My latest video is about two lost Hartford mansions. The Ely family homes stood on Main Street, where the Capitol Prep Magnet School is today. They were built in 1811 and 1830-1832 by William Ely, a wealthy shipping merchant who had a town called Elyton named for him in Alabama. Elton was later absorbed into the city of Birmingham, but the Elyton Hotel in Birmingham and Ely Street in Hartford perpetuate his name today.
This video gives the background on the Keney Memorial Clock Tower in Hartford, Connecticut. It was built on the site of Henry and Walter Keney’s wholesale grocery business and next door was the brother’s Greek Revival style mansion, which is now lost. There is doubt about whether the Tower was built as a monument to Keney business or to the mother who raised them.
This is a compilation of my videos about Hartford department stores: Steiger-Vedder, Sage-Allen, Wise-Smith, Brown-Thomson, G. Fox, and the West Hartford Lord & Taylor.
This video features fifteen houses considered to be mansions in their time that were built between 1798 and the 1870s in Hartford, CT. They range from the elegant Federal-style residences of the early 1800s to later homes built in the Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate and French Second Empire styles.
This video is a series of extended quotations from the Hartford Courant newspaper printed between 1905 and 1908 about old buildings that existed along the Connecticut River in Hartford, Connecticut, some that were lost when the Bulkeley Bridge was built in 1908 and some when the Valley Railroad came through in 1871.
This video is about a house that was built circa 1780 in Hartford, Connecticut for the Revolutionary War diplomat Silas Deane. Deane never got to live in the house (in fact he never set foot in it!), but his brother Barnabas moved in instead. The house was built by the Scottish builder William Spratts, who had been a prisoner of war. He built a number of other high-style residences in Connecticut at the time. The Deane House was torn down in 1926.
In so many of my other videos I describe what has been lost and destroyed in downtown Hartford, CT. But in this video I talk about the great buildings that survive from the days before the great mid-century urban renewal projects, from old houses (Butler-McCook, Barnard & Hills Houses), to later residential and commercial buildings (the Hotel Capitol, McCone Block, Cheney Building & the Linden), and then from department stores (Sage-Allen, Wise-Smith, G. Fox) and office towers (Hartford Trust Co. and Travelers), to churches (Center and South Congressional, Christ Church Cathedral, St. Peter’s, South Park Methodist & Central Baptist) and great public and institutional buildings (South Green Fire Station, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Municipal Building & Old State House). Which are your favorites?