Located on Elm Street, Hartford’s “Insurance Row” of the 1920s, a building based on the style of a Florentine palace (Renaissance Revival style) served as the home of the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Company from 1920 to 1963, when it moved to a more modern building. The structure features a striking use of color in the pattern of its bricks and the use of glazed tiles.
Very unusually for a Georgian Revival style house, the Fanny S. O’Connor House, on Gillett Street in Hartford, was constructed of brownstone. The house, built in 1899, also features a Jacobethan Revival-style gable.
Strongly influenced by many features of the Old State House, the Horace Bushnell Memorial Hall was built in 1930 in the Georgian Revival style. It was constructed in Hartford, near the State Capitol, as a gift to the community from Dotha Bushnell Hillyer in honor of her father, the Rev. Horace Bushnell. The building was designed by the architectural firm of Corbett, Harrison and MacMurray, which also worked on Rockefeller Center. While the exterior reflects Colonial influence, the interior is in the Art Deco style. Today, the expanded Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts remains Hartford’s main venue for concerts and can also serve as a public auditorium.
Once, together with the nearby Polish National Home, at the heart of a vibrant Polish community in Hartford, SS Cyril and Methodius Church still serves Polish-Americans. Built in 1917, on Charter Oak Avenue, the church features elements of the Gothic Revival, Romanesque Revival and High Victorian Gothic styles.
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On this Veteran’s Day, I went to see the play at the Hartford Stage, Chick, The Great Osram, about the life of A. Everett Austin, Jr. Known as “Chick,” Austin was the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 to 1944 and during his tenure made Hartford a center of the art world. He built up the Atheneum’s collections of both Old Master Paintings and modern art, brining to the first major exhibition of Picasso to the united States. He was also involved with the performing arts, staging the premiere of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson‘s Four Saints in Three Acts, with an all black cast, and bringing George Blanchine to America. It was the biographical play’s last day, but an exhibition called Magic Facade: The Austin House, about the home Chick Austin built on Scarborough Street in Hartford, continues through April 20.
The house, constructed in 1930, was designed by Leigh H. French, Jr., under Austin’s direction. A Palladian Villa, it was modeled on the 1596 Villa Feretti-Angeli in Dolo, Venezia, Italy. The house gives the feeling of a stage set, as it is only one room deep. When I was in high school, I heard one variation of an urban legend about the house, according to which it was a mere facade for a power station! The house was bequeathed by Chick’s widow, Helen Goodwin Austin, to the Atheneum in 1985 and has recently been restored. It is available for tours on request with a donation to the Sarah Goodwin Austin Memorial Fund.
An excellent example of the Second Empire style, the 1869 Hartford home of Oliver H. Easton, an architect and builder, features a colorful mansard roof and a tower, both with elaborate dormers. The house is located on Fairfield Avenue, where many affluent families built homes in the years after the Civil War.
The house built in 1875 for the superintendent of Hartford’s Cedar Hill Cemetery is in the Gothic Revival style and features a rare full second-story window with an elaborate hood. The cemetery, designed by Jacob Weidenmann, is a notable example of the Victorian style of rural, park-like cemeteries. Weidenmann also designed Bushnell Park and the garden at the Butler-McCook House in Hartford.
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