The former South Park Methodist Episcopal Church, facing South Green in Hartford, was built in 1875. In 1886, the Boardman Chapel was added to the rear of the church, but has since been removed. In 1982, South Park Methodist Church merged with the United Methodist Church on Farmington Avenue. The 1875 South Green church was purchased by South Park Inn, Inc., which renovated the building and opened in in 1984 as an emergency homeless shelter.
The series of buildings at 235-257 Asylum Street in Hartford are valuable nineteenth century survivors, examples of a period when cast iron was popular as a decorative element on commercial buildings in the city. New York has its famous Cast Iron District in SoHo, but Hartford has a few examples of cast iron ornamentation from the same period, most notably the cast iron front added to the building at 105 Asylum Street in 1896. The three buildings at nos. 235-257 Asylum Street were built between 1870 and 1872 by John Harrison. As reported in the Courant on June 13, 1871:
John Harrison and his associates, who purchased a portion of the Shepherd property on Asylum street, will erect at the head of Ann street a five-story iron building, which will be the second iron front in that street when the improvements now going on are completed.
To the left, in the image above, is 235-237 Asylum, completed in 1871. The original cast iron front on the first two floors was later replaced, but has been retained on the upper three floors. The adjacent middle building, 241 Asylum, is a narrower structure, having three instead of four bays. The largest of the buildings, 247-257 Asylum on the right, dating to 1872, was constructed of brick. Its windows have cast iron architraves and the building is topped by a bold cornice featuring semicircular arches, a feature also used on the later McKone Block on Main Street, built in 1875. There are more pictures after the jump…
The only surviving nineteenth-century building on Market Street in Hartford is a former church building at no. 125. It was built in 1855 as St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a mission to the immigrants who once lived on Hartford’s East Side. In 1880, it was sold and became the German Lutheran Church of the Reformation. In 1898, it became St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church, which served the neighborhood’s Italian-American population. In 1958, St. Anthony’s merged with St. Patrick’s Church and the former St. Anthony’s Church building became a Catholic information center. Today, it is used by Catholic Charities Migration and Refugee Services. The church no longer has its original steps up to what was once the front door.
At the church’s northeast corner is an eighteenth-century grave, protected by a deed restriction. As described in Commemorative Exercises of the First church of Christ in Hartford, at its Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary (1883), “The monument of Dr. Norman Morison, who died in 1761, and was buried in his own garden, still stands in front of St. Paul’s church on Market street, with that of another of his family.” Dr. Norman Morrison (1690-1761) had a property that stretched to Main Street. His house there was later moved to Trumbull Street.
The Wadsworth Atheneum art museum in Hartford consists of four connected structures. Three of them can be seen, lined up adjacent to each other, on Main Street: the original Atheneum building (1844), the Colt Memorial Building (1906) and the Morgan Memorial Building (1910). The fourth section, the Avery Memorial Building, is on Atheneum Square and Prospect Street, behind the 1844 building. Samuel P. Avery left his art collection and funds to construct a building to house it. The Avery Memorial, built in 1934, was designed by the firm of Morris & O’Connor to have a minimum of decorative ornament. The interior has the earliest International Style interior of any museum in America.
Agudas Achim is a Orthodox Jewish congregation founded in Hartford in 1887 by immigrants from Romania. Meeting at first in private homes, the Congregation moved to a building on Market Street around 1902 and then to a larger synagogue on Greenfield Street, constructed in 1928. Like the similar Beth Hamedrash Hagodol on Garden Street, Agudas Achim (1928) was designed by the firm of Berenson & Moses. Following the movement of Jews out of Hartford’s Upper Albany neighborhood, the Congregation constructed a new synagogue on North Main Street in West Hartford in 1968. The 1928 building has since been a Baptist Church and is now the Glory Chapel International Cathedral.
In this post I’m trying something new: many of the links embedded below point to articles from the Hartford Courant from the 1920s, available at iconn.org (for those with a Connecticut Library Card).
There were once two Baptist Churches on Main Street in Hartford. The First Baptist Church, originally located (from 1798 to 1831) at the corner Market and Temple Streets, moved to a second building on Main Street and finally to a third, at Main and Talcott Streets. The South Baptist Church had two edifices, the first built in the 1830s and the second, at Main and Elm, dating to 1854. In the 1920s, the two Baptist churches united to form the Central Baptist Church. Worship services continued at the First Baptist Church, while the former South Baptist Church was demolished and a new church built on the site for the combined Central Baptist congregation. While many other churches at the time had been moving to neighborhoods to the west, the Baptist Church, after considering such a move for financial reasons, decided to remain on Main Street. Ground was broken in 1924, the cornerstone was laid the following year and the completed church was dedicated in 1926. Designed by Isaac A. Allen, the church would contain a large auditorium and gymnasium.
The yellow brick building of the Hartford B.P.O. Elks Lodge #19, organized in 1884, was built on Prospect Street in 1903. Designed by John J. Dwyer, a Hartford architect, the building was constructed in the Renaissance Revival style. The Hartford Club, nearby on the same street, was built the same year in the Georgian Revival style. The Elks Lodge has retained its original elegant interiors.
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