Connecticut Architecture. Christopher Wigren
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has works by national leaders such as Beatrix Farrand (notably at Eolia, place 3), as well as by local designers, including Marian Coffin of New Haven. Not surprisingly, industrial design and construction became a needed specialty for some architectural and engineering firms in the Northeast. The most prominent, such as Boston’s Lockwood Greene, were located outside Connecticut, but in-state firms such as Fletcher-Thompson of Bridgeport also developed industrial expertise.
Connecticut’s third century—its industrial era—created the urbanized, industrialized, diverse state that we know today. Despite the state’s colonial image and the overwhelming development of the post–World War II period, a large proportion of Connecticut’s architecture dates from this era. It reflects a people and a time that were dynamic, prosperous, and confident.
Modern Connecticut, 1930 to present
An industrial giant in the early twentieth century, Connecticut saw its economic base weakened in the Great Depression of the 1930s, as companies closed or moved elsewhere in search of cheaper labor. In fact, the roots of the decline go back even farther, to a slowing of innovation and investment in new machinery and facilities that began in the 1920s or even earlier.20 World War II briefly revived the state’s industries, but since the war Connecticut’s economic history has largely been one of industrial loss. Nonetheless, manufacturing continues to contribute to the economy, with companies producing jet engines and parts, electronics, helicopters, and submarines.
As industry shrank, other economic sectors gained importance. Connecticut became home to large corporate headquarters, particularly in Fairfield County, where major companies such as General Electric, American Can, Pitney Bowes, and Union Carbide (place 38) settled after moving out of New York City. (Nearness to top executives’ suburban residences often was an unstated factor driving the relocations.) Hartford continued to be a center of the nation’s insurance industry, with some companies remaining in the city while others, like their New York counterparts, moved to the suburbs. An influential pioneer was the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, which built a new headquarters in Bloomfield in 1957 (figure 47). Designed by the corporate architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with art and landscaping by sculptor Isamu Noguchi and interiors by the design firm Knoll Associates, Connecticut General’s new headquarters received nationwide attention as a model of Modernist design and planning. However, by the end of the century, mergers and offshoring were weakening the corporate presence, and companies that remained found it more advantageous to occupy rented quarters rather than invest in imposing headquarters that future reorganization might render redundant.
FIGURE 47. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Connecticut General Life Insurance Company headquarters, Bloomfield, 1957. National Register of Historic Places
Education, always important in Connecticut, came to the forefront as other sectors declined. This is most dramatically seen in New Haven, once known primarily as a manufacturing city. As factories closed, Yale University became the city’s biggest and richest employer and played an increasingly influential role in the city’s overall development. Trinity College has played a similar role in its neighborhood of Hartford, where it has promoted redevelopment projects to benefit the city while enhancing its own surroundings. In addition, the state college and university system grew rapidly. The flagship University of Connecticut exploded from thirty-five hundred students in 1945 to more than twenty-five thousand today, and regional normal schools established to train teachers have been upgraded to universities (figure 48). Private education also continues to draw national and even international student bodies, and prestigious secondary schools like Avon Old Farms are prominent presences in a number of communities (place 73).
FIGURE 48. Amenta / Emma Architects, Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center, Naugatuck Valley Community College, Waterbury, 2007–2009. Robert Egleston
Despite the economic changes, Connecticut continued to attract new residents. African Americans from the South and Puerto Ricans came to the cities in the 1940s and ’50s, ironically as the industries that attracted them were beginning to fail (see New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood, place 99). After changes to immigration law in the 1960s, Asian immigrants increasingly came to the state. These newcomers shaped the places where they lived, worked, and worshipped in a variety of ways, both subtle and overt. In Montville, for example, recent Chinese immigrants are making their mark on the suburban landscape (place 48).
As the period from 1840 to 1930 was dominated by the growth of industry and cities, the time since then could be characterized as the age of suburbanization and regulation. No doubt the most significant development of the past seventy years has been the growth of the suburbs. While suburbanization in Connecticut had roots as far back as the early nineteenth century, and by the 1920s was becoming a significant factor in the state’s development, after World War II it intensified dramatically. Part of a sweeping change in settlement patterns that affect the whole country, suburbanization in Connecticut reversed the centralizing forces of the industrial era, spreading the state’s urban population back across the countryside. New planning types, such as residential subdivisions (Broadview Lane, place 77), shopping centers, and industrial parks (Medway Business Park, place 37), along with new versions of older building types such as schools, factories, and