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7 Fun Facts About the Merritt Parkway

In July 1934, a Connecticut congressman named Schuyler Merritt presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for the Merritt Parkway. The road would be “constructed for pleasant transit,” he said.

Tell that to the motorists who navigate the tight curves, narrow lanes, short ramps, dangerous entrances and low bridges that pinch cars together at an average speed of 73 mph—at least during non-rush hours.

Designed for Chrysler Airflows, Buick Roadsters and Cadillac All-Weather Phaetons, the Merritt Parkway originally had speed limits averaging 40-mph. The road stretched from the New York state line to the Housatonic River in Stratford. As a pleasant and quick way to travel from New York to the countryside, it spurred the development of Fairfield County’s tony suburbs.

“Driving into Connecticut on the Merritt Parkway gives drivers a fleeting glimpse of Fairfield County 60 years ago, when back-country Greenwich was still a hodgepodge of cow pastures and 20-acre estates,” reported the New York Times on Jan. 30, 2020. The story appeared after an accident on Dead Man’s Curve killed two Greenwich high school students.

“It is also a highway that thousands of commuters use to get to their jobs in New York, and although it is a beautiful road, the nearly eight-mile stretch of highway here can be dangerous,” reported the newspaper.

In the Merritt’s most recent history, preservationists and transportation officials have tried to balance scenic beauty and historic integrity with highway safety and efficiency. After all, those flowering trees are nice until someone dies crashing into them.

The Connecticut Department of Transportation can only do so much. The Merritt Parkway is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 37.5-mile road is Connecticut’s largest—and most heavily visited—National Register historic district.

Steel flowers on a bridge in Stratford are one reason the Merritt is on the National Register

Merritt Parkway

It’s hard to believe today, but aesthetic ideals once inspired highway construction.

The Merritt resulted in part from the City Beautiful movement during the first half of the 20th century. City Beautiful advocates believed parkways linking parks outside of cities would alleviate urban problems like crime and delinquency.

The Merritt was actually the last of the New York area parkways. Urban planner Robert Moses had created a system of parks and parkways in New York City as well as Long Island. And right across the Connecticut border, Westchester County in 1906 began building parkways – the Saw Mill River, the Hutchinson River, the Briarcliff-Peekskill, and Cross County Parkways. In Washington, D.C., the George Washington Memorial Parkway opened in 1932. (Note: the urban problems didn’t go away.)

An abutment with sculpture on the Grumman Avenue Bridge in Norwalk

By then, the National Park Service had come up with a formal definition of a parkway. A parkway had to

Only allow recreational, noncommercial traffic;
Prohibit unsightly roadside development and signs;
Include wide rights-of-way to buffer abutting property;
Encourage preservation of natural scenery by granting no frontage or access rights;
Prefer a new site to avoid congested and built-up areas;
give best access to native scenery
eliminate major grade crossings; and
reduce traffic congestion with well-distanced entrances and exits. (On the Merritt, No Man’s Land runs 5.5 miles between exit 42 in Westportand exit 44 in Fairfield.

The Merritt qualified.

The Quintessential Parkway

The Merritt was one of the last of the parkways. It “culminated a generation of experiments in combining the talents of engineers, landscape architects and architects to create parkways that served recreational purposes and gave aesthetic pleasure while providing safe transportation,” according to the nomination for the National Register. “In it, all the best features developed in its predecessors were put together to create the quintessential parkway.”

But World War II came along, and the German autobahn became the model for high speed travel over highways.

Renovating the Merritt Parkway

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, two new interchanges went up over the Merritt Parkway in Trumbull. They endangered the road’s historic nature and agitated preservationists, who then in 1991 managed to get the parkway listed on the National Register.

The Redding Road Bridge on the Merritt Parkway

In 1992, the state Department of Transportation created a working group to come up with guidelines for maintaining and rehabilitating the parkway. Around 2000, the Merritt Parkway Conservancy began as a specialized SWAT team to make sure CTDOT complied with those guidelines. The Conservancy, for example, inspects every tree before it is cut down or moved.

CTDOT has since worked to rehabilitate all 37.5 miles of the parkway. It has repaved the roadway, removed invasive species and installed wood guardrails reinforced with steel. It has cut down trees and removed ledge, recolored concrete bridges for historical accuracy and rehabilitated the Colonial Revival service stations. The state also began to allow fast-food vendors in the rest areas for the first time.

