Videos

This video is about Armsmear, the estate of Samuel Colt in Hartford, Connecticut. The mansion survives today but the landscape, which once included picturesque ponds, statuary and an extensive complex of greenhouses, has been replaced with athletic facilities and a lawn.

This video is about the James Goodwin House, also known as Woodlands and the Goodwin Castle. Built in 1871, it stood near the intersection of Asylum Avenue and Woodland Street in Hartford. Once the largest private home in the state, it was torn down in 1940.

This video is about buildings and businesses that have existed on the west side of Market Street, between State Street and Talcott Street in Hartford, Connecticut. This area, including the adjacent Kinsley and Temple Streets, was once the location of A. Squires & Son Grocery store, Blodgett & Clapp iron merchants, the D’Esopo Bank, the original home of the Hartford Stage, and Hartford’s old Greek Revival-style City Hall, later the site of Police Headquarters. In this vicinity in 1937 a dramatic engineering project moved an 8-story building 125 feet from behind G. Fox & Co. to the rear of Brown-Thomson Co. There is also a former church on Market Street that is the only building there that survives from the nineteenth century.

This video is about the block of Market Street, between State Street and Talcott Street, where Constitution Plaza is today. Buildings that used to be here were the Farmers & Mechanics Bank, the Nolan Building (once the home of MIckey’s Villanova Restaurant), Charles G. Lincoln (importers of coffee), the site of the 1816 Stone Schoolhouse, the Clover Leaf Cafe, the American Theater, the Barbour Silver Company, the William Rogers Manufacturing Company (producers of silver plate), Hartford original Baptist Church of 1798, the Warburton Chapel and the onetime home of the Aetna Radiophone Corporation of America.

This video is about a lost section of the old East Side neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut. I talk about buildings and businesses that used to exist on State Street, from the Intersection with Front Street to the Connecticut River. The entire area was demolished in 1957 for the building of the Founders Bridge. In the early nineteenth century this was an affluent area. Steamships arrived at the foot of State Street and there were docks and warehouses used in the West India trade. Later in the century, as the East Side became the home of immigrant communities, various businesses flourished here, including saloons, grocery and liquor wholesalers, and manufacturers of paper and of flavoring extracts. At the foot of State Street the steamboats were joined by the Connecticut Valley railroad. In the first half of the twentieth century, the shade tobacco industry dominated the area, with blocks of buildings being used as warehouses. By the 1950s there were still various businesses here, including large stores for furniture and for heating and plumbing supplies, as well as a hotel for transients. But it was all swept away for redevelopment.