The Gold Coast and Two Connecticuts

Stand on the Merritt Parkway in Greenwich on an October morning, when the sugar maples and oaks are at full color, and you can see one of the most coveted real estate landscapes in the northeastern United States. The Gold Coast, roughly the stretch of Fairfield County shoreline from Greenwich through Westport and Fairfield and into New Haven County, is the Connecticut that Wall Street built. The story of the Gold Coast begins with the railroad.

When the New York and New Haven Railroad opened through Fairfield County in the eighteen forties, it put Greenwich within an hour of Manhattan. Wealthy New Yorkers who wanted clean air, space, and genteel surroundings without leaving the commuter radius began buying estates along the Sound. By the Gilded Age, Greenwich and Darien and Westport had become the suburban vision of Eastern privilege, shingle-style cottages on hedged lawns, yacht clubs on salt water, private schools feeding into the Ivy League.

The density of wealth in the Gold Coast is extraordinary by any national measure. Hedge funds and private equity firms have colonized Greenwich's office parks. The per-capita incomes in some Gold Coast towns rank among the highest in the United States.

But Connecticut is two states, and the distance between the Gold Coast and the cities of the Connecticut River Valley tells a complicated story. Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, these cities experienced deindustrialization in the nineteen seventies and eighties with particular severity. The factories that had employed generations of Polish, Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican workers closed or moved south.

The tax base collapsed. The schools deteriorated. In nineteen ninety-six, in the case known as Sheff versus O'Neill, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the extreme racial and economic segregation between Hartford and its suburbs violated the state constitution.

Nearly three decades of remediation efforts have produced modest integration and significant political conflict. Connecticut remains, in measurable terms, one of the most economically unequal states in the country, partly because the top is so high.