New Canaan, Connecticut

New Canaan is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States, 8 miles (13 km) northeast of Stamford, on the Five Mile River. In 1900, 2,968 people lived in New Canaan, and in 1910, 3,667. The population was 19,395 at the 2000 census. The town is one of the most affluent communities in the United States.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 22.5 square miles (58.2 km²), of which, 22.1 square miles (57.3 km²) of it is land and 0.3 square miles (0.9 km²) of it (1.56%) is water. The town is served by the Merritt Parkway, and by a spur line of the Metro North railroad. The downtown area consists of many restaurants, an old movie theater, and antique shops. There are also several churches in town, as well as the historic Roger Sherman Inn. The town is bounded on the north by Lewisboro in Westchester County, New York, on the east by Wilton, on the southeast by Norwalk, on the south by Darien and on the southwest and west by Stamford. The Silvermine neighborhood (which also extends into Norwalk and Wilton) is in the southeast part of town.

Commute to New York City

New Canaan has two Metro-North railroad stations: the New Canaan station and the Talmadge Hill station, both on the New Canaan Branch of the New Haven Line. Travel time to Grand Central Terminal is approximately one hour.

History

Until the Revolutionary War, New Canaan was primarily an agricultural community. After the war, New Canaan's major industry was shoe making. As New Canaan's shoe business gathered momentum early in the nineteenth century, instead of a central village, regional settlements of clustered houses, mill, and school developed into distinct district centers. Some of the districts were centered on Ponus Ridge, West Road, Oenoke Ridge, Smith Ridge, Talmadge Hill and Silvermine, a pattern which the village gradually outgrew.

With the 1868 advent of the railroad to New Canaan, many of New York City's wealthy residents discovered the quiet, peaceful area and built magnificent summer homes. Eventually, many of the summer visitors settled year-round, commuting to their jobs in New York City and creating the residential community that exists today.

The Harvard Five and modern homes

New Canaan was an important center of the modern design movement from the late 1940s through roughly the 1960s, when about 80 modern homes were built in town. About 20 have been torn down since then. "During the late 1940s and 50s, a group of students and teachers from the Harvard Graduate School of Design migrated to New Canaan ... and rocked the world of architectural design", according to an article in PureContemporary.com, an online architecture design magazine. "Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen and Eliot Noyes -- known as the Harvard Five -- began creating homes in a style that emerged as the complete antithesis of the traditional build. Using new materials and open floor plans, best captured by Johnson's Glass House, these treasures are being squandered as buyers are knocking down these architectural icons and replacing them with cookie-cutter new builds."

Other architects, well known (Frank Lloyd Wright, for example) and not so well known, also contributed significant modern houses that elicited strong reactions from nearly everyone who saw them and are still astonishing today. ... New Canaan came to be the locus of the modern movement's experimentation in materials, construction methods, space, and form", according to an online description of The Harvard Five in New Canaan: Mid-Century Modern Houses, by William D. Earls. Some other New Canaan architects designing modern homes were Victor Christ-Janer, John Black Lee and Allan Gelbin. The film The Ice Storm (1997) shows many of New Canaan's modern houses, both inside and out.

New Canaan Links

Town of New Canaan, Connecticut
Philip Johnson Glass House - New Canaan CT
New Canaan Public Schools
Metro North Railroad Schedules

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