Lost Hartford

This is my presentation recorded live earlier today for the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum: “When Hartford Was a Retail Hub: the Growth of the City’s Great Department Stores (1890s – 1960s).”

This video is about the buildings that Hartford Hospital erected at its main campus between 1857 and 1972. Many of these are now lost, including many of the hospital’s brownstone buildings erected in the early nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

In this video I talk about a section of State Street north of the Old State House in Hartford, Connecticut. In the nineteenth century this was the location of the popular United States Hotel. The hotel would be replaced by The First National Bank building, the W. T. Grant store and the Regal Theatre. These were all torn down to make way for the State House Square development in the 1980s. The famed Honiss Oyster House, the origins of which went back to 1845, was located in the basement of the hotel and later the Grant’s store before it closed in 1982.

This video is about a historic corner of Hartford, Connecticut. What today is the Main Street side and entrance Pavilion of the State House Square complex was long a prominent site of now lost historic buildings and notable businesses. These included early 19th-century silverware producers, the publishers of Hartford’s yearly Geer’s City Directory, Goodwin’s drugstore, and the well-remembered Harvey & Lewis Building.

The stretch of Main Street in Hartford, Connecticut that’s now occupied by the Gold Building is very historic. It was once the site of landmarks that included the 1780s home where prominent businessman and philanthropist James B. Hosmer lived from the age of two until he died two days before his 97th birthday, the building that was occupied from 1828 to 1964 by the city’s second oldest continuously operating business, the Sisson Drug Company, the building where the Young Men’s Institute (forerunner of the Hartford Public Library) had its first permanent home and stage where Mark Twain made his acting debut in 1876.

What used to be on Main Street between Center Church and the Gold Building? In this video I talk about a 1771 schoolhouse, the original 1764 home of the Hartford Courant, the Kellogg Brothers lithographers who rivaled Currier and Ives, Augustus Washington, who was a successful African-American daguerreotypist, John Porter, who founded one of New England’s first lunchroom chains, and more!

This video remembers the two Christmas villages that appeared on the marquee of the G. Fox & Company department store in Hartford, Connecticut. The first village was created in 1959 and the second in 1967. Original 8mm movie of the Christmas village from 1960: https://youtu.be/B9W3Nr5UZHE