Built before the 1930s, the commercial building at 176-178 Main Street in Bristol was given a new art deco facade in the 1930s with its new name, Lorraine, prominently displayed. The Lorraine Building is the only art deco building in Bristol’s Main Street Historic District.
The name William Wallace conjures up images of the movie Braveheart. Wallingford also had a William Wallace, and a building downtown is named for him. Not the Scottish patriot who fought Edward I of England, Wallingford’s Wallace was a real estate developer, possibly related to the Wallcaces who started the Wallace Silver Company. In the second half of the nineteenth century, North Main Street north of Center Street was being developed as a commercial center. The William Wallace Block, at 33 North Main Street, was one of the first of the new commercial buildings to be constructed there in 1857. The Italianate structure is impressively large for its early date. It has high stoops and a high first floor allowing basement shop windows, a feature typically found in more urban areas at the time. It remains the largest commercial structure in the Wallingford Center Historic District today.
The Pierpont Block, on Howe Avenue in Shelton, is an impressively large Richardsonian Romanesque building, built in 1893. It was named for J. P. Morgan, one of the structure’s original investors. The Pierpont Block once contained Arcanum Hall, a hall for public gatherings, and also the public library, before it moved to a new building in 1894. The Pierpont Block was restored (pdf) in the early 1980s.
Built in 1974-1975 and replacing a former succession of historic low-rise buildings which once stretched on the west side of Main Street in Hartford, between Pearl Street and Center Congregational Church, is the skyscraper at One Financial Plaza. Popularly known as the Gold Building, for its unusually tinted windows, it was designed by Neuhaus & Taylor of Houston, TX. The Gold Building was recently the victim of some car-on-building violence.
Built in 1954-1957, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company’s headquarters in Bloomfield (now known as the Wilde Building, for company president Frazer B. Wilde), was a pioneering example of an International Style suburban corporate structure. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, it was conceived as a modern campus with sophisticated amenities in a bucolic area. The skills of interior designer Florence Knoll and sculptor Isamu Noguchi were also called upon in the building’s creation. In 1982, CG and INA Corporation joined to form CIGNA, which proposed to demolish and replace the building with a new development in 1999. Preservationists acted to oppose these plans and the building was placed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places list in 2001. CIGNA eventually decided to remain in the building and rehabilitate it. (more…)
The series of buildings at 235-257 Asylum Street in Hartford are valuable nineteenth century survivors, examples of a period when cast iron was popular as a decorative element on commercial buildings in the city. New York has its famous Cast Iron District in SoHo, but Hartford has a few examples of cast iron ornamentation from the same period, most notably the cast iron front added to the building at 105 Asylum Street in 1896. The three buildings at nos. 235-257 Asylum Street were built between 1870 and 1872 by John Harrison. As reported in the Courant on June 13, 1871:
John Harrison and his associates, who purchased a portion of the Shepherd property on Asylum street, will erect at the head of Ann street a five-story iron building, which will be the second iron front in that street when the improvements now going on are completed.
To the left, in the image above, is 235-237 Asylum, completed in 1871. The original cast iron front on the first two floors was later replaced, but has been retained on the upper three floors. The adjacent middle building, 241 Asylum, is a narrower structure, having three instead of four bays. The largest of the buildings, 247-257 Asylum on the right, dating to 1872, was constructed of brick. Its windows have cast iron architraves and the building is topped by a bold cornice featuring semicircular arches, a feature also used on the later McKone Block on Main Street, built in 1875. There are more pictures after the jump…
Established in 1860, the New Britain National Bank constructed a building at the corner of West Main and Main Streets in 1906. It was designed in the Beaux Arts style by the firm of Davis & Brooks and was used by the bank into the 1930s. Now called the Gates Building, it was acquired by Florence Judd Gates, whose family had become wealthy making barbed wire. Used as retail and office space through the late 1980s, the Gates Building was later restored and now contains the New Britain Board of Education.
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