street had been watching the construction with more than passing interest.

“They say they just hold their breath when any of the historic houses on Main Street change hands, because really there’s nothing on the books that makes it a historic district that says what you can and cannot do,” Pam Carroll said.

Essex is known for its old New England Main Street, lined with homes dating to the town’s heyday as a bustling center for shipbuilding in the 18th and 19th centuries. The street ends at the town dock on the banks of the Connecticut River, which flows through four states before reaching the Long Island Sound.

The Carrolls’ home still fits right in — they kept the original front facade intact. And they’ve quickly found community by joining the Essex Yacht Club, a short walk from Main Street.

“Essex is a really good location for boating: It’s very protected because we’re up the river a little ways from the storms,” Pam Carroll said. “But it is so easily accessible to zip right down to Long Island Sound, and a super easy run over to Shelter Island, Sag Harbor and the Hamptons. On the river, there’s Hamburg Cove, just opposite Essex. People go in there and drop anchor, hang out and barbecue, paddleboard.”

Nancy Tela is hoping to take crewing lessons now that she owns a home in the village. A real estate broker in Manhattan, Tela grew up boating and is familiar with much of the Connecticut coastline. But she only recently began exploring Essex as a possible remote-work getaway when a “quirky” three-bedroom house with river views came on the market last winter. She dashed up to the open house.

“It was kind of perfect,” Tela said. “It just clicked.”

She closed in May for $600,000, in time to enjoy the property’s wildflower gardens in full bloom.

“The area is incredibly bucolic,” she said. “It’s got a little bit of everything. And you get so much bang for your buck.”

What You’ll Find

Covering 12 square miles, the Middlesex County town of Essex is small, with a population of less than 6,700, but encompasses three villages: Essex Village, Centerbrook and Ivoryton, each with its own ZIP code.

Essex Village grew up around the shipbuilding trade — and continues to support a cluster of marinas, yacht services and boating clubs — while the other two villages were fueled by industry along Falls River, which crosses the town from west to east.

Now primarily residential, Essex is “one of the few places where you don’t have a main city at the mouth of the river, so it stays very clean and picturesque,” said Colette Harron, a real estate agent with William Pitt Sotheby’s and a longtime Essex resident.

The town’s population skews older, with a median age of 53, compared with a statewide median of 40, according to census data.

Centerbrook is the more commercial section, with a supermarket, service stations and pizza parlors. The center of Ivoryton, once a hub for the manufacturing of ivory products, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as “a well-preserved example of a company town.”

Historic district protections for the town have been discussed in the past but have never received broad support, said Melissa Josefiak, the director of the Essex Historical Society. Yet those who appreciate history often choose to live in Essex because of its historic architecture and voluntarily “maintain their properties in keeping with the historic character of their neighborhood,” Josefiak said.

What You’ll Pay

The median single-family home price for the year ending in May was $380,000, roughly the same as the previous year, according to information provided by Harron.

About 80 single-family homes and 15 condominiums were on the market as of July 7. The least expensive single-family house was a one-bedroom ranch on 1.69 acres for $125,000; the most expensive, at $2.995 million, was a renovated four-bedroom Victorian on Foxboro Point with expansive river views.

Condominium prices ranged from $150,000 for a one-bedroom unit to $539,900 for a new two-bedroom town house. One of the more popular developments is Heritage Cove, on River Road, Harron said. Although it is an older complex, all of the condos and town houses there have water views. “People buy them and redo them,” she said.

Historic homes with preserved exteriors and fully updated interiors tend to sell quickly, especially if they have water views, said Joel Lucas, an agent with Coldwell Banker.

Buyers from New York City are plentiful, particularly because “the property taxes are practically free,” Lucas said, compared with what you might pay across the Sound on Long Island.

Essex Station Luxury Rentals, which opened last year, is the only rental complex in town. The 52 one- and two-bedroom apartments there are fully leased, at rents ranging from $1,595 to $1,895 a month, with 40 names on the waiting list, said Penny Parker, an agent who works with the developer.

