This video is about the forgotten history of Ford Street, which is across from Bushnell Park in Hartford, Connecticut. Now a parking lot, it is remembered as the site of the old Statler-Hilton Hotel, which was demolished in 1990. But before the hotel was built in the early 1950s, there had been many other buildings here, including one where the city’s first Black labor union formed.
My latest video is about the block of Asylum Street in Hartford between High Street and Union Place. What used to be here before the current two buildings (the Hollander, originally the Capitol National bank, built in 1926, and the Capital Hotel, originally the Shoreham Motor Hotel, built in 1960)? I go all the way back to the 1860s to cover the history of this block, which is right across from the northwest section of Bushnell Park. I also have a new Substack post in which I go into greater detail about an 1899 fire that I mention in the video.
My latest video is about how old buildings along Main Street, Arch Street, and Sheldon Street in Hartford were replaced by the massive Hartford Public Library and Ribicoff Federal Building/US Courthouse. Back in the mid-1800s there were commercial blocks, houses and a church here, as well as the bridge over the Park River. The bridge survives, but the river was buried under a highway and the Library was built above the highway.
My latest YouTube video reveals the forgotten history of the block of Main Street (west side, between Park Street and Buckingham Street). I also have a new Substack piece that gives more details about a story I mention in the video (it involves an antique fire bucket!).
Gifford Pinchot, who became the first head of the US Forest Service in Theodore Roosevelt’s administration and later served two separate stints as Governor of Pennsylvania, was born in his maternal grandfather’s home (pictured above) in Simsbury (now called the Simsbury 1820 House) on August 11, 1865. Pinchot’s father, James, erected a chateau-like mansion in Milford, PA in the mid-1880s. It was later the home of Gifford Pinchot and his wife Cornelia Bryce Pinchot. It’s not in Connecticut, but please check out my recent YouTube video about the mansion, which is called Grey Towers!
My new Substack post is about the estate of Hartford insurance executive Carl F. Sturhahn, who had herds of Jersey cattle on his dairy farm over a century ago. His farm and Tudor-style mansion were surrounded by a bend of the North Branch of the Park River (near the University of Hartford campus). The property was later subdivided as the Sunny Reach real estate development in West Hartford. The former Sturhahn barn, erected in 1918, was converted into a residence in 1939 (a contemporary view is shown above).
This video is about historic landmarks along Main Street in Hartford, north of the intersection with Albany Avenue up to the border with the Town of Windsor. The landmarks include the Fuller Brush Factory (currently undergoing redevelopment), the second oldest house in the city, another house that’s been called “The Mark Twain House of the North End,” historic cemeteries and several Black churches with long histories in the city. Many of the buildings played an important role in the city’s Jewish history.
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