Located at the corner of Main and High Streets in Willimantic is a building which was constructed from 1909 to 1912 and then served as a United States Post Office from 1912 to December of 1966, when a new building opened just up Main Street. Left empty for almost thirty years, the old Post Office was renovated and is now a restaurant and microbrewery called the Willimantic Brewing Company.
The Orient Insurance Company Building was constructed in 1905, on Trinity Street in Hartford, next to the Bushnell Memorial Hall and near the State Capitol. It is just around the corner from Elm Street, which by the 1920s became known as Insurance Row, after four more companies built offices there near the Capitol. Designed by Davis & Brooks in the grand Beaux-Arts style, the Orient Insurance Company Building originally featured a large dome, which is no longer extant. The building now serves as state offices.
The Hartford neighborhood of Asylum Hill got its name from the American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, which was founded there in 1817. A century later, the organization changed its name to the American School for the Deaf and moved to West Hartford. Its Hartford property was purchased by the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, which had been founded in 1810. This firm was the first of many to leave downtown Hartford and build a new headquarters in Asylum Hill. The headquarters of the company, which is now known as The Hartford Financial Services Group, was constructed in 1921 in a Classical Revival style, designed by Stevenson & Dodge, with Parker, Thomas & Rice.
Located on Capitol Avenue in Hartford, right across from the State Capitol building, Connecticut’s State Library and Supreme Court Building was constructed in 1908-1910. It was designed by the New York architect, Donn Barber, in a style influenced by the Italian Renaissance. The statues above the front entrance, installed in 1913, are figures of Justice, History, Art and Science, sculpted by Michel Louis Tonnetti. The building’s East Wing houses the State Library, while the West Wing houses the Supreme Court. Between the two wings is Memorial Hall, which is home to the Museum of Connecticut History. As with the neighboring State Capitol, visitors can take tours of the Supreme Court.
Begun in 1926, the Hartford County Courthouse Building, on Washington Street in Hartford, opened in 1929. The architects were Paul P. Cret, of Philadelphia, working with the Hartford architectural firm of Smith & Bassette (Roy Bassette had been Cret’s student at the University of Pennsylvania). Designed in Cret‘s severe variation of the Beaux-Arts style, featuring striped-down classical details, it replaced an earlier 1885 structure, located at the corner of Trumbull and Allyn Streets, that was later torn down. The Hartford County Building now serves as the Hartford Judicial District Courthouse.
Around 1900, J. Pierpont Morgan, a native of Hartford, was encouraged by his cousin, Rev. Francis Goodwin, to acquire land adjacent to the Wadsworth Atheneum for the museum to use in a future expansion. Goodwin was then the president of the Atheneum. In 1910, Morgan presented the Morgan Memorial Wing in honor of his father. It was designed by the firm of LaFarge and Morris.
Built in 1920 on Prospect Street as headquarters for the Hartford Times, the city’s evening newspaper, which existed from 1817 to 1976. Designed by Donn Barber, the Beaux-Arts building features six green granite Ionic columns salvaged from the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York (designed by Stanford White; built in 1906, demolished in 1919 to make way for the Met Life Building’s expansion). The recessed porch also features allegorical scenes. For many years, the building hosted campaign speeches by presidential candidates. Current plans for the building involve its adaptive reuse as an annex of the neighboring Wadsworth Atheneum, as such it will be an important part of the Adriaen’s Landing development.