“It was tough to get through zoning, because Essex isn’t used to apartments,” Parker said. “But it’s been very well received.”

Essex Village draws tourists to its Main Street shops and restaurants, including the well-known Griswold Inn, which has a Colonial-era tap room with live music and an all-you-can-eat brunch called the Sunday Hunt Breakfast.

Other attractions include the Essex Steam Train and Riverboat in Centerbrook, operated by the Valley Railroad Co., and eagle-watching cruises that depart from the dock at the Connecticut River Museum.

In Essex, most any holiday is an excuse for a parade, including the Fourth of July, St. Patrick’s Day and Groundhog Day. Carroll recalled wrapping holiday presents at home one day in December when she heard music in the distance and opened her front door to find a fife-and-drum band marching up Main Street playing Christmas carols.

Professional theater productions can be seen year-round at the Ivoryton Playhouse, a 250-seat theater that dates to 1911. A farmers market is held on summer Saturdays on the adjacent Ivoryton Green.

Essex is part of a regional school district that includes the towns of Chester and Deep River. Each town has its own elementary school and board of education, and a fourth board oversees the regional district.

There is a regional preschool program for children ages 3 to 5 at Essex Elementary School, which has about 340 students in preschool through sixth grade.

The regional John Winthrop Middle School, in Deep River, serves about 265 students in seventh and eighth grades. Students can learn how to grow and harvest vegetables in an extensive campus garden. Since 2008, the New England League of Middle Schools has recognized Winthrop as a Spotlight School for its record of “effective teaching and learning.”

Valley Regional High School, serving ninth through 12th grade, is also in Deep River.

The Amtrak train from the neighboring town of Old Saybrook to Penn Station in Manhattan takes about two hours, 15 minutes. One-way fares start at $42.

Shore Line East trains run regularly from Old Saybrook and Westbrook to New Haven, where commuters can catch a Metro-North train to Grand Central. The ride takes two to three hours; a one-way ticket ranges from $24 to $30, depending on the time of travel and method of purchase, and a monthly pass is $573 to $589.

Driving the roughly 110 miles to Manhattan on Interstate 95 can take as long as three hours, depending on traffic.

During the War of 1812, Essex shipbuilders specialized in building privateers, privately owned warships used to prey upon British merchant ships. On the night of April 7, 1814, British troops attacked Essex and destroyed 27 of the ships, causing one of the greatest financial losses of the war. The event is commemorated annually with a Burning of the Ships Day, featuring a parade and re-enactments.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/realestate/essex-conn-a-small-town-where-history-lives-on.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Essex, Connecticut: A small town where history lives on

The renovation took a year, and the Carrolls frequently drove up from their home in Southport to check on the project.

<h1>A “tasteless eyesore,” one resident, James Buckner, complained in a letter to the town’s Planning and Zoning Commission.</h1>

“Hideous,” wrote another, Mimi Findlay.

“An abomination in the heart of our village,” wrote Todd Bruno in a letter to a local newspaper.

It’s only a wall, but this slab of concrete has captured far more attention than its builder ever anticipated, or wanted. Perhaps it has struck such a collective nerve because walls are a particularly sensitive subject these days, given the national conversation. Or perhaps it’s the wall’s association with “fakeness,” another sore point for our times. Or maybe, as its detractors argue, it’s just really that ugly.

Stretching for several hundred feet along Park Street, the wall (technically two walls — one along the sidewalk, with an identical one terraced above it) marks the beginning of construction on a 109-unit residential development on a 3-acre site a short walk from the heart of downtown.

Called Merritt Village, the development will consist of four buildings with 59 rental apartments starting at about $3,500 a month and 50 condominiums starting at around $1.2 million, according to the builder, Arnold Karp, president of Karp Associates, based in New Canaan, and a developing partner in the project.

