Recent discussion about flooding at 55-57 Greens Farms Road — and the potential for more, if plans for a 250-unit apartment complex there move forward — got Eric Buchroeder thinking.
Though very young, he remembers construction of I-95 — then called the Connecticut Turnpike — in the mid-1950s. It was part of President Eisenhower’s plan for a nationwide highway network to provide security against foreign invasion. (As a young cavalry officer in World War I, he’d had difficulty moving large numbers of troops around the country.)
In 1953, Eric says, the plan was to construct an elevated highway, in a right of way between Greens Farms Road and the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad tracks.
Though later built level with the tracks, it needed much more roadbed material than was available commercailly.
Someone had the idea to pump liquified sand and silt from the bottom of Long Island Sound at Compo Beach. Steel pipes ran the material from the beach, up Hillspoint Road to Greens Farms Road, where it was used as landfill to elevate the road embankment.
Greens Farms Road was rebuilt too, replacing curves with the current stretch between Hillspoint Road and Compo Road South/Bridge Street.
Readers: Do you remember construction of that stretch of I-95, and the construction of the “new” Greens Farms Road? Click “Comments” below.
We have no photos of the construction of I-95 along Greens Farms Road. So this view — looking east from Saugatuck — will have to do.
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