Here are some more fun facts about the Merritt Parkway.

1.It was originally called the Parallel Post Road.

The Merritt didn’t start off as a parkway, but as a solution to traffic congestion. The old Boston Post Road, the only shoreline artery linking New Haven with New York City, had gotten crowded and dangerous. In 1925, Gov. John H. Trumbull said he’d support a plan to build an alternate road.

Schuyler Merritt, the Republican congressman from Fairfield County, headed a commission to get the parkway built. For that, county Republicans urged the state to name the parkway after him.

2. A corrupt political hack bought the land for the parkway. He went to prison.

Leroy Kemp belonged to the Fairfield County Republican machine, and when it came time to buy rights-of-way for the Merritt, he got the job. Kemp, a Darien real estate broker, had served as a state representative and had a lot of friends in the state GOP.

Kemp ultimately inflated the cost of land purchases to $6.5 million, a whopping amount of money back then.

He took advantage of the secretive highway commissioner, John MacDonald, who refused to disclose plans for the parkway.

A Colonial Revival service station in Fairfield

Since no one knew where the road would go, Kemp told his real estate broker friends what parcels the highway department needed. They would then approach the landowners and offer to negotiate with the state. When the seller agreed to sell for a price, two, five and ten times the market value, the real estate agents would then split their fees with Kemp. In one deal, for example, Kemp had the state buy a piece of land in Greenwich for $93,000. Fair market value was $7,458.

Eventually people got suspicious. The state and the press investigated, and ultimately Kemp was sentenced to three to seven years in the penitentiary. A jury found him guilty of conspiracy after three hours of deliberation.

A grand jury found Connecticut Highway Commissioner “entirely to blame” for most of the “waste, extravagance and incompetence” in buying the parkway’s rights of way. MacDonald resigned in disgrace after 15 years on the job.

Ornamental detail on the Lake Avenue Bridge

3. Nude swimmers and picnickers caused problems in the early years.

When the Merritt Parkway opened, people started taking picnic lunches and relaxing by the side of the road.

Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, complained to CTDOT about skinny dippers in a creek that passed under the Merritt and over his property.

4. Tollbooths caused a stir. Now they’re museum pieces.

Many people objected to the state’s announcement that it would collect 10-cent tolls in Greenwich and Milford (near the parkway’s entrance). People felt the government taxed them twice since taxes, not tolls, paid for the parkway’s construction.

Merritt Parkway toll booth at the Boothe Memorial Park

The highway architect, George Dunkelberger designed rustic, whimsical Log Cabin-style tollbooths. An out-of-work electrical engineer named Theodore Fleischmann paid the first toll at the Greenwich toll booth without complaint. But others protested by paying in pennies or throwing trash near the toll booths. One man drove fast through the tollbooth, then threw his dime in the grass.

When Connecticut eliminated tolls in 1988, the Milford toll booth went to Boothe Memorial Park in Stratford. Part of the Greenwich toll plaza went to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

5. The original 69 mostly-much-admired bridges are all different.

An urban legend about the bridges says different people made proposals to the highway department. Since government officials couldn’t make up their minds, they selected them all. But it’s wrong. A single architect, George Dunkelberger, came up with the idea of building attractive, unique bridges.

The James Farm Road overpass with Nike wings

He designed most of them in the then-popular Art Deco or Art Moderne style. Some of the notable work includes relief sculptures of a Puritan and an Indian on the Comstock Hill overpass in Norwalk. Dunkelberger elaborately ornamented the Lake Avenue Bridge. He put concrete Nike (the goddess not the shoe) wings on the James Farm Road overpass.

For some bridges, Dunkelberger took inspiration from fortified French bridges of the Gothic and Renaissance eras. On the Route 110 bridge in Stratford he applied metal flowers.

The Comstock Hill overpass in Norwalk

Works Progress Administration workers built some of the bridges.

One exception is at exit 39, which has ordinary modern bridges constructed using undecorated concrete-on-steel I-beams. The highway department got a grant to build the bridge, but it didn’t cover the cost of decoration.

The Comstock Hill overpass in Norwalk.

6. It took 200 gardeners to landscape the Merritt Parkway.

A roadside development team of 200 men planted and shaped the parkway’s s surroundings. They removed mature trees from the path of the road and stored them for later replanting, and they scraped topsoil to use along the roadside. Earl Wood, engineer of roadside development, later recalled, “The general objective was to help nature heal the scars of construction.”

