Burning Bridges: The Loss of Long Beach, CT

ong Beach was a small community located on a sandbar between Bridgeport and Stratford in Connecticut that consisted of about 45 cottages and the remains of a small amusement park that had closed in 1958 on the Pleasure Beach section of the peninsula. When the bridge to Pleasure Beach burned in 1996, the city decided that rebuilding it was too costly. The Long Beach residents were stranded with homes that were inaccessible except via boat or a long hike along a sandbar.

The period that followed saw the homes ransacked and burned, turning a once beautiful beachfront community into a heavily vandalized wasteland. Windows were smashed, possessions strewn about houses, and graffiti covered nearly every surface.

The people that lived here deserved better than what they got. The stark evidence of the injustice that had been done – not only by the town but by the people who ransacked the community after the burning of the bridge – is gone now. The homes were razed in 2010-2011 and the sandbar bears almost no trace of the houses that were there. It looked like the land might be sold to developers, but as of 2014 was reopened as a public park and is now a protected refuge for endangered birds such as the barn owl and piping plover.