How New Yorkers in One Small Town Became Allies Instead of Enemies

In contrast to the $2,200 caviar at Le Bilboquet in Sag Harbor, the Cornwall Country Market in Cornwall, Conn., offers a chicken Cordon Bleu sandwich for $8.99. If you wanted to take things up several notches, you would need to drive 24 minutes to the White Hart Inn in Salisbury, but even there you would have a hard time competing with the profligacy of Long Island’s East End: The most expensive item on the menu is a strip steak for $42 that comes with fries.

Litchfield County in northwestern Connecticut has always been long on wealth and status but short on the vulgarities of the Hamptons, and within its frame, Cornwall has remained singularly averse to ostentation. Like Sag Harbor, Cornwall evolved as a community in the mid-18th century and drew artists and writers and academics in the 20th — the poet Mark Van Doren, the humorist James Thurber, the sculptor Tim Prentice — but unlike so many previously bohemian places now colonized by affluent New Yorkers, Cornwall has largely safeguarded itself from the excesses and entitlements of the financial class.

So when city people rooted themselves in their second homes or took up occupancy in new ones for the course of the pandemic, some with the intention to stay forever, the story took an unpredictable turn.

The surge in fact was welcome. Although plenty of people were moving in, enough so that the town had to considerably supplement its sanitation budget, this was a place where the population was aging and had been in decline for more than a decade. Classrooms that had previously had too few students now had many more.

Many public services in the town are delivered on a volunteer basis, and as Gordon Ridgway, Cornwall’s first selectman and functionally the town’s mayor for 30 years, explained it, “There were now people stepping up to do everything.’’ A Google executive, for example, created a platform for a local food pantry to deliver services.

The acrimonies and resentments that can characterize relationships in towns like Cornwall often stem from the obliviousness of weekenders to the struggles of working people who find themselves increasingly marginalized by rising housing costs. In Ulster County, in New York, home to Woodstock, for example, the county executive, Pat Ryan, recently implemented a universal basic income program to deal with mounting poverty. “People shouldn’t expect to move to these rural areas and find a big nature preserve. People are as stressed out here as they are in other places,’’ said Mr. Ridgway, who has seen firsthand the benefits of collaboration between part-time and full time people in town. “We need a variety of people.’’

The most visible change has been an explosion of interest in local politics and civic issues. Suddenly town meetings that might have previously attracted very few people are drawing dozens. New Yorkers are around and noticing things, and they are not afraid to speak up. Something they noticed early on was a slapdash repair to one of Cornwall’s architecturally significant bridges, which replaced the original concrete with an unappealing metal guardrail.

The controversy that stirred quickly became known around town as “bridgegate.” Speaking for the aggrieved, one displaced New Yorker wrote a long letter to local officials, after culling through documents and hours of video footage of meetings that led to the construction decision. She wanted to know why it was “one” man who set the “winning agenda for our bridges.’’ She wrote that “any simple Google search on ‘historic bridge design’ or ‘historic bridge repair’ yields a wealth of research into design standards and public decision-making processes” and that “we did not have to rely on the latest and greatest and cheapest solution.”

This might have seemed like imperious big footing had it come from an investment banker suddenly paying attention from Central Park West, but the author of the letter was not so dismissible. An architect named Tobie Cornejo who oversees affordable housing initiatives in Brooklyn and East Harlem, she had been coming to Cornwall for more than two decades before settling in with her husband and children at the home of her in-laws for a long stretch of the pandemic. Spending so much more time in town, she wanted to be more involved. “I wondered where in the heck had I been as a citizen for the past 20 years,” she said.

“As much as I want a beautiful little bridge at the end of my road, what I really want is a historic district, a site plan and a process that would allow for information to be put forth so better decisions could be made.”

Although some in town have grumbled about the intrusions, plenty of others seem to welcome the advocacy. As Joanne Wojtusiak, who has lived in Cornwall for 34 years, put it to me, “Our town meetings are enlivened by different points of perspective and what’s bad about that? What’s bad is that they’re driving house prices up,’’ she said, admitting that this was simply a sign of the times. “The genie is out of the bottle. Small towns like Cornwall will never return to the control of a tiny group of white men.”

Another drama that has marked the Covid-19 period in Cornwall, although its origins predate the pandemic, involves the loosening of regulations around home businesses, a measure taken to draw more young working families to the area. Generally speaking, it was not fussy New Yorkers who opposed the ruling, worried that an auto body shop might pop up in view of the pool house, but rather older longtime residents who were concerned about noise and disruption to “local character.” But even within that demographic, there seemed to be a sense of awakening to the spirit of debate.

As one longtime resident wrote in a letter to a local paper, he felt compelled to break with his habit of reticence. “I think the risk posed by the noise and dust of working women and men earning a living is far less than the destruction wrought by the hushed tones of the fashionable playing paddle tennis throughout our land,’’ he said.

In the name of furthering equity, for which the state of Connecticut is not famous, legislators ruled not long ago that individual towns would need to increase their stock of affordable housing. Serving on the steering committee for the plan is now another New Yorker who has been coming to Cornwall for 50 years: Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban planning and policy at New York University. She previously worked at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development under the recent mayoral candidate Shaun Donovan, who also has a house in Cornwall. Should a battle erupt, it would seem that the soldiers are in place.