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
Before the Stilts building was erected in Hartford in 1981 there were numerous historic structures that once stood on the block of Main Street, north of the intersection with Church Street, including the Strand Theater, the American Industrial Building, a well-remembered 19th-century hotel and the home of the beloved Peanut Store.
Lord & Taylor had its first department store outside the greater New York area at Bishops Corner in West Hartford Connecticut. In this video I describe the store, which opened with great fanfare in 1953 and moved out (to Westfarms Mall) in 1983. I also talk about the adjacent shopping center, the Dutchland Farms dairy restaurant and summer pony rides that had previously existed on the site in the 1930s and 40s, and the attempts by local residents to block the building of Lord & Taylor.
This video is about what once existed on a block of Asylum Street in Hartford, CT where the City Place office towers were built in the 1980s. This included the house where J. P. Morgan was born, the sites of many historic Hartford businesses (including music stores, Turkish baths, bakeries and clothing stores), and a controversial mural that sparked public debate in the 1970s.