As the Irish population of Torrington grew in the mid-nineteenth century, a wood frame Catholic church was built on Main Street in 1859. St. Francis of Assisi mission became a parish in 1874 and on November 13, 1887, a new Gothic-style St. Francis of Assisi Church, replacing the earlier wooden one, was both dedicated and consecrated on the same day, allegedly the first instance of this dual ecclesiastical honor in the nation.
Theodore Alfred Hungerford, the son of a local merchant, was born in Harwinton in 1838. He later became successful in the New York publishing business. In 1903, Hungerford’s nephew, Newman Hungerford, convinced him to endow a library as his memorial in his home town. The T. A. Hungerford Memorial Library, including (according to legend) a tomb for Mr. Hungerford in the basement, was completed in 1909. Although it is no longer the town’s public library, it continues to serve as a museum of the town’s history, with a collection of artifacts begun by Newman Hungerford.
Having already designed a house in Litchfield for Rufus Stillman in 1950, Marcel Breuer designed a second in 1965, this time working in collaboration with Herbert Beckhard. Breuer also designed factory buildings for Stillman’s company. Unlike that of its predecessor, the entry facade of Stillman House II presents the main view of the house, allowing me to take a more dramatic picture.
Next to Stillman House I, at the end of Beecher Lane in Litchfield, is another mid-century modern home called the Huvelle House. It was built in 1953 and designed by John Johansen on land land that had been split off from the neighboring Stillman property. Dr. C.H. Huvelle and his wife were the architect’s clients and a condition of Stillman’s land offer to them was that they build modern. Mrs. Huvelle continued to reside in the house until her death earlier this year.
The Hotchkiss-Fyler House was built in 1897 for Orsamus R. Fyler and his family. Fyler was prominent in Connecticut politics, serving as a reforming State Insurance Commissioner, State Railroad Commissioner and Chairman of the Republican State Central Committee. Fyler occupied the house with his wife, Mary, and their daughter and son-in-law, Gertrude and Edward Hotchkiss, who were married in 1896. When Gertrude Fyler Hotchkiss died in 1956, she bequeathed the Fyler-Hotchkiss Estate to the Torrington Historical Society. The Chateauesque Hotchkiss-Fyler House became a house museum and headquarters of the Society.
Like the Perfect Six on Atwood Street, another building in Hartford’s Asylum Hill neighborhood recently restored by the Northside Institutions Neighborhood Alliance is a Queen Anne House at 246 Sargeant Street, which stands dramatically at the end of Atwood. It was built as a two-family home in 1897 and is known to local residents as “The Castle.”
This month’s issue of Hartford magazine has an article about the restoration of a “Perfect Six” apartment building at 87-89 Atwood Street in Hartford’s Asylum Hill neighborhood. Perfect Sixes, with three floors, double bow-fronts, and six apartments, were very popular in Hartford at the start of the twentieth century. The one on Atwood Street was a particularly stylish one, intended for middle-class residents. Built in 1911 by two Russian immigrants, Louis and Morris Schoolnik, the building had become run down by the 1980s and was shut down by the city in 1997. The Northside Institutions Neighborhood Alliance, which works to revitalize Asylum Hill, sought to acquire and restore the building, a process which took some time, during which the building further deteriorated. The roof collapsed in February 2009, but the reclamation project was able to retain the building’s historic facade facing the street, while the rest was demolished and rebuilt. The converted structure now contains two townhouses.
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