The Brownstone Building, erected for the Charter Oak Bank in 1861. Later home to the City Bank & Trust, the Capitol Grill and the Brownstone Restaurant. Before it was built, this was the site of the 1846 Unitarian Church of the Saviour and before that a log cabin erected for William Henry Harrison’s presidential campaign in 1840.
This video is about the section of Asylum Street in Hartford, CT where a retail/parking structure was built by the Hartford National Bank & Trust in the 1960s. This was once the home of clothing stores, like the now vanished Covey & Smith, and the legendary Huntington’s Book Store, which was in existence under various names between 1835 and 1993 and was known to Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain as Brown & Gross.
This video is about a section of Asylum Street (south side, east of Trumbull Street) and the buildings and businesses that were once there, including the Stackpole Moore Tryon Company, Flint-Bruce Company, Horsfalls, H. F. Corning & Co. leather goods, Cone’s Hardware, Leopold Morse and a careful dentist!
Savitt Jewelers was a beloved Hartford institution, famous for the slogan P.O.M.G. (Peace of Mind Guaranteed). For half a century the store was located on the south side of Asylum Street. In this video, I talk about Savitt’s and some of the earlier businesses that existed in the same section of Asylum Street going back to the nineteenth century. These included a number of clothiers, one whose fame was compared to that of Lord Byron. Another clothing store was run by a former Hartford mayor and yet another was damaged during a major riot caused by the distribution of free suspenders.
This video is about a lost section of Allyn Street, between Trumbull and Ann Streets in Hartford Connecticut, before the Civic Center (now called the XL Center) was built in the early 1970s.
The Civic Center in Hartford, Connecticut opened in January 1975. The roof collapsed in 1978 and was rebuilt in 1980. The Civic Center became the XL Center in 2007. Long before the Civic Center was built, the block of Trumbull Street between Asylum Street and Church Street had several notable (and now lost) buildings, like the lavish Allyn House Hotel, the Hartford County Court House and the City Club Building.
This is my presentation recorded live earlier today for the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum: “When Hartford Was a Retail Hub: the Growth of the City’s Great Department Stores (1890s – 1960s).”