At 31-33 Lewis Street in Hartford is a Georgian Revival office building built in 1928 and designed by William F. Brooks. It matches well stylistically with the neighboring early nineteenth-century residences on Lewis Street. Recently rehabilitated, the building is back-to-back with the Trumbull on the Park apartment complex. To learn more about Lewis Street and other sites in Hartford, buy my new book, A Guide to Historic Hartford, Connecticut.
The former headquarters building of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, at 56 Prospect Street in Hartford, is currently vacant. An Art Deco structure built in 1932, it was designed by Carl J. Malmfeldt. This block of Prospect Street was once the site of two lost Hartford landmarks: the old headquarters of the Travelers Insurance Company and Parson’s Theatre. To learn about the founding of Hartford Steam Boiler and find out about other great sites in downtown Hartford, check out Tour 1 in my new book, A Guide to Historic Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1981-1982, three nineteenth-century buildings on Capen Street in Hartford, each with 6-units, were converted into cooperatively-owned housing and named “Haley Manors” after Alex Haley, the author of Roots. The property for the project was donated by Rev. Dr. Lincoln J. Davis Sr., founder and President of Lincoln Enterprises, one of the first minority-owned business development corporations in Hartford. Two of the buildings, at 42-44 Capen Street (see image above) and 46-48 Capen Street (see image below), are wood-frame structures that follow the same basic plan with different decorative details on each building. They were built in 1898 by Henry D. Ely. The third building, located at 36-38 Capen Street (see image below), is a brick Italianate, built around 1875. These buildings are mentioned in Tour 8 in my new book, A Guide to Historic Hartford, Connecticut. (more…)
To celebrate the release of my new book this week, A Guide to Historic Hartford, Connecticut, I’ll be featuring Hartford buildings. The Henry C. Dwight School, at 585 Wethersfield Avenue, consists of two attached structures. The earlier one (image above) was built in about 1885 and is a polychromatic High Victorian Gothic building designed by Jacob Bachmeyer. In 1901, a larger addition (see below) in the Renaissance Revival style was constructed, which more than doubled the size of the school. Known as the Wethersfield Avenue School, it was later renamed for Henry C. Dwight, wool merchant, president of Mechanics Savings Bank, mayor of Hartford in 1890–92 and chairman of Hartford’s South School District. (more…)
In 1897, Immigrants in Ansonia from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire established one of the first parishes of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the United States. The first St. Peter and St. Paul Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was constructed in 1897-1898 on May Street. In 1910, the congregation purchased land at 105 Clifton Avenue, where the current church was built in 1915-1916. Plans for the church were sent by an architect from Lviv, Halychyna and the architectural firm of Johnson and Burns of Hartford was selected to complete the blueprints. The church’s roof is covered in red tiles and the domes are clad in copper. A major restoration of the building took place in 1987-1989.
David Smith was a house builder who constructed a row of Greek Revival houses at 237, 259-261, and 283 Brewster Street in the Black Rock Section of Bridgeport. The house at No. 259-61, now a multi-family home, was Smith’s own residence, built in 1843. At 3 Calderwood Court is the David Smith Barn, built the same year and converted into a residence in the 1850s.
Born in Wolcott in 1785, Seth Thomas first worked in the clock business under Eli Terry and later purchased Terry’s clock-making business in 1810. Thomas moved to Plymouth Hollow (later named Thomaston in his honor) in 1813 and founded the famous Seth Thomas Clock Company, which continued in business until the 1980s. In 1838, Seth Thomas purchased the house at 237 Main Street in Thomaston from Marvin Blakeslee. It had probably been built in about 1825 and is the only remaining of the five houses owned by the Thomas family on Main Street. In 1850, Thomas sold it to his daughter, Amanda Thomas Bradstreet, whose husband, Thomas Jefferson Bradstreet, was a descendant of the Puritan poet, Anne Bradstreet. The house remained in the family until the death of Miss Edith Bradstreet Mather in 2004. The following year, the Town of Thomaston bought the property from her surviving sister, Clara-Louise Mather Riggs. The Thomas-Bradstreet House, restored by the Thomaston Historical Commission, is now a house museum open to the public.
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