Asa S. Cook House (1870)

On 20 Charter Oak Place in Hartford is a three-story mansard-roofed Second Empire-style brick house erected in 1870. The entrance to the house is on the south side while the street-facing side has a two-story bay window above which is a pyramidal roof. The house was the residence of Asa S. Cook (1823-1916), a manufacturer who invented several machines for making wood screws. Born in Sandwich, New Hampshire, Cook learned the machinist’s trade while working in the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. He came to Hartford in 1850 and worked for a time in the Colt Armory before establishing his own business in 1858. It was incorporated as the Asa S. Cook Company in 1896. In addition to wood screw and bolt machines and various wooden machine parts, the company‘s plant also for a time manufactured Stephen’s patent Parallel Vice.

In the early twentieth century the house was divided into apartments. Although it was later restored to be a single-family dwelling again, by the early 2000s it had fallen into disrepair. After 2013 the house was lovingly restored and modernized by the Lotstein family.

Schwab-Cook House (1870)

The Italianate-style double house at 22-24 Charter Oak Place in Hartford was erected c. 1869-1871 by Joseph Schwab (1826-1914), an insurance agent, who lived at No. 24. His father Jacob Schawb served in Napoleon’s army and survived the disastrous invasion of Russia, although he never recovered the full use of one of his legs that had been frozen during the Moscow Campaign. Jacob later emigrated to America and became a butcher in New York. His son Joseph Schawb was born in Gruenstadt, Germany. In his youth he worked as a manager for a mercantile house in Bühl, just south of Baden-Baden and during that time supported the German revolutionaries of 1848. He arrived in New York at the age of twenty-eight and worked for a German banking house in the city before joining a dry goods and millinery business in Hartford. When that partnership dissolved in 1877, he went into the insurance business, only retiring in 1912, two years before his death at the age of eighty-eight. In addition to building up a large fire and life insurance writing business, Schawb served as manager for New England of the Germania Life Insurance Company of New York. For forty years he also served as the first president of the Ladies’ Deboarh Society of Hartford, which raised funds to build the 1886 Deborah Chapel at Beth Israel Cemetery in Hartford, a building that was recently demolished. For thirty-seven years he also served on the city’s High School committee, being treasurer for eighteen terms. During that time another building which has since been demolished, the Gothic-style Hartford Public High School, was erected on Hopkins Street.

House at 16 Charter Oak Place, Hartford (1894)

According to the nomination for the Charter Oak Place National Historic District, the house at 16 Charter Oak Place in Hartford was erected in 1894 for Philemon Robbins, a furniture manufacturer, but Robbins had passed away in 1890. In the 1830s he was a partner with Isaac Wright and Joseph Winship in Isaac Wright & Company, one of Hartford’s leading furniture companies. After Wright’s death in 1838 his partners formed Robbins & Winship, which became Robbins Brothers in 1878.

The house’s first story is brick, with its upper two stories being shingled. There is a Palladian window in the upper story’s triangular gable.

The ninth chimney fire was added to the fire department list yesterday, when the headquarters chemical company answered a telephone call just after noon to the house of Mananger Norman McD. Crawford of the street railway, at No: 16 Charter Oak Place. The chimney burned Itself out and no damage was done.

Hartford Courant, February 14, 1901

Hartford Hospital: Brownstone Building (1923)

One of the older buildings on the campus of Hartford Hospital is the Brownstone Building, located at 79 Retreat Avenue. It opened in November, 1923 as the hospital’s Women’s Building, with a focus on maternity care. It was designed by Carl J. Malmfeldt of Hartford and was the subject of an article, “The Women’s Building of the Hartford Hospital, Hartford Conn.” by L. A. Sexton, MD, that appeared in Modern Hospital, Vol. XXII, No. 5 (May, 1924). The builders were the R. F. Jones Company and its construction was the last time that stone was used from the famed brownstone quarries in Portland. Along the sidewalk next to the building is a fence with a cast iron gate that features the symbol of the Caduceus and the letters “HH.” The building has housed various departments of the hospital over the years, currently being home to the Adult Cystic Fibrosis Clinic and the Department of Dentistry. Long known as the Brownstone Ambulatory Care Services Building, it formerly housed the outpatient Brownstone Clinic, which recently moved to a new space on Jefferson Avenue and is now called Hartford Hospital Community Health.

Burlingame Building, Institute of Living (1948)

One of the buildings on the campus of the Institute of Living (originally chartered in 1822 as the Retreat for the Insane) in Hartford is the Burlingame Research Building. Erected in 1948, the eight-story building was designed by architect Irving W. Rutherford and was named for Dr. C. Charles Burlingame (1885-1950), who was superintendent of the institution in the 1930s-40s. Atop the building is a tower that displays the symbol of the Caduceus on four sides and is crowned by a golden dome. The tower was lit at night because it was directly in line with runways at Brainard Field (see “Dome Atop Burlingame Building Completed At Institute Of Living,” Hartford Courant, November 25, 1948). The following year a connected eight-story part of the building, called the Psycho-Surgery Building, was opened. (see “Psycho-Surgery Plant Now In Use At Institute,” Hartford Courant, April 17, 1949). Here lobotomies were performed until the 1960s. The operating room was on the sixth floor and the fifth floor was the infirmary for care of immediate post-operative patients. The fourth floor was described in the Hartford Courant (in the 1949 article referenced above) as “unique in the hospital world.” It contained classrooms for retraining those who had been operated on, including social, vocational and recreational development. Subjects included home economics, commercial art, and accounting. Today the Institute is part of Hartford Hospital and the Burlingame Building contains a library and offices.

Nathan Bosworth House (1878)

On Sherman Street in Hartford are a pair of French Second Empire-style houses with mansard roofs and corner towers. They were erected by John R. Hills, a stonemason and builder (who also worked with contractor John B. Garvie to build the Mark Twain House), and William Blevins, a stone dealer. One of the houses, built in 1877, is at 21 Sherman Street. The other, pictured above, is at 25 Sherman Street. It was built in 1878 and its first resident was Nathan A. Bosworth, a plumber and steamfitter who was a partner in the company Embler and Bosworth and had served in the Civil War.