Daily Nutmeg New Haven — Lines in the Sand

Images photographed by Bob Adelman and provided courtesy of Yale University Press. Image 1 depicts “children from Hartford’s North End play[ing] at the private Madison Beach Club.”

May 24, 2018

By Kathy Leonard Czepiel — CONNECTICUT — Connecticut has 253 miles of shoreline, but in the late 1960s only seven miles of it were accessible to the public. That rankled activist Ned Coll, and he set out to do something about it. The story of a controversial, theatrical, passionate campaign that played out over more than a decade in the 1960s and ’70s is the subject of a new book by Andrew W. Kahrl, Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline. Published this spring by Yale University Press, Kahrl’s book retells a compelling story that many New Haveners will remember firsthand.

The coastline—“land covered by tidal water”—has been understood to be public since an 1892 Supreme Court decision, Kahrl explains. Connecticut law draws the line between what’s public and what’s private at the “mean high water mark.” But beginning in the 1920s, Kahrl writes, developers began snatching up shoreline property, and by 1972 the New York Times lamented, “It has become virtually impossible for a city-dweller to venture into the suburbs and find an inexpensive, pleasant place to swim, sun, or relax within a single day’s drive.”

Lest this seem like a luxury, Kahrl begins Free the Beaches with some context: the beach was one of the “undefended fronts that could be used to challenge broader exclusionary practices”—zoning laws that kept “the poor and people of color” out of wealthy white enclaves. In other words, fighting for access to the beach could establish a precedent to fight for much more.

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