The Gilded Age and Summer Resort Era

By the late nineteenth century, with its commercial seaport life fading into history, Black Rock became a prized destination for wealthy New Yorkers seeking a Newport-style summer existence of posh cottages and sailing on the Sound. Grand summer homes sprout on The Point at the base of Grover's Hill. 
 
1870 BLACK ROCK BECOMES PART OF THE CITY OF BRIDGEPORT 
With little if any resistance from residents of either municipality, Black Rock was separated from Fairfield and transferred to the adjacent city of Bridgeport, whose growth in manufacturing and shipping was an attraction. As Black Rock lost its historic maritime commerce, it slowly became a primarily residential village. 
 
1874 GEORGE HOTEL OPENS ON BLACK ROCK POINT 
The George was an imposing, elegant hotel on the Sound owned by Bridgeport businessman George Wells, whose life The New York Times described as "almost as interesting as" that of his former boss, P.T. Barnum. As the harbor area turned from marine commerce into a hub for yachting society, the toniest New York yacht clubs began making Black Rock a regular stop for their wealthy recreational yacht masters. Famous sailors such as Commodores Vanderbilt, Gould and Bartram of the New York and Larchmont yacht clubs regularly visited the harbor, and the George quickly became a popular resort destination for the ultra-wealthy. Even Barnum himself built a home on the Point near the hotel. Social events including "hops," clambakes, regattas and daily concerts attracted many guests. 

Black Rock's own Gould brothers built The George in the French Second Empire style, and the hotel commanded the view of the Point for a quarter century. It boasted of its own restaurant, swimming beach, promenade, pier, “elegant stables” and even a “tallyho” horse and carriage to pick up guests arriving at Bridgeport Station on special summer trains from Grand Central. 

Affluent New York families built oversized Newport-style summer "cottages" adjacent to the hotel, and brought small armies of servants to run their homes throughout the summer months while they enjoyed all of the leisure activities and concierge benefits offered by the hotel. The George closed around the turn of the century, with much of the land and cottages bought by wealthy year-round Point families. The George's swimming pier is now the location of the Black Rock Yacht Club. 

 
1875 BLACK ROCK'S FIRST TWO-FAMILY HOME 
The Gould brothers built a two-family, Italianate Gothic home they shared on Seabright Avenue. Demand for two-family homes soon exploded as Bridgeport's factories required more workers. 
   
1877 ONE OF FIRST INTERTOWN PAY TELEPHONE CALLS MADE FROM THE GEORGE HOTEL 
When the telephone was invented in 1876, it was a service available only to the relatively wealthy. Guests of the George Hotel required the latest up-to-date stock quotations from Wall Street, previously delivered by the hotel’s own ticker tape or via telegram. One of the earliest commercial telephone exchanges was between Bridgeport and Black Rock in 1878. Thomas Doolittle “put a telephone on each end and put them in wooden booths” at a cost of 15 cents per call, possibly the first telephone connection between two booths where people could make an individual paid call. Doolittle’s company later became Southern New England Telephone. 

1881 DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE ESTATES ON THE POINT BEGINS 
NY stockbroker Thomas W. Pearsall, and Jonathan Thorne, a wealthy New York leather merchant with a celebrated, lavish mansion on Fifth Avenue, built their seaside estates on the Point. In 1885 they were joined by Gen. Thomas L. Watson, a founder of the oldest banking institution in Connecticut. Watson initially lived in a Palliser-designed home on the Point built by P. T. Barnum, before it was demolished and rebuilt as a grand mansion next to the Pearsall and Thorne estates. Watson’s daughter later built her own home nearby on “The Anchorage." 
 
1883 BURROUGHS HOME FOR WOMEN BUILT 
With a bequest from Catherine Ames Burroughs, The Burroughs Home on Fairfield Avenue was built as a refuge for indigent, unmarried Protestant women. The site was near the Old Indian Field, where Goody Knapp was hanged in 1653 for witchcraft. It later became the core of a 60-acre estate owned by Verdine D. Ellsworth, for whom Ellsworth Street is named, and was later known as James Couch's Mapleside, whose vineyard included 4,000 plantings of Clinton hybrid grapes. The imposing, red-brick building is now a community center. 

1883 HARRIET V.S. THORNE AND HER PHOTOGRAPHY 
A groundbreaking photographer of her time, Harriet van Schoonhoven Thorne was one of the earliest to freeze motion -- as her shot of the 1883 Hurricane in Black Rock Harbor shows. She was active from 1885-1920, a period when male professionals dominated the new medium of photography. Married to prominent NY leather merchant Jonathan Thorne, she worked in a professional photo studio and darkroom at Schoonhoven, their Point estate. She photographed local residents -- especially children -- as well as Black Rock landscapes and the Sound. Grieving after her husband's death in 1920, she renounced photography and asked her sons to dispose of her negatives and equipment. The chance discovery of some of her negatives decades later eventually led to an exhibition of her work at Yale in 1979.