Update: This Carriage House was demolished in January 2010 after the roof collapsed from heavy snow.
The Caleb M. Holbrook House once stood at the corner of Farmington Avenue and Gillett Street in Hartford. Built in 1865, the Second Empire style house was later torn down, but Holbrook’s carriage house remains on Gillett Street. Below is the intersection where the house once stood as it appears today (also note that the current apartment building is in the Mission Revival style):
For more on the loss of this building:
I was leading a group today on a tour around Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood. I brought them down Gillett Street to show them the Holbrook Carriage House of 1865, a remnant from the French Second Empire-style Holbrook House that once stood on the corner of Gillett Street and Farmington Avenue. The Carriage House is now a pile of Rubble.
I don’t know when it was demolished. Update: Thanks to the comment below I found out more details: It was demolished due to snow damage back in January. According to the CT Trust for Historic Preservation:
In Hartford, the city building official ordered an historic carriage house on Gillette Street demolished after its slate roof caved in. According to the Hartford Preservation Alliance, the carriage house was built about 1865 to serve a house, since razed, on Farmington Avenue.
Further info can be read in this pdf document: http://costep.cslib.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Historic-Building-To-Be-Demolished.pdf. [End Update] Both the Holbrook House and the Carriage House can be seen in the 1877 Bird’s-Eye View of Hartford and are in historic Hartford atlases, like the one published in 1896. The Carriage House, with its distinctive pyramidal roof can still be seen in the 3D views of Gillett Street at Bing Maps and on GoogleMaps Satellite View. This is the first structure I know of that I’ve featured on this website that is now history. Everyone, please take a moment to mourn the passing of yet another small part of Hartford’s past.
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Isn’t this the building that suffered significant snow damage this past winter? I remember seeing a news story about it.
It was a sad day when I returned home from work to see that the carriage house’s south wall had begun to crumble. The weight of the snow throughout the winter worsened the problem until the slate roof finally gave way and slid off the south side of the carriage house. The worst part was realizing that there was nothing that could be done to save it and the only thing to do was demolish it.