Lost Hartford

My latest video is about Travelers Tower which was built in 4 stages between 1906 and 1927. The tower was built on the site of several older structures, including the Universalist Church and a house designed by Henry Austin. Two buildings that once housed the Aetna Insurance companies were later demolished to create the plaza just south of Travelers Tower.

This is an 1849 lithograph entitled “View of Hartford, CT from the Deaf and Dumb Asylum.” It looks eastward from Asylum Hill. There are 12 churches in the view, only 3 of which are still standing today.

The campus of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut is famous for its Gothic Revival architecture. But  long before the college moved to its current campus in the 1870s, it was located downtown, on a now lost campus on the hill where the state capitol building stands today. In this video I talk about the lost Greek Revival-style buildings of Trinity’s original campus, as well as three buildings that have been lost from the current campus.

In the early 20th century, Harry Bond had a hospitality empire in Hartford, CT. He opened the Bond Restaurant downtown in 1908. The Hotel Bond on Asylum Street was built in two stages: 1912-1913 and 1920-1921. Bond also acquired two other nearby hotels, which he named the Bond Annex and the Bondmore. Bond died in 1935 and his hotel empire, facing competition from the new Hotel Statler, eventually went bankrupt in the 1950s. Special thanks to Lawrence Plourde for permission to use his photographs of the Thomas Hooker (formerly Bond Annex) Hotel.

This video is about an urban renewal project in Hartford’s old East Side that coincided with the construction of the Bulkely Bridge in the first decade of the twentieth century. The old riverfront area was cleared to make way for the construction of the new Connecticut Boulevard. The demolished buildings included old houses, tenements, warehouses and businesses dating to a lively period along the city’s waterfront. These changes took place almost a half century before the destruction that preceded the building of Constitution Plaza and the interstate highways.

Crossing the Connecticut, a 1908 book about the building of the Bulkeley Bridge.

A better photo of Asa Farwell’s warehouse at the corner of Ferry and Commerce Streets.

This is my second video about the 1877 Bird’s Eye View of Hartford. I talk about 5 interesting things: 1) the State Arsenal that was located at Main & Pavilion Streets from 1818 to 1909; 2) the original Union Station that stood from 1843 to 1886; 3) the lost Lord’s Hill, or Garden Street, Reservoir; 4) the stalled development of Hartford’s West End in the 1870s; and 5) the Charter Oak Park harness racing track.