Thirty years before building their International Style complex in Bloomfied in 1957, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company was headquartered in a Renaissance Revival-style building at 55 Elm Street in Hartford. Built in 1926 and designed by James Gamble Rogers, the building was inspired by the Medici-Riccardi Palace in Florence, Italy. Owned by other insurance companies after 1958, the building now houses state offices.
The building (built around 1895) at 109-121 Allyn Street in Hartford is currently home to the Palace night club and Aladdin Halal restaurant. A historic photograph at Connecticut History Online shows the same building in about 1895 when it was the Capitol City Carriage and Harness Repository. The company was established in 1895 by George W. Pomeroy and the building is referred to as “Pom[e]roy’s New Building.” The first two floors have been greatly altered since then, but the rest of the building is still recognizable from the historic photograph. (more…)
Facing Bushnell Park at 55 Jewell (now 55 Trumbull) Street in Hartford is the Southern New England Telephone Company Building, built in 1930-1931. The Art Deco structure, designed by R.W. Foote, emphasizes linear compositions with geometrical ornamentation. The building was expanded in 1953 with the addition of the upper six floors, an enlargement that had been planned for in the original design. SNET relocated in the 1970s and the building was leased to other tenants, eventually becoming wholly vacant. In recent years, it has been converted into apartments and is known as “55 On the Park.”
Carl J. Malmfeldt designed the offices of the Caledonian-American Insurance Company, the Hartford branch of a Scottish firm. Constructed in 1936 at 150 Cogswell Street, the building is now part of the Hartford.
Henry C. Judd and Judson H. Root were successful wool merchants in the later nineteenth century. The firm of Judd & Root, formed in 1869, built an office building at 179 Allyn Street in Hartford in 1883. The architects were Francis H. Kimball and Thomas Wisedell, who also designed the Goodwin Building in Hartford. Unlike that earlier Queen Anne structure, the Judd & Root Building was constructed in the Romanesque Revival style, although both buildings feature terra-cotta decoration on the upper floors. The Judd & Root Building also has a brick Renaissance Revival-style arcade on the first floor, where retail shops were located. It became known as Professional Building in the 1920s, when the ground floor housed a pharmacy and a surgical supply company and over 50 physicians and surgeons had offices above. The building was restored around 2001. (more…)
The Noah Webster School is an elementary school on Whitney Street in Hartford’s West End. It was named for the famous lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author, Noah Webster, who was born in West Hartford. The school was designed in the Tudor Revival style by architect William C. Brocklesby. Additions were made to the building in 1906 and 1909 by Brocklesby & Smith, in 1932 by Malmfeldt, Adams & Prentice, and most recently by DuBose Associates as the school was converted into a “MicroSociety Magnet School.”
In 1851, local joiner Lewis Rowell built as his residence the brick house at 25 Lewis Street (a street renamed in his honor in 1883). The house has a 1926 addition by architects Smith & Bassette, projecting out to the sidewalk. Lewis built the adjoining house, at 27 Lewis Street, in 1855 as a mirror image to his own house. He purchased the house at 30 Lewis Street as a wedding present for his daughter, Mary Rowell Storrs, in 1874. She later lived in an 1899 house on Farmington Avenue.
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