In 1895, an imposing Colonial Revival house, built of buff brick and limestone, was constructed on Woodland Street, in Hartford’s Asylum Hill neighborhood. Built for the lawyer Theodore Lyman and his wife Laura Lyman, the house was designed by the architectural firm of Hapgood & Hapgood. With the death of Mrs. Lyman, in 1925, the building was bought by the Town and County Club and has since been preserved by its members.
As we count down the the last hours and minutes of 2007, it seems appropriate to showcase a clock tower. The Keney Memorial Clock Tower, located at the intersection of Albany Avenue, Main and Ely Steets in Hartford, stands on the site of the wholesale grocery business run by the brothers, Henry and Walter Keney, who lived in a house nearby. Henry Keney’s will left funds for both the memorial, which was dedicated to his mother, Rebecca Turner Keney, and for the creation of Hartford’s Keney Park. The Clock Tower, constructed of brownstone in 1898, was designed by Charles C. Haight and was modeled on the Tour Saint-Jacques, a surviving Gothic tower in Paris. The Keney Clock Tower stands 130-feet high and is Hartford’s only free-standing tower.
Houses in many of the popular styles of the later nineteenth century were built on Allen Place in Hartford, which was laid out in 1869. The house at 125 Allen Place is an excellent example of the Gothic Revival style, featuring steeply pitched roofs and dormers, and decorated bargeboards.
Col. Charles H. Northam, a Hartford businessman, was director of the Cedar Hill Cemetery Association and donated funds for the construction of the cemetery’s Northam Memorial Chapel, completed in 1882. It was designed by the important Hartford Architect, George Keller, in what he described as the “Modern Gothic” style, his simplified version of the Gothic Revival style. The chapel was restored in 1999, after being unused for nearly fifty years, and today houses the cemetery’s offices.
The congregation of All Saints Orthodox Church was founded in Hartford in 1914. The original church building was on Broad Street, near the State Capitol. In 1956, land was purchased on Scarborough Street for a new church, which was not constructed until 1963-1964. Each November, the church has a Russian Tea Room and Bazaar. Today is Christmas, but some Russian-American Orthodox Christians will celebrate Christmas on January 7, the date of Russian Christmas.
Hartford’s Fourth Congregational Church, modeled on New Haven’s Center Church on the Green, was built downtown on Main Street in 1850. This original building can be seen in a number of historic photographs. In 1913, the Main Street property was sold for commercial development. William F. Brooks, the architect of Hartford’s Municipal Building and the New Britain Public Library, persuaded the congregation to keep the original church’s steeple and portico and use them on the new church, completed in 1914, at the intersection of Albany Avenue and Vine Street. Thanks to this early work of historic preservation, the later building preserves an important part of a demolished historic structure. The Fourth Congregational Church merged in 1953 with Windsor Avenue Congregational Church to form the Horace Bushnell Congregational Church. The church is now home to Liberty Christian Center International. (more…)
Nathaniel Shipman was a lawyer, Federal judge, and a founding partner of the law firm of Shipman & Goodwin, which is still prominent today. His house, on Charter Oak Place in Hartford, was built in 1860 in the Italianate style. Charter Oak Place was a fashionable neighborhood when Shipman moved there, and today has many surviving houses built between 1858 and 1875, including two Italianate double houses, the Kingsbury-Gatling House, the Robinson-Smith House and the Charles Northam House.
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