Artist renderings promoting the development online appear to show a stacked stone wall along the Park Street perimeter. But the actual structure, which functions as a retaining wall, is concrete. Its face is textured to look like it is constructed of individual pieces, an effect created by a mold when the concrete was poured. It is this manufactured “faux-stone” look, as the planning commission chairman has called it, that especially irritates critics. In an affluent community that prides itself on appearances, a prominent faux-stone wall appears glaringly out of context to some residents.

“It’s an embarrassment to New Canaan, which has beautiful fieldstone walls all over town,” said Alan Goldberg, an architect who has lived there for decades. “There are patterns that repeat every 8 feet or so. And it’s all uniform in color. It should never have happened.”

Constance MacDougall, in an email to the Planning and Zoning Commission, called it an “insult” to the town’s colonial tradition, “a mind-numbing monochromatic gray cartoon of a wall devoid of any visual element that would give it a measure of compatibility to the landscape on which it sits.”

Robert Thorson, a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut and coordinator of the Stone Wall Initiative, which raises awareness about New England’s historic stone walls, is very familiar with such walls in the area, having led tour groups around the grounds of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, a national trust historic site in New Canaan, to explore the varied mix of stonework there.

“New Canaan has lovely walls,” he said. “It’s a wealthier place than many in New England but the basic backdrop is the same: people living on roads that used to be farms,” and lined with leftover fieldstone boundary walls or stone walls rebuilt in a more upscale fashion.

Those stone walls “are advertising what the land is made of,” helping to create a sense of place, Thorson said. “The key issue,” he said of the new structure, “is where’s the authenticity to our landscape?”

Karp pointed out that there is another faux-stone wall across from a coffee shop and a deli downtown that does not seem to bother people. He also argued that opponents have been too quick to judge, given that construction has only just begun, and that his most vocal critics were opposed to the high-density development from the start.

“I’ve driven by a lot of these peoples’ homes,” he said. “How do I say it? I don’t think they’re the arbiters of design in New Canaan.”

The resident who started the petition to stop the wall, Jack Trifero, has also objected to the scale of the residential project, and is among a handful of citizens who continue to question the approval process. He and others also claim that the plan does not adequately protect an adjacent burial ground, an argument that at one point led to his arrest, along with another resident, for trespassing on the site. (The charges were later dropped.)

The Planning and Zoning Commission has also suggested that the wall is not what its members expected. In a letter to Karp last November, the commission’s chairman, John Goodwin, requested that a fieldstone veneer be put on the face of the wall, which he said is not in keeping “with the drawings that you originally presented as part of your application.”

Karp refused, noting that nothing in the 65 conditions of approval set by the commission mentioned stone for the retaining walls. Adding a veneer now would cost at least an additional $250,000, he said.

After additional discussions with commission members and the town planner, Karp has given some ground, however. In late February, he presented a “more robust” landscaping plan for the wall, to begin this spring, with plantings hanging over the top portion, ivies growing up the lower portion, and mature trees planted on the terraced portion between them.

While he still believes the controversy has been overblown, his aim now, he said, is to “put the matter behind us.”

“I don’t get to critique everybody else’s home in New Canaan,” Karp said. “I don’t understand why everybody gets to critique my project.”

Not everyone is. Dave Prutting, a custom homebuilder, lives directly across the street from the wall, but he’s not upset about it. He opposed the idea of adding a stone veneer, which he said wouldn’t necessarily improve the wall’s appearance, as veneers, too, are a matter of taste. And he is optimistic that expert landscaping might neutralize the presence of the concrete and “salvage the aesthetics.”

In the meantime, he’s made peace with his concrete neighbor.

“Do I love the wall? No,” Prutting said. “But I can accept the wall.”

Since its appearance last fall, a gray mass on one of the primary routes to the compact downtown of New Canaan, Connecticut, has generated a flurry of angry online comments, emails to town officials, and even a petition on the site change.org.

A wall divides a connecticut town

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Lisa Prevost

Articles written by the author

Essex, Connecticut: A small town where history lives on

A wall divides a connecticut town