The Showman's City
Near Bridgeport Stamford, Connecticut
Walk into the Barnum Museum on Main Street today and you will find yourself in a building that still carries his exuberance in its bones: a Victorian wedding cake of a structure with turrets and a carved elephant on the facade, sitting in the middle of a city that Phineas Taylor Barnum spent much of his adult life trying to improve, publicize, and honestly manipulate into fame.
Barnum was born in eighteen ten in Bethel, Connecticut, a small farming community twenty miles north of here. He left for New York as a young man with big ambitions and bigger nerve, and for decades he lived between Manhattan, where he ran his famous American Museum on Broadway, and Bridgeport, where he built four successive houses and kept the winter quarters of his circus. He named one of his Bridgeport mansions Iranistan, a Moorish palace that burned down in eighteen fifty-seven before he finished paying for it. He built another, called Lindencroft. He built a planned neighborhood of cottages and called it East Bridgeport.
What Barnum cared about, beyond spectacle, was civic infrastructure. When he was elected mayor of Bridgeport in eighteen seventy-five, he used the office with the same promotional energy he brought to the circus. He pushed the city to install gas street lighting. He championed the water supply. He was the first president of Bridgeport Hospital when it was founded in eighteen seventy-eight. He donated land along Long Island Sound, working with Nathaniel Wheeler, the sewing machine manufacturer, to establish what became Seaside Park, an Olmsted-designed public space that Bridgeport residents still use every summer afternoon.
Barnum died on April seventh, eighteen ninety-one, at his home in Bridgeport. He is buried at Mountain Grove Cemetery, just two miles from here. His museum, the one on Main Street, opened two years later, in eighteen ninety-three, and it survived two fires and a tornado before landing on the National Register of Historic Places. It was hit by another fire in two thousand fifteen and has been under restoration for years. The building endures, slightly battered, which feels about right for a man who built a career on the idea that a little damage makes the story better.
