This video is about old days in Hartford, Connecticut when Frank’s Restaurant, the Majestic/E. M. Loews Theater, the Allyn Theater and the Allyn House Hotel stood on the block of Asylum Street between Trumbull Street and Ann Street that’s now the south side of the XL Center and Hartford 21 Building. This block is also where the house of Rev. T. C. Brownell, Episcopal Bishop and founder of Trinity College, was located.
Steamboat Gothic? Picturesque? High Victorian? Stick? Just what is the architectural style of the Mark Twain House?
Photographs taken in the first decade of the 20th century provide a view of buildings that stood near Hartford, CT’s riverfront in its great days as a river port. In this video you will learn about the development of Ferry Street and the old days of Hartford’s trade with the West Indies. Also the first bridge across the Connecticut River here, built in 1809, and some of the people who lived and worked in the area, including Thomas Blake, firefighter and coppersmith, and Asa Farwell, famous for his cherry bounce.
Hartford, Connecticut’s riverfront has gone through many changes over the years. Long before the highway came through, the Valley Railroad was built in 1871 through the warehouse district by the river. A number of old warehouses and fish markets, documented in photographs in the 1860s and 1870s, were demolished around this time. I talk about them in this video, as well as a sycamore tree that survived next to the river from Hartford’s earliest colonial days, through its great era commercial activity along the river, and into the 1890s.
In this video I talk about the historic buildings on Main Street in Wethersfield from the intersection with Church Street north to Hanmer Park. I cover the Greek Revival-style John Williams House, the former home and office of Dr. Erastus Cooke, the former church that’s now Griffith Academy, the former Masonic Hall, the Simeon Belden House, Comstock, Ferre & Co., the Rev. James Lockwood House, Trinity Episcopal Church, the Charles C. Hart Seed Company, the site of the Stillman Tavern (where Rochambeau stayed in 1781), the Second Empire-style Edward Robbins House, the houses of Allyn, Timothy and Henry Stillman, the Lemuel May House, the former High Street School, the houses of Francis and Capt. John Bulkeley, Ebenezer Talcott and Maj. David Hills, the Mansard-roofed. Capt. Daniel Francis House, the Cape. Jesse Goodrich House, the Porter-Belden House (some of its paneling is now in the Brooklyn Museum), Hanmer Park and the impressive brick Samuel Woodhouse, Jr. House.