The Wallace Camp House is a Queen Anne-style building, constructed circa 1888 at 92 Woodlawn Terrace in Waterbury. Wallace Camp was an industrialist and employee of the Scovill Manufacturing Company. In more recent years, the house has been a bed and breakfast and has recently been for sale.
As related in Frederick John Kinsbury’s A Narrative and Documentary History of St. John’s Protestant Episcopal Church (formerly St. James) of Waterbury, Connecticut (1907): “In 1884 John C. Booth and Mrs. Olive M. Elton presented to the parish the lot at the corner of Church and West Main streets, and a rectory was erected thereon, which was completed in the spring of 1886 at a cost of about $16,000.” The Queen Anne-style building, at 21 Church Street, features a Romanesque Revival archway on the front porch. In the 1970s, this former minister’s residence was converted into an office building.
Opened in January of 1922, the Poli’s Palace theater was built by Vaudeville impresario Sylvester Z. Poli of New Haven. The Rennaissance Revival building is the work of Thomas W. Lamb, a noted architect of theaters, who later designed the Warner Theatre in Torrington. After Poli’s retirement in 1934, it became the flagship theater of the Loew’s Poli chain and was used as a cinema and performance space until 1987. The Palace Theater has since been restored and reopened in 2004 as a performing arts center for Greater Waterbury.
At the intersection of Field and Grand Streets in Waterbury is the former Waterbury National Bank Building, now the headquarters for Junior Achievement of Southwestern New England. Built in 1919-1922, the building is one of several notable structures along Grand Street designed by Cass Gilbert. The Chase family had a long association with the Waterbury National Bank, which was founded in 1848 and was Waterbury’s first bank. Augustus Savin Chase, who became the Bank‘s Cashier in 1852 and President in 1865, controlled it until his death in 1896. The Bank’s original building was located at Grand and Bank Streets, giving the latter thoroughfare its name. Henry S. Chase intended the new bank building to be part of his plan for an impressive Waterbury municipal center. Henry died in 1918 and his brother Irving Chase assumed management of construction, utilizing Cass Gilbert, the same architect who had designed the Chase Brass and Copper Company’s headquarters, also located on Grand Street.
A Young Men’s Christian Association was established in Waterbury in 1858. Association activities dwindled by the late 1870s, but the organization was revived in 1883 and officially incorporated in 1889, making it the oldest YMCA in Connecticut. The YMCA‘s rented space soon became inadequate and a new building was constructed on West Main Street in 1892-1893. It occupied part of what had been the land of Philo Brown, who had a house designed by Henry Austin. Philo Brown was head of the Brown and Brothers brass company. The first YMCA building was replaced in 1924 by the current Georgian Revival structure, designed by Richard Dana. The building was expanded with a new modern wing in 1971.
The late Greek Revival house at 180 Prospect Street in Waterbury was built around 1850 for Isaac B. Hinman. It was later home to Dana L. Hungerford of Benedict & Burnham and then, after 1918, by Clarence P. Cook, a 1901 graduate of Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School. He was employed by the Scovill Manufacturing Company and also served as president of the Waterbury Y.M.C.A.
Wilfred Griggs designed the Colonial Revival house at 98 Woodlawn Terrace in Waterbury for Paul D. Hamilton. Built in 1916, the house’s side porch was added around 1950. As described in the History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley, Vol. 3 (1918), “Paul D. Hamilton, president and treasurer of the Hamilton Hardware Corporation, is thus widely known as one of the leading and representative business men of Waterbury, where his entire life has been passed and where he has so directed his efforts as to win not only success but the high and merited regard of his fellowmen.”
