Gardella Block (1880)

The two adjoining business blocks at 46-52 and 42-44 Main Street in Ansonia are both referred to as the Gardella Block in the nomination for the Upper Main Street Historic District. They are part of a row of five buildings (along with the Sentinel Block at 36 Main Street, the Hotchkiss Block at 54-64 Main Street, and the building at 70 Main Street) that were erected c. 1880 (or as early as sometime before 1875) by the W. & L. Hotchkiss Company and distributed after the company dissolved in 1885. George Gardella, who came to Ansonia from Italy in 1882, opened a fruit, nut and confectionery business on Maple Street 1883. He moved his business to 46 Main Street in 1910 and retired in 1931, passing his business to his two sons. Another notable Gardella in Ansonia was Pasquale Gardella, an Italian immigrant who ran a peanut stand at the Maple Street bridge. After the stand burned down about 1896 he rented a store in the Ansonia Opera House on Main Street.

Sentinel Block (1881)

The Ansonia Housing Authority is located at 36 Main Street in Ansonia, at the end of a row of adjoining commercial blocks on the west side of Main Street, just south of the intersection with the Maple Street Bridge. The building displays the date 1881 under its cornice. It is sometimes called the Sentinel Block (it is given this name in the nomination for the Upper Main Street Historic District) because it was once home to the the offices of the Naugatuck Sentinel newspaper. In the book Derby and Ansonia (in Arcadia Press’s Then and Now series, 2004), it is referred to as the Gardella Building, a name that the the Historic District nomination gives for the two adjacent buildings just to the south. (more…)

I Am That I Am Ministries (1906)

The church at 23 Franklin Street, at the corner of Arch Street, in Ansonia was built between 1900 and 1906: it does not appear on the 1900 Sanborn insurance map, but does appear on the 1906 Sanborn map, where it is labeled “Swedish Church.” In recent years it was the Evangelical Baptist Church (founded in 1958). It was placed on the market in August 2015 and was sold last July. It is now I Am That I Am Ministries Inc.

Osborn and Cheeseman Company Office (1910)

At 153 Main Street in Ansonia is a large former factory building that was built c. 1900 by the Ansonia Osborne and Cheeseman Company. As described in The History of the Old Town of Derby, Connecticut, 1642-1880 (1880), by Samuel Orcutt:

Osborn and Cheeseman conducted a mercantile business in Birmingham some years, and in 1858 went into the hoop-skirt business at that place, and removed to Ansonia in 1859. In 1866 the Osborn and Cheeseman Company was organized with a capital stock of $120,000. Charles Durand was president of the company until 1875, when he sold his interest in the enterprise. The company now manufactures a great variety of goods, such as sheet and brass ware, gilding metal, German silver, copper and German-silver wire, seamless ferrules, and other kinds of metallic goods, which are sold in all parts of the United States.

Attached to the factory on the Main Street side is a yellow brick Neoclassical Revival former company office building (pictured above), erected c. 1910 with a third floor added sometime later. The entire factory building is now known as the Palmer Building because Palmer Brothers Trucking was located there, with other businesses, from 1955 to 1985. The building was then acquired by the City of Ansonia, but remained vacant, except for the Doyle Senior Center on the ground floor, for years as the city tried to sell it to a developer. There are now plans to convert the property for apartments and retail use.