Weld Thayer Chase, a 27-year-old landscape architect, supervised the landscaping. Wanting a splendid spring bloom, he contracted for 47,700 laurels and 3,777 dogwoods, He also bought 6,459 pines, 3,095 cedars and 2,037 hemlocks. In addition, Fairfield County garden clubs helped with the landscaping, donating thousands more flowering trees and shrubs. The parkway once had 17 bronze plaques embedded in rocks to commemorate the garden clubs’ efforts.

Chase also planted Oriental bittersweet, which has since overgrown the parkway. (Well, he was only 27.)

7. Commercial vehicles are still not allowed on the Merritt Parkway.

Technically, the Merritt Parkway doesn’t allow trucks, RV’s, cars towing trailers, buses and all commercial vehicles. However, commercial vehicles do flout the law, and trucks have gotten stuck under the 11-foot-high bridges.

The state police say they have higher priorities than keeping pick-up trucks off the Merritt.

The Nichols-Shelton Road Bridge

All black and white photos courtesy Library of Congress.

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The Connecticut Accent, Or Does Connecticut Even Have One?

Poor old Connecticut, invaded every day by thousands of Noo Yawkers and Bahstonians. Those people who don’t know what to do with their ‘r’s make it nearly impossible for the state to sustain a uniquely Connecticut accent.

You can make a good argument that Fairfield County, parts of New Haven and Litchfield County belong more to the Tri-State Area than to New England. Those places are where New Yorkers buy antiques, keep their weekend home and send their kid to prep school. They take Metro-NORTH trains into Grand Central and get their local news from New York City.

The pride of Westport

The Non-Connecticut Accent

They also tend to speak like New Yorkers, dropped ‘r’ and all. People who live near (or work in or escaped from) Noo Yawk are more likely to talk like Cuba Gooding, Jr. He lives in Greenwich, by the way. A big part of living in Connecticut is knowing which wealthy town which wealthy celebrity lives in.

People who live in Northeast Connecticut tend to talk more like Bostonians. They see ‘Jawdin’s Furnichah’ (Jordan’s Furniture) ads on television. They buy b’daydas at the Stawp & Shawp (potatoes at the Stop & Shop). And they root for the Sawx, the Broons and the Pats and in the summer you’ll find them down the Cape.

So you have two different non-Connecticut accents, both with the dropped ‘r.’ Phonologists call it non-rhotic.

The rest of New England tends to view Connecticut with suspicion. After all, half the state roots for the Yankees and the Giants.

Rich Talk v. Poor Talk

The state’s severe economic inequality also wipes out any possibility of a single, statewide Connecticut accent. It has some of the wealthiest towns in the country just a stone’s throw from the poorest cities.

Latinos make up about 40 percent of the population of Hartford, the fourth poorest city in the U.S. The same goes for Bridgeport and New Britain. They come mostly from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic and they have distinct dialects and slang. Sometimes phonologists call it New York Latino or East Coast Latino English. It’s evolving, it’s varied and it’s usually spoken by people who grew up speaking English. (Listen to Pedro Martinez, a Dominican, here. He lives in Greenwich.)

Pre-Greenwich Pedro Martinez

Many of Connecticut’s rich residents speak in a neutral, upper-class accent sometimes called ‘Mid-Atlantic.’ People generally have to manufacture that accent, because no one speaks it naturally. Listen to Westport’s Martha Stewart, for example. She once had a heavy Joisey (New Jersey) accent, but worked to get rid of it. You wouldn’t know she’s a Jersey girl to listen to her now.

A young Jacqueline Onassis at Miss Porter’s in Farmingdale

Starting around the 1920s, New England prep schools had taught students to speak with a quasi-British accent. Jacqueline Onassis, for example, developed a serious boarding-school accent at Miss Porter’s in Farmington. Katharine Hepburn got hers at the Oxford School in West Hartford, though her well-to-do Mummy and Daddy probably helped it along. You’ve heard the accent if you’ve watched old movies with upper-class characters. It’s rather stagey to American ears, and it fell out of fashion sometime in the 1960s.

Muddled Dialect Boundaries

So Connecticut has non-rhotic speakers in the northeast and southwest. Throughout the state it has manufactured Mid-Atlantic accents in the tony towns away from the gritty urban East Coast Latino English. Some have ‘r’s, some don’t.

