Central Baptist Church, Hartford (1926)

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.

Hartford B.P.O. Elks Lodge (1903)

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.

Chevry Lomday Mishnayes (1926)

Congregation Chevry Lomday Mishnayes was founded in Hartford by Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia in 1918. Having no permanent home for their first seven years, the congregation built a shul in 1924-1926 on Bedford Street in Hartford’s Clay Arsenal neighborhood. The building‘s exterior has the same design as the many standard brick apartment buildings that were being constructed in Hartford at the time, but with adaptations for its use as a synagogue. In 1964, the congregation moved to a new shul at 191 Westbourne Parkway and in 1983 merged with Teferes Israel, which merged with Beth David Synagogue in West Hartford in 1993. The former shul on Bedford Street is now the Temple of Prayer and Worship for the House of God.

Beth Hamedrash Hagadol (1922)

The construction of Temple Beth Israel, on Charter Oak Avenue in Hartford in 1876, established a model for future urban synagogues in Connecticut. Influenced by the design of the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Straße (1859-1866) in Berlin, Germany and Temple Emanu-El (1868) at 43rd Street and 5th Avenue in New York, Temple Beth Israel has broad steps leading to a series of round arched doorways in a center section recessed between two projecting square towers. Other synagogues to follow this model include Congregation Tephereth Israel (1925) in New Britain and Beth Israel Synagogue (1925) in New Haven. Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, an Orthodox congregation organized on Hartford’s East Side by Eastern European immigrants in 1905, moved to the city’s North End in 1921. The following year, the congregation commissioned the Hartford architectural firm of Berenson & Moses to design a synagogue on Garden Street that was to be similar to Beth Israel in New Haven. The completed building, later known as the Garden Street Synagogue, was used by the congregation until 1962. Following the movement of Jews from the city to the suburbs, Beth Hamedrash Hagadol merged with Ateres Kneset Israel to form the United Synagogues of Greater Hartford, which moved to West Hartford in the 1960s. The Garden Street Synagogue’s Torah Ark, which remained in the building’s basement for two decades, was recently restored by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford. The former Garden Street Synagogue is now The Greater Refuge Church of Christ.

87-89 Atwood Street, Hartford (1911)

This month’s issue of Hartford magazine has an article about the restoration of a “Perfect Six” apartment building at 87-89 Atwood Street in Hartford’s Asylum Hill neighborhood. Perfect Sixes, with three floors, double bow-fronts, and six apartments, were very popular in Hartford at the start of the twentieth century. The one on Atwood Street was a particularly stylish one, intended for middle-class residents. Built in 1911 by two Russian immigrants, Louis and Morris Schoolnik, the building had become run down by the 1980s and was shut down by the city in 1997. The Northside Institutions Neighborhood Alliance, which works to revitalize Asylum Hill, sought to acquire and restore the building, a process which took some time, during which the building further deteriorated. The roof collapsed in February 2009, but the reclamation project was able to retain the building’s historic facade facing the street, while the rest was demolished and rebuilt. The converted structure now contains two townhouses.