Connecticut Architecture. Christopher Wigren
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(place 34). Companies continued to develop or expand factory towns and neighborhoods offering housing, stores, and community buildings for their workers. In the early twentieth century the Progressive and Garden City movements inspired efforts to improve working-class housing (see Seaside Village, place 44). A privately built example is Connecticut Gables (1917, W. H. Cox; figure 32), a multifamily structure erected by the Connecticut Mills Company in the Danielson section of Killingly. Its fourteen apartments each comprised three to five rooms, plus modern kitchens and bathrooms. The building, which resembled an English country inn, bore a plaque proclaiming it “A Forward Step in Good Housing for Working People.”
Companies were less likely to get involved in neighborhood building in the cities, where private investors were active. However, industrial expansion still drove rapid growth in Connecticut cities from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. During this period the two- or three-family house emerged as the most common urban residential type. These narrow buildings with units stacked one on top of the other gave each unit windows on all four sides, providing more light and air than the older row houses or side-by-side double houses (figure 33). Multifamily buildings like the Perfect Sixes of Hartford (place 19), or bigger apartment blocks could accommodate larger numbers of people. Fire laws required brick construction in inner neighborhoods, changing the texture and visual weight of buildings.
FIGURE 31. Meriden Curtain Fixture Company, Meriden, 1891 and later. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation
FIGURE 32. W. H. Cox, Connecticut Gables, Danielson, 1917. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation
Immigrants faced challenges fitting into the built environment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the cities they generally lived and worked in buildings constructed and owned by the Yankee upper classes. In the countryside, they moved into farms abandoned by their Yankee owners. The newcomers’ most visible effect on the built environment was in houses of worship: synagogues and Catholic and Orthodox churches brought new forms to Connecticut communities. Catholic churches, convents, and schools formed complexes that served as a religious centers for the Irish, Germans, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and French Canadians who worked the state’s mills or farms (see Catholic churches in Baltic and Ashford, places 61, 75). Jewish immigrants built synagogues with onion domes and other Moorish Revival design motifs that expressed the Middle Eastern roots of their faith and distinguished the buildings from their Christian counterparts (place 97). Eventually members of some immigrant groups went into the building trades and contributed to the construction of many character-defining structures in the state (Villa Friuli, place 93).
FIGURE 33. 50 Francis Street, Ansonia, ca. 1900. Robert Egleston
Downtowns became ever more densely developed, as commercial buildings pressed to the sides and rears of their lots and grew taller. In Bridgeport, the Bishop brothers adopted an uncommon building type, the arcade, to use one property more fully (place 43). Even in small towns a few multistory “blocks” (as commercial buildings were called) proclaimed modernity and prosperity (figure 34). Very tall buildings remained rare, but each of the state’s large cities has at least one structure that might qualify as a skyscraper, relatively speaking. A city’s tallest building might become a local landmark, like the Travelers Insurance Company’s tower in Hartford (1906–1918, Donn Barber; figure 35).
FIGURE 34. Main Street, New Hartford. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation
FIGURE 35. Travelers Insurance Company, Hartford, 1906–1918. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation
In transportation, railroads broadened their coverage to create a statewide network of rails and stations, as well as engineering wonders like the Rapallo Viaduct in East Hampton (figure 36). Built in 1873 for the Air Line Railroad, it spans an eight-hundred-foot valley on slender wrought-iron trestles sixty feet high (eventually filled in with sand and compacted cinders to support heavier loads). Many a town’s fate—whether it prospered or withered away—depended on whether or not it gained a railroad connection.
FIGURE 36. Rapallo Viaduct, East Hampton, 1873, altered 1912–1913. Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries. Accession number UC17–0264, IMG0028–1015
The Connecticut Highway Department, established in 1895, improved roads and bridges, an effort that gained momentum after 1900 as automobiles proliferated. By the 1930s, the statewide network of roads and highways had become a prominent feature of the landscape (figure 37). Meanwhile, the growing cities’ need for water and electricity prompted the construction of reservoirs that flooded vast portions of rural towns such as Barkhamsted (place 6).
While progress was often celebrated, the sweeping changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization also prompted reaction. The beauty of the natural world provided the central theme, expressed in picturesque, Romantic, or eclectic buildings designed to harmonize with their landscape settings and to hark back to seemingly simpler eras. In planning it expressed itself in the building of naturalistic parks and the proliferation of suburbs (figure 38). Almost every Connecticut city established one or more parks during this period, a number of them designed by Hartford native Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903). Vacationers escaping the heat and dirt of the cities also flocked to Connecticut’s countryside and coasts, creating resorts at every level from farmstead boardinghouses (Orchard Mansion, place 28) to grand country estates (Eolia, place 3).
To guide growth, cities turned to more intensive planning from the 1890s on. Allied with the reformist goals of Progressivism, the City Beautiful movement advocated carefully considered transportation networks, systems of parks to provide recreation and literal breathing space, and construction of public buildings as civic amenities—many the gifts of wealthy industrialists like Timothy Beach Blackstone of Branford (place 92). Both Hartford and New Haven commissioned wide-ranging city plans by nationally known firms in the 1910s. Only fragments of these City Beautiful ideas were executed—a new bridge and approaches in Hartford, a new railroad station and a couple of parks in New Haven—but they remained on the books as ideals. On a smaller scale, in 1921 the city of Bristol opened Memorial Boulevard, a landscaped gateway to the city and a monument to its World War I dead (figure 39).
FIGURE 37. Railroad station (1886) and concrete highway bridge (1930), Cornwall. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation
Aesthetically, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century designers focused on the concept of “style” and cycled through an ever-changing assortment of architectural fashions. Almost all of them sought to harmonize with nature through rambling footprints, picturesque outlines, and muted color schemes, as seen in the Harral-Wheeler House in Bridgeport, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis