This video is about the forgotten history of Ford Street, which is across from Bushnell Park in Hartford, Connecticut. Now a parking lot, it is remembered as the site of the old Statler-Hilton Hotel, which was demolished in 1990. But before the hotel was built in the early 1950s, there had been many other buildings here, including one where the city’s first Black labor union formed.
My latest video is about the block of Asylum Street in Hartford between High Street and Union Place. What used to be here before the current two buildings (the Hollander, originally the Capitol National bank, built in 1926, and the Capital Hotel, originally the Shoreham Motor Hotel, built in 1960)? I go all the way back to the 1860s to cover the history of this block, which is right across from the northwest section of Bushnell Park. I also have a new Substack post in which I go into greater detail about an 1899 fire that I mention in the video.
My latest video is about how old buildings along Main Street, Arch Street, and Sheldon Street in Hartford were replaced by the massive Hartford Public Library and Ribicoff Federal Building/US Courthouse. Back in the mid-1800s there were commercial blocks, houses and a church here, as well as the bridge over the Park River. The bridge survives, but the river was buried under a highway and the Library was built above the highway.
My latest YouTube video reveals the forgotten history of the block of Main Street (west side, between Park Street and Buckingham Street). I also have a new Substack piece that gives more details about a story I mention in the video (it involves an antique fire bucket!).
This video is about historic landmarks along Main Street in Hartford, north of the intersection with Albany Avenue up to the border with the Town of Windsor. The landmarks include the Fuller Brush Factory (currently undergoing redevelopment), the second oldest house in the city, another house that’s been called “The Mark Twain House of the North End,” historic cemeteries and several Black churches with long histories in the city. Many of the buildings played an important role in the city’s Jewish history.
This video is about the campus of the Hartford Theological Seminary, which stood on Broad Street in Hartford, CT. The main building, Hosmer Hall, was erected in 1879 and tensions with the contractors and the building committee led to the firing of the famous architect Francis H. Kimball. A decade later, work began on the adjacent Case Memorial Library building. The Seminary moved to a new campus on Sherman Street (now the home of UCONN Law School) in 1926 and Hosmer Hall was replaced by a Y.W.C.A. dormitory building (torn down in 1972). Before it was demolished in 1964, the former Case Memorial Library was home to the Hart School of Music from 1938 until 1963.
In 1918, Hudson Street in Hartford was extended north of Buckingham Street through Capitol Avenue to Elm Street and then across a new bridge over the Park River. The new road plowed through the middle of a block of row houses, a c. 1750 house (that has once been the home of Hartford’s first mayor and then President’s Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy), and another old house built in the 1790s. The bridge over the Park River only existed for about a quarter-century before the river was put through an underground conduit and Pulaski Circle was created.