What Makes for a Perfect New England Summer Town?
Summer Cottages and Beaches, Old Money and New Money
All photos by Muffy Aldrich
There are so many summer towns that dot the New England coast. Summer towns, or villages, or neighborhoods. Or enclaves1. Or islands.
In some cases, these communities’ summer populations are twice or more their winter population. In other cases, that ratio is a bit less, tamped down by a gentrification of sorts, as more people move in year-round.
What is Critical to a Summer Town?
So what makes for a perfect summer town?
Sometimes there is just a feel and it is hard to pinpoint exactly what gives one that feel. We’ll call it charm.
But this is the result of a combination of factors. And even as so much about them changes and evolves over the generations, as most things do, at varying rates, some factors mostly stay the same.
And sometimes knowing the specifics can help a community to protect and preserve mightily certain touch points, while gently improving and growing others.
My Town
I was organizing these photos that I took not too long ago in town, the same town in which I have lived for nearly all of my life. It is a lovely summer town on the Connecticut shore. My town is large enough (just under 20,000) to not be too small, it is upscale and incredibly well managed, clean and safe. And I have watched shift to ever more appearing to be a legitimate year-round town. But in its DNA, it is still a summer town.
For me, these photos summarizes a lot of what makes a summer town a summer town.
The Beaches are the Heart
The sine qua non that most defines a New England summer town is that the beaches are the thrumming heart of the community.
Yes, there are town greens with white congregational churches. There are downtowns with stores (even if too few hardware stores and too many liquor stores), and school campuses (private and the others). In most cases this list would include golf courses, but in my town, the golf course is barely a stone’s throw from the water.
But the real action is, especially in the summer, where the lands meets the sea.
