When the interstate was built in the mid-1950s to ease longer-distance traffic off local streets, it didn’t skirt the working-class Italian community the way it did more affluent parts of Fairfield County. It cut straight through, like a battering ram.
Houses came down; so did a church. Blacktop replaced Turtle Pond, a favorite place to ice-skate. A rumbling overpass halved Franklin Street, a residential locus for Italian-Americans (who today account for about 20 percent of the population).
“You know that progress has to happen,” said Cathy Romano, whose childhood home, a porch-wrapped wood-frame house on West Ferry Lane, became a dorm for highway builders before being razed for a parking lot. “But it was traumatic.”
But the community, determined to hold Saugatuck together, adapted. Some of the displaced took their dwellings with them; a few ended up on Dr. Gillette Place Circle, so that Victorians are interspersed around an area with Capes and ranches.
Ms. Romano relocated to a house on Saugatuck Avenue built by her grandfather, an Italian immigrant who worked as a gardener on nearby estates. Built in 1920 for $7,000, in an area that has since been zoned commercial, the shingle-sided colonial was a three-bedroom, though two other bedrooms have been added, said Ms. Romano, who is employed as the education director for the Church of the Assumption.
Even the nooks at the base of a column that holds up the highway across the Saugatuck River have been adapted for a handy purpose, as a spot for fishermen to store lobster pots, half a dozen to a stack.
Bustling and dense, with a number of restaurants and some shops, Saugatuck can feel almost urban, especially when compared with leafier, sleepier Westport areas like Coleytown, which has two-acre residential zoning. But there are plenty of people who would rather be squeezed in than spread out.
When Bette Demartini moved to Westport in the early 1980s, she and her husband, Paul, a surgeon, had a house just outside Saugatuck. She regularly shopped in the neighborhood, reached by a stroll across a bridge. It was a convenience reminiscent of Manhattan, where she had lived for years, she said.
Getting around easily by foot also informed her next house purchase: a contemporary with lots of glass and open space in the nautical Saugatuck Shores section. With views of Long Island Sound from its third-story deck, the four-bedroom house cost $875,000 in 1987, said Ms. Demartini, a retired anesthesiologist.
With its houses nearly touching on quarter-acre or smaller lots, Saugatuck Shores doesn’t seem like a place to go to maximize privacy. That was precisely the point, said Ms. Demartini, explaining that trips to the beach at the end of her block usually involve stops to chitchat.
“We didn’t want a suburban lifestyle,” she said. “We wanted something that maintained the air of being an active and social place.”
What You’ll Find
The community is in the midst of an $18 million attempt to ease the effects of I-95’s divisive presence: Saugatuck Center is a mixed-use four-acre redevelopment project undertaken by the Gault family, a local landlord whose roots date to the mid-1800s. (It also operates Gault Energy.) In addition to shops, restaurants and plazas at a Riverside Avenue site, there will be houses — in other words, a residential presence in a longtime commercial district. Six apartments became available in 2011; all are leased, Gault says.
And 21 more, ranging from studios, for $3,000 a month, to two-bedrooms with decks for $5,500, are to be completed in the final phase this fall, said Jim Donaher, the project head, declaring, “We’re going to bring this area back to what it was.” In a community with hardly any housing beyond single-family homes, 27 new apartments amount to a lot.