Westport: The Town That Artists Built
Near Bridgeport Stamford, Connecticut
Westport was incorporated in eighteen thirty-five, carved out of parts of Fairfield, Weston, and Norwalk, and named for the western approach to the Saugatuck River. For its first century it was a modest onion-and-oyster town. What transformed it was the arrival of artists and writers in the nineteen tens and twenties, drawn by cheap farmhouses and the light off Long Island Sound.
By the nineteen forties, Westport had become Connecticut's answer to Greenwich Village, home to illustrators, novelists, and advertising creatives who commuted to New York. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived here briefly around nineteen twenty.
The town became so associated with the creative class that it anchored a whole postwar mythology of the artistic suburb. Today it is one of the wealthiest towns in the country, but the arts infrastructure the bohemian years built: the Westport Country Playhouse, galleries, and studios. All still very much there.