But beyond all those muddled dialect boundaries, there is a place where a Connecticut accent survives: Somewhere from south of Hartford to somewhere north of Springfield (which started out in Connecticut).

Hartford, as pronounced by its inhabitants, has an ‘r.’

Connecticut accent likely pronounced here

T-Glottaling

Unlike most New Englanders, the Central Connecticut Mumbler has no problem with the ‘r.’ It goes in all the right places. ‘Gilmore Girls,’ ‘Waterbury’ and ‘cruller.’ All have ‘r’s in the right places. In Connecticut, lobster rolls have butter. Mark Twain lived in Hartford. Buy a steamed hamburger in Meriden.

The Merri’

It’s the ‘t’ that Central Connecticut Mumblers can’t deal with. Phonologists call what they do ‘t-glottaling.’ Or ‘gloh-a-ling.’

Ask someone from Connecticut to say “kitten from New Britain.” You might hear “kih-en from New Brih-en.” ‘Mou-en’ for ‘mountain,’ ‘bo-el’ for ‘bottle’ and ‘Kah-neh’uhkit’ for ‘Connecticut.’

The ‘t’ also tends to fall off the end of words. So if a word ends with a ‘t,’ that word duh-zen have a consonan’ a’ the end.

And Now for the Mumble

The Central Connecticut accent has a distinct mumble. People who have it rush through the syllables, especially in the middle of a sentence, mushing them into incomprehensibility. They eat their consonants and flatten out their pitch.

A student newscaster at Central Connecticut State University and his interviewee in New Britain had it bad. (Listen to them here.)

On the video we learn that because of the parking problems at CCSU, students risk getting a ticket or showing up to class late. Or in the Central Connecticut Mumble, it becomes ‘geh-in a tickeh orshowinuptclss late.’

“Sawdonsee …” equals “So I don’t see.”

Meg Ryan, who grew up in Fairfield, sometimes lapses into the Central Connecticut Mumble. In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, she describes how she took ‘something like a six hour flight’ to pick up her adopted daughter. Only it comes out ‘tsngthin’ like a six-hour flight.’ “You’d think she’d be upset” turns into ‘you’d think she’d bempset.’

It can’t be a coincidence that Scrabble was invented in Connecticut. A game where people try to turn jumbled letters into intelligible words.

The Northern Cities Vowel Shift

Ironically, network newscasters used to talk as if they grew up in Hartford or Springfield. Those city accents resembled those of such Great Lakes cities as Buffalo, Rochester or Cleveland (which used to belong to Connecticut).

NBC news anchor John Chancellor grew up in Chicago, for example, but he spoke NBC standard. Phonologists call it Inland Northern American English.

Recently they’ve identified a trend: more people using the Northern Cities Vowel Shift – in Cleveland, in Hartford and in Springfield. Vowel shifters replace ‘o’ sounds with ‘a’ sounds and vice versa.

Instead of block they say black. Instead of busses they say bosses. And instead of more they say mawhr.

From Connecticut?

One easy way to tell if someone grew up in Connecticut: ask them to identify a submarine sandwich and a yard sale. Bingo! If they say grinder or tag sale.

Or ask someone to complete this series: 84, 91, 95. Correct answer: The Merritt, as in the terrifying Merri’ Parkway.

Ask where Yukon is and if they say Storrs they grew up in Connecticut; if they say Canada, they didn’t.

UConn Huskies logo in the ’60s

You can also tell someone isn’t from Connecticut if he calls himself a Nutmegger. It’s something no self-respecting Connecticut native would ever say. Or if they say NEW Haven. It’s New HA-ven.

You can get them going in whatever Connecticut accent they prefer by saying one word: Taxes. Connecticut has the worst taxes in the world, yes sir.

And if you want to talk to someone from Connecticut about pizza, just don’t.

Want to speak like a Bostonian? Click here. For New Hampshire, click here, for Maine, click here, and for Rhode Island, click here.

With thanks to Ana Celia Zentella, “Spanish Language in the Northeast,” from Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century edited by Edward Finegan, John R. Rickford.

Images Tag sale By Jim Chute – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17010593; Grinder By jeffreyw – mmm…sammichesUploaded by Fæ, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23097562; Martha Stewart By David Shankbone – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15049241. This story was updated in 2023.

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