Old Lyme — Connecticut | Shared Latitude

A painter's town at the mouth of the Connecticut River, where a century-old art colony still shapes how the light falls on Lyme Street. Lia spent longer in the Florence Griswold Museum's gardens than in most European galleries, and I didn't rush her.

We crossed the old railroad bridge into Old Lyme on a hazy August afternoon, the kind of soft, diffused light that apparently drew painters here more than a century ago, and it took about ten minutes of walking Lyme Street before I understood why. This is a town of roughly seven thousand people at the point where the Connecticut River finally gives up and becomes Long Island Sound, and it has the unhurried self-possession of a place that already knows it’s beautiful. Lia, who studied art history before switching to something more employable, kept stopping mid-sentence to point at the angle of sun through the elm trees, half-joking that she finally understood what Childe Hassam was chasing.

The Florence Griswold Museum

The centerpiece of town is a mustard-yellow 1817 mansion where, starting in the 1890s, a widow named Florence Griswold took in a rotating cast of American Impressionist painters as boarding-house guests. They repaid her in kind — literally, painting directly onto her dining room doors and wall panels, which are still there, a strange and wonderful record of a whole movement working out its ideas on a landlady’s woodwork. We wandered the riverside gardens afterward, laid out to recreate what the painters themselves would have seen, irises and daylilies leaning toward the same water they once put on canvas.

Impressionist-painted door panels inside the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut

Lyme Street and the meetinghouse

Lyme Street itself is a straight run of white clapboard houses and elms so complete it’s a National Historic Landmark district, anchored by the First Congregational Church, whose tall steeple has been painted by nearly every artist who ever set up an easel in town. We had coffee at a small shop that doubles as a gallery for the Lyme Art Association next door, still an active painters’ cooperative, and watched two students sketching the church from folding stools on the sidewalk, unselfconsciously continuing a tradition that’s never really stopped.

Rogers Lake and the river’s edge

South of the historic district, we drove down to where the river opens into the Sound near Old Lyme Shores, watching ospreys work the shallows at low tide. Rogers Lake, a smaller freshwater pond a few minutes inland, gave us a quieter afternoon — we rented a canoe from a dock with an honor-system cash box and paddled past lily pads while a heron ignored us completely. It’s a town built for exactly that pace.

Getting There

Bradley International Airport (BDL) outside Hartford is the closest major airport, about an hour’s drive south on I-91 and I-95. From New York City, it’s roughly two hours east on I-95, and Amtrak’s Northeast Regional also stops in nearby Old Saybrook, a short taxi ride away. A car makes exploring the gardens, the lake, and the coastline far easier, though the historic district itself is entirely walkable once you’ve parked.