Every man, we are told, craves some distinction, and we have ours, a plain, simple, and unfortunately secure one. We come horn the least beautiful town in New England—New London, Connecticut, known to sportswriters as the Whaling City but to those who operate on less historical principles as Eyesore-on-Sea. Our citizens have been celebrated in the past as smugglers, as embezzlers, as book burners; oui town as a nest of privateers, a rendezvous lor rumrunners, a Navy “liberty” port, and the watering place of the hard-drinking family of the late Eugene O’Neill. Several of his plays deal with our declining fortunes. Now we are in the papers again, because our city fathers are about to tear down our railroad station, a registered national landmark designed in 1885 by one of the great American architects, H. H. Richardson.

Any distinction, of course, must be earned, and New London did not attain its lack of beauty by an act of God, like Sodom or Gomorrah, or by inheritance, as did such mill towns as Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Bridgeport. We worked to get where we are. Our city stands upon one of the most beautiful harbors in the world, the mouth of what geologists call a drowned river, the Thames, wide, deep, and locally mispronounced to rhyme with “James.” (We sound the h , too.) Despite these advantages it was already mean and unsightly by the time of the Revolution, according to our able local historian, Miss Frances Caulkins. During the war we were given a second chance when Benedict Arnold, a native of New London County and by then a British general, came with a British force in 1781, took the town, and burned it to the ground, perhaps on purpose, perhaps not. Our tiny garrison Rred one round and Red across the river.

We missed the chance provided by this native son. As Miss Caulkins tells us, we rebuilt an even more unsightly town, for partial evidence of which she cites the story of an early steamboat heading into our once busy harbor. A stranger was standing next to the captain, who heard him say, “If I only had the money!” The captain turned and asked, “What would you do if you only had the money?” “Buy that town and burn it,” said the stranger.

Miss Caulkins, who would feel at home in New London today, died more than a century ago at the height of the whaling boom, in the 1850’s and 6o’s, when the city had only one less ship at sea than New Bedford and when the streets began to be lined with the imposing columned mansions of the shipowners and the smaller but picturesque houses and cabins of the masters and crews. After whaling waned, the New York Yacht Club discovered the lower harbor of New London, and a string of enormous summer “cottages” of the Newport variety went up along the drive on