On Sunday, August 30, at 7 p.m., the Sound Beach Community Band will set up its stands at Binney Park and close out the season with a program called "Wicked Good: The Music of Stephen Schwartz," pulling songs from Godspell, Pippin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Prince of Egypt, and Wicked. It is the final concert in the Greenwich Parks and Recreation Summer Concert Series at Binney Park this year, and it is the kind of evening most people in Old Greenwich will show up to without quite knowing why the park exists in the first place, or who is actually responsible for the grass being mowed under their picnic blanket.

Here is the part almost nobody brings up while they are setting out folding chairs: this park was supposed to be a housing development.

A Swamp That Wasn't Supposed to Stay a Swamp

Edwin Binney, the co-founder of Crayola, was a summer resident here in the early twentieth century. The parcel that is now the park's 32 acres had been earmarked for housing lots, the ordinary fate of low, wet land near a growing rail town. It was Binney's daughters, Mary Binney Davis and Helen Binney Kitchel, who talked their father out of that plan and into buying the swampy tract outright to give to the town instead. It took four years to build out. The park opened in 1933, a year before Edwin Binney died. Helen Binney Kitchel went on to serve in the Connecticut House of Representatives, where she became the first woman in the state to have a bill named after her.

None of that is on a plaque you'll trip over walking in from Sound Beach Avenue. But it means every Sunday concert, every stroller loop around the pond, every kid feeding the ducks near the stone bridges, is happening on land that a different set of incentives would have turned into another block of houses. The park is not an amenity the neighborhood was handed. It is a choice one family made against the market logic of its own moment.

Why the Last Sunday Looks Different From the Wednesdays

The town's broader Summer Concert Series runs across two locations, and they are not interchangeable. Roger Sherman Baldwin Park hosts four Wednesday-night shows this stretch of the season, and the town's own concert schedule is explicit that pets and grills are prohibited there. Binney Park gets only two Sunday dates all summer, July 26 and August 30, and neither restriction applies. That is not a small difference if you are the one packing the car. It also means Binney's slot on the calendar is scarcer, which is part of why the finale carries more weight than a routine Wednesday show would.

The July 26 concert, the Sound Beach Community Band's set of Billy Joel and Elton John, had its own oddity worth knowing if you missed it: First Selectman Fred Camillo stepped in as guest conductor for the performance, with music director Zachary Kampler and assistant conductor and trombonist Lisa Romeo handling the arrangements. It is a small-town detail in the best sense, the kind of thing that only happens when the person running the town and the people in the audience are the same people who show up to the same park bench every year.

A Fire Department Band That Never Actually Left

The band closing out the season on August 30 was not built for concerts. It started in 1955 as a Greenwich Fire Department band, and it has been playing town ceremonies, parades, holiday programs, and now summer concerts for nearly seven decades since. It operates today as a private nonprofit, and membership runs from audition-eligible middle schoolers up through working and retired professional musicians, all performing side by side. Kampler still directs the group.

That continuity matters more than it might seem on a lawn chair. A band that has outlived its original institutional purpose by seventy years and kept going anyway is not being kept alive by a budget line. It is being kept alive by people who decided a fire department band was worth becoming a town band, and then worth becoming a family band that spans three generations of players on the same field. The August 30 program is not a one-off booking. It is the latest entry in something that has not stopped since Eisenhower's first term.

Who Is Actually Cutting the Grass

If the town supplies the bandstand and the permit, the day-to-day upkeep of Binney Park runs through a volunteer nonprofit called Friends of Binney Park, which counts more than 250 members. This is the group planting a native meadow garden in the park's north end, across from the Perrot Library, and hosting greening days on the third Wednesday of most months where members show up with gloves and garden tools to weed the pollinator garden and the holly grove. It is also the group behind the model sailboat regatta on Binney Pond each fall, sponsored with the Old Greenwich Riverside Community Center, which drew its 61st fleet of homemade and remote-controlled boats to the water in 2025 and returns again on October 18 this year.

None of that shows up on a town budget line either. It is residents deciding, repeatedly, on a schedule nobody is paying them to keep, that the park is worth the labor. The August 30 concert will happen inside a space that a volunteer board maintains between concerts, on land a private family bought instead of developing, run by a band that outlived the institution that founded it. Every layer of the evening is the product of someone choosing to keep something going past the point where it was required.

What Comes After the Music Stops

The concert itself runs about an hour and fifteen minutes, based on past programs at the same slot, and the town's weather line at 203-861-6100 after 4 p.m. is the number to call if a storm threatens the date. For anyone planning the last Sunday of the season, the useful calendar looks like this:

• August 30, 7 p.m.: Sound Beach Community Band, "Wicked Good: The Music of Stephen Schwartz," Binney Park
• September, third Wednesday: Friends of Binney Park greening day, native pollinator garden and holly grove, volunteers welcome
• October 18: OGRCC model sailboat regatta, Binney Pond

If you want to make an afternoon of it before the concert, the walk in from the village center is short enough that a car is optional, something we've written about in more detail when it comes to getting around Old Greenwich without one. Grab something to go beforehand and you have a full evening without ever pulling out of a driveway. We've also mapped a few of the better options nearby if coffee before the concert sounds right for a Sunday.

The thing worth sitting with, blanket down, band tuning up, is that almost none of what makes that Sunday evening pleasant was inevitable. A different family could have taken the money and built the houses. A different fire department band could have disbanded once its ceremonial purpose passed. A different set of neighbors could have decided the meadow garden and the holly grove were someone else's job. Old Greenwich has a park that works because enough people, across nine decades, kept deciding it should.

If you already live near enough to walk to Binney Park on a Sunday night, you already know what that's worth. If you're weighing whether this corner of Greenwich fits the way you want to live, that's a conversation worth having directly. Barbara Zaccagnini has spent decades getting to know Old Greenwich block by block, park bench by park bench. Let's Connect.