At 1886 Park Street (corner of Amity Street) in Hartford is Tempolo Sion Pentecostal Church. The church was built in 1900 as St. Paul’s Methodist Church. Designed by George W. Kramer, it replaced an earlier St. Paul’s built in 1894. The Romanesque Revival church has a flexible design (following the Akron Plan) adapted to its relatively small urban lot. The church lost its steeple in the 1938 hurricane.
The Corning Building is at the southwest corner of Main and Asylum Streets in Hartford. Today’s Corning Building was built in 1928–30 and replaced an earlier Corning Building on the site, which dated to the 1870s. Before that, the three-story Robinson and Corning Building stood here. Dating to the 1820s, it was long home to the Brown & Gross bookstore, which later moved to Asylum Street. Arriving by train to deliver a speech in Hartford on March 5, 1860, future president Abraham Lincoln walked up Asylum Street to the bookstore, where he first met Gideon Welles, the editor of the Hartford Evening Press. Welles would later serve as Lincoln’s secretary of the navy. Dr. Horace Wells had his office here, where in 1844 he had a tooth successfully removed without pain after first inhaling laughing gas–the first use of anesthesia. A plaque was placed on the Corning Building in 1894 to honor Wells on the fiftieth anniversary of his discovery.
The two-story apartment building at 2050-2052 Park Street in Hartford is constructed of contrasting tawny brick and has a corner storefront. It was designed by Burton A. Sellow and was built in 1917.
February is Black History Month! At 61 F.D. Oates (formerly Mahl) Avenue in Hartford is a house constructed about 1897. It is one among the many two-family houses on the street constructed by developer Frederick Mahl between 1893 and 1898. The house at No. 61 is notable because it was the home of Marietta Canty (1905–1986), an African American actress who appeared in theater, radio, motion pictures and television from the 1930s to the 1950s. She is best remembered for her roles in such films as Father of the Bride (1950) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The house was purchased by her father, Henry Canty, in 1930. Marietta Canty lived in the house after her retirement from acting in 1955 to care for her father. She also continued her social and political activism, for which she received many awards.
Founded in 1906 by Alfred C. Fuller (whose 1917 house still stands on Prospect Avenue in Hartford), the Fuller Brush Company, famous for its door-to-door salesmen, was located in Hartford until the 1960s. The company built a factory at 3580 Main Street in Hartford in 1922-1923. On March 31, 1923, as it was nearing completion, a 56,000-gallon water tank dropped through 4 concrete floors of the factory’s tower, a disaster in which ten people were killed. The tower was eventually rebuilt. Today, the former factory contains employment and social service agencies. This building is mentioned on p. 180 of my book, A Guide to Historic Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1896, Father Joseph Zebris of St. Andrew Church, New Britain organized the Sons of Lithuania Society in Hartford, offering Mass for the city’s Lithuanian immigrants in a rented room on Sheldon Street. 1900, when the mission filed a report with the diocese of Hartford, is officially regarded as the inaugural year of Holy Trinity Catholic Church. In 1903, the church purchased property on Capitol Avenue which included a two-story brick building which was converted into a place of worship. This brick dwelling was moved to the back of the lot in 1913 to make room for construction of a new church. The cornerstone was blessed on October 10, 1915 and a basement chapel was ready for use by Christmas of that year. The remainder of the church was completed in 1927 and was dedicated on March 18, 1928. (more…)
The fire station of Hartford‘s Engine Company 16 is located at 636 Blue Hills Avenue. Built in 1927, the station was designed by Hartford architects Ebbets and Frid in the Tudor Revival style to blend in with a neighborhood that was, at that time, more residential in character.
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