Saint Luke’s Home for Destitute and Aged Women (1892)

135 Pearl Street, Middletown

The building at 135 Pearl Street at the corner of Lincoln Street in Middletown was built in 1892 as St. Luke’s Home for Destitute and Aged Women. The home had been established in 1865 and members of the Church of the Holy Trinity were instrumental in establishing the endowment. St. Luke’s Home was originally located in a house at the southwest corner of Court and Pearl Streets. A large legacy enabled the construction of the new building, which had quarters for fourteen women. A new wing addition was constructed and other alterations made in about 1925. In the 1970s the Home moved to new quarters behind the Rectory of the Church of the Holy Trinity and in 1981 the building on Pearl Street was converted into nine apartments.

Planter & Porter Boarding House (1854)

In 1848, William Planter and Samuel Q. Porter purchased the Stone and Carrington paper mill in Unionville. They soon built another mill and in 1860 organized the Planter & Porter Manufacturing Company, which produced fine writing paper and book paper. As one of Unionville’s largest employers, they needed housing for their workers and erected at least five rental houses in the neighborhood. They erected the rooming and boarding house at 28 Elm Street in 1854. Franklin C. Chamberlin, a Hartford lawyer, bought the building in 1878 and continued to rent its rooms out to local factory workers. In 1889 the house became the residence of Thomas Mulrooney, an Irish immigrant who worked at the American Writing Paper Company (which had acquired Planter & Porter in 1877), and his wife Mary Jane Mulrooney, who was born in Burlington to Irish immigrant parents. Mrs. Mulrooney rented out rooms in the house to supplement the family’s income. The house remained in the family until 1941.

John P. Chamberlin Apartments (1889)

Yesterday I posted a workers’ tenement building erected by Nathaniel Hayden, a Civil War veteran, in Unionville in 1875. It was one of several tenements constructed in that community in Farmington during a period of industrialization in the nineteenth century. A growing industrial labor force was being drawn to Unionville’s paper mills. Another tenement, located next door to Hayden’s, was erected by John P. Chamberlin (1823-1893), a mechanic, sometime between 1878 and 1889. Chamberlin had purchased the property from Franklin Chamberlin in 1867. The relationship between the two Chamberlins is unknown; Franklin, who had links with local paper mill owners, was a lawyer in Hartford and a neighbor of Mark Twain. The property that John P. Chamberlin acquired included a house on Main Street and land to the rear, where both he and Hayden would build tenement buildings along a passway that would become Maple Avenue. In the 1870s, Chamberlin also erected the rental house at 66 Maple Avenue. Chamberlin’s 6-tenement building, 60-64 Maple Avenue, passed out of his family in 1919.

Nathaniel Hayden Apartments (1875)

In 1870, Nathaniel Hayden (1835-1916), a Civil War veteran, moved to a house (now the Ahern Funeral Home) on Main Street in Unionville in Farmington. He had served as a captain in the 16th Connecticut and was wounded at the Battle of Antietam. He would later be the primary donor for Unionville’s Civil War monument, dying just weeks after it was dedicated on July 15, 1916. Hayden’s original next-door neighbor was a tableware manufacturer named Russell Humphrey. In June of 1875, Humphrey’s widow Aurelia sold Hayden a tract of land at the rear of her property, along what is now Maple Avenue. Hayden then constructed a tenement building on the property, which would have housed workers at the nearby paper mills. Title to the building passed to Ernest M. and Ida A. Hart in 1916. The apartment building still exists at 52-56 Maple Avenue and represents a period of industrialization in Unionville.

Seifert Armory (1891)

As downtown Danbury expanded in the late nineteenth century, commercial buildings were constructed on side streets. One is example is Library Place, formerly a cow path, which was opened after the construction of the Old Danbury Library in 1878. Here, Alexander Wildman built a post office, followed by other commercial buildings, including the Seifert Armory in 1891. Located at 5-15 Library Place, the large armory and commercial building, designed by architect Joel Foster, has storefronts on the ground floor, while the three upper floors contained apartments and the armory hall, itself later converted to apartments. In the 1920s, the Danbury Times began printing in the building and a plate-glass window was installed to show the press at work. The building has lost its original tower that projected above the main entrance. The farthest store on the left now has a Carrara glass (a type of pigmented structural glass) storefront.

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Martha Apartments (1926) & Palace Theater (1928)

Located at 161-169 Main Street in Danbury is the Martha Apartments/Palace Theater complex. Designed by architect Philip Sunderland, the Martha Apartments were erected in 1926. The third storefront from the south end on the building’s ground floor (165 Main Street) is the entrance to the Palace Theater, the fifth largest auditorium in Connecticut. The theater opened on September 6, 1928 as a vaudeville stage seating 1,999 (a way to avoid the law that a 2,000 seat theater had to join the union and pay extra fees). The Palace soon switched over to moving pictures. In 1979, it was converted into a triplex by the addition of partitions, and continued in business until 1995. In 2008, owner Joe DeSilva began to renovate the historic theater to become a venue for film and the performing arts.