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November 4, 2019

Whale of a tale: A seaside park's mystery signs

By Michael C. Bingham

No one seems to know exactly where these metal silhouette pole signs came from, exactly when they first appeared, or who designed and fabricated them.

The signs are part of the landscape at Ocean Beach Park in New London, a popular summer destination for visitors from throughout Connecticut since it was incorporated during the early years of the 20th century.

“I wish I knew more than I do, because I love those signs,” explains OBP General Manager Dave Sugrue. “They’re an important part of the park.”

What is known is that the signs were erected some time following the New England Hurricane of 1938, which ravished most of the Connecticut coastline.

Following the historic storm, the park, its boardwalk and the surrounding neighborhood were rebuilt, miraculously, over an 18-month period that enabled the park to reopen in June 1940 — in the nick of time for the summer season, Sugrue explains.

That storm, which struck New England on September 21 of that year, was one of the most destructive natural events in recorded history, with wind speeds exceeding 160 mph, more than $300 million in damages and as many as 800 fatalities.

A co-author of the plan for the beach redevelopment was a man named W. Earle Andrews, who was also a consulting engineer on the project. Earlier in his career Andrews had been a director of Jones Beach on Long Island, N.Y. designed by visionary developer Robert Moses.

“What you see here at Ocean Beach Park is modeled after Jones Beach,” Sugrue explains.

One of the landmarks of the newly reopened Ocean Beach Park were these silhouetted directional signs, an architectural filigree Andrews had borrowed from Jones Beach. But who designed and made the signs — and whether there once were more of them — is lost to posterity. (It is known that they were milled of brass, though concealed over decades by countless layers of paint.)

Ours are kind of more whimsical” than their Jones Beach counterparts, Sugrue allows. The markers depict a fireman and policeman playing checkers, an archery scene, a nurse and child, and people playing horseshoes. The signs presumably direct visitors to nearby points of interest. Ocean Beach Park once had a horseshoe pitch, a nurse’s station, and an archery arcade game. (Checkers can be played most any old place — including at the beach.)

The whale perched across the top of each silhouette frame of course references Ocean Beach Park’s New London home, a/k/a the Whaling City.

Sugrue is happy to get the word out about his park’s mystery silhouette signs. “We get a lot of visitors from the New Haven area,” he notes. Most of them, presumably, when the weather warms up a bit.

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