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In 1890 the Pequot Casino Association was
formed by the socially prominent families who owned Pequot Colony summer
cottages. Their first casino burned in 1893. It had been a private home
adapted to serve as a casino. In 1894 the Association purchased
waterfront property and built a spacious Shingle Style casino with
"two dining rooms, as well as a ballroom, a billiard room and
tennis courts" (Gelbs, LWMC, 358). They also built a gazebo out on
the rocks. The moonlit Casino pier serves as the setting for the
Prologue and Epilogue of O’Neill’s play The Great God Brown (1926).
The Pequot Casino represented a social world where an Irish touring
actor and his family would never be welcomed, and the young playwright’s
sense of exclusion is clearly expressed in the play’s Epilogue when
his characters are described listening to "the sound of the
waves" and the Casino’s "distant dance music"
(Collected Plays, 641).
The Casino with the pier to the gazebo, c. 1910 |
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