New London

New London doesn’t do quaint the way half the towns up the Connecticut coast do, and honestly that’s what made it interesting. We arrived by way of the ferry terminal, watching a boat load up for Orient Point across the Sound, and walked into a downtown of handsome but weathered granite and brick buildings — real wealth once, whaling money mostly, now a little threadbare in places and all the more honest for it. Lia, tired by that point of manicured historic districts, said this felt like the first Connecticut town all week that hadn’t been restored into a museum of itself.

Whaling money and Eugene O’Neill’s ghost

In the mid-1800s New London was one of the country’s great whaling ports, second only to New Bedford, and the fortunes it produced built the granite custom house and the grand homes still lining the hills above downtown. Playwright Eugene O’Neill grew up summering here, and his family’s modest shingled cottage, Monte Cristo, sits a short walk from the water — the setting he later mined for Long Day’s Journey Into Night. We toured it on a quiet weekday afternoon, just us and a docent, and the ordinary sadness of the rooms explained a lot about the plays.

The Coast Guard Academy and Fort Trumbull

New London is also home to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and we spent a morning walking its riverside campus watching cadets in formation, the training tall ship Eagle tied up at the pier when we visited, masts bare and enormous against the sky. Down at Fort Trumbull State Park, a squat granite fortress from the Civil War era guards the harbor mouth, and we climbed its ramparts for a view straight down the Thames River toward Groton’s submarine base on the opposite shore — a reminder that this stretch of coast has been militarily important for a very long time.

Getting There

New London has its own Amtrak station on the Northeast Regional line, making it one of the easier Connecticut towns to reach without a car, roughly two and a half hours from New York City or under an hour from Providence. Bradley International Airport (BDL) near Hartford is about an hour’s drive north. If you’re planning to catch the ferry onward to Orient Point or Block Island, or to explore Fort Trumbull and the Coast Guard campus properly, a car still helps, though downtown itself is compact and walkable.