Before Bushnell Plaza, Bushnell Tower, and the MDC building were built in the 1960s-70s, this area of Hartford, CT (across Main Street from the Municipal Building and the Wadsworth Atheneum) was filled with interesting old buildings that at one time included two Poli theaters, hotels, restaurants, shops, the original home of the American School for the Deaf, and the German neighborhood along Mulberry Street. In this video I talk about this lost neighborhood.
The old campus of Hartford Public High School, which one stood between Hopkins and Broad Streets, is fondly remembered as a lost treasure of the city’s architectural and educational history. In my latest video I talk about this lost landmark, which was destroyed to make way for highway construction in the 1960s. I also discuss the high school’s origins and its previous buildings.
It started as the Hartford Grammar School, which started in 1638, but became a true high school in 1847. From then until 1869, it was located at the corner of Asylum and Ann Streets. Its first building on Hopkins Street, built in 1869, burned down in 1882. This was replaced by what would grow into a campus complex consisting of the Hopkins Street building (first phase erected in 1882-1884, second phase in 1897-1898), the Manual Training Building (erected in 1898), and the Broad Street building (first phase erected in 1914-1915, second phase in 1917-1918). The current building on Forest Street opened in 1963.
In this video I talk about two Connecticut writers of the early nineteenth century who wrote factual books for children. Jesse Olney, who served as the principal of Hartford’s First District School and later lived in Southington, wrote bestselling geography textbooks. Samuel Griswold Goodrich, who wrote under the name Peter Parley, wrote a long series of books that covered a variety of subjects, including history, geography and science. He grew up in Ridgefield, spent his young adulthood in Hartford and, after living in Massachusetts and abroad, moved to Southbury just before his death.
The building at 9 Tryon Street in South Glastonbury may have been built as early as 1720. Around that time Thomas Hollister and Thomas Welles started a saw mill on the east side of nearby Roaring Brook. The mill was linked to the shipbuilding industry in the area at the time. By the mid-eighteenth century this early operation had developed into what was known as the “Great Grist mill at Nayaug.” The house at 9 Tryon Street may have been the bake house associated with that mill that is mentioned in a 1783 deed. According to one source, the Welles-Hollister grist mill and bake oven on Roaring Brook at Nayaug was completely destroyed in the great flood of 1869 and the mill had to be rebuilt on the northwest side of the bridge over Roaring Brook at the foot of High Street. Later, in the early twentieth century, there was a feldspar mill on the east side of the brook and the building at 9 Tryon Street may have served as the mill office of owner Louis W. Howe and then as housing for a spar mill worker’s family. Howe sold the house c. 1928 to Mrs. Aaron Kinne, who had the interior remodeled c. 1940 to designs by restoration architect Norris F. Prentice. It was remodeled a second time in 2002.
In this video I talk about lost buildings on the south side of Pearl Street, west of Trumbull Street, in Hartford. There’s a former jail that became the home of Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co., a school that became a Turkish Bath House, the Telephone Building, Donchian’s Oriental Rugs, the A.M.E. Zion Church, the fire H.Q. and the Y.M.C.A. Along the way I talk about a wall that collapsed with a crash, a broken window that led to a police chase and the recreation room where the “Hello Girls” used to rest between shifts at the switchboard.
In this video I talk about buildings on the north side of Pearl Street, west of Trumbull St., in Hartford, CT. I focus on lost buildings, including the old 1870 headquarters of the Hartford Insurance Company, Plimpton’s envelope and stationary factory, and Seidler & May’s furniture store, among others.
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