Uncategorized

Today is the eighteenth anniversary of this website, which started on April 30, 2007 with a post about the Joseph Webb House (back when the house was still painted “Webb Red”!). Since then, I also started a similar website about Massachusetts, I wrote two books about historic Hartford, started a YouTube channel History with Dan Sterner, and most recently launched a Substack called Remembering Old Hartford (and another one called That’s Historical). Thank you all for reading and watching! If you would like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid Substack subscriber, a member of my YouTube channel, or visit my Ko-fi page.

My latest Substack article is about Buckingham Square Park, which is located at the corner of Main Street and Buckingham Street in downtown Hartford. I describe the park’s origins, which go back to 1830, and then explore times when the park was a subject of public debate: the 1840s, when a grocer wanted to place hay scales there; the 1880s, when a plan by the city to landscape the park led to complaints by the neighbors; and 1930, when many disliked the unemployed men who gathered there to sit on benches at the onset of the Great Depression.

There was once a hotel at the corner of Trumbull and Pratt Streets in Hartford. When it was torn down in the early 1920s it was called the Clifton House. Earlier, it was known as the Madison House and before that, in the early 1890s, as the Pratt Street House. My latest Substack article is about an unusual incident that took place at the hotel in 1892.

Check out my latest article on Substack. It’s the story of a shoe store manager who left Hartford (and his wife and family) the day after Christmas, 1917 on a cross-country spending spree with a young woman using embezzled funds.

As a follow-up to my last Substack post, in my latest post I present two Hartford examples of a dramatic aspect of the construction of steel-framed buildings in the early twentieth century: the tossing of red hot rivets across large distances by teams of iron workers.

My fourth article for Substack is about a 15-story office tower that stood on Main Street in Hartford from 1921 until it was demolished in 1974.

The third article for my Hartford Substack is about Gundlach’s jewelry store, which was located at 20 State Street from 1859 until 1927. Above is an 1860s view of buildings on State Street near the corner of Main Street. The white awning on the far right (on the ground floor of the three-story building) reads “Deming & Gundlach.” The building was later raised to four stories. It was torn down in the 1980s to make way for the State House Square development (Picture Source: Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, Accession number 1956.84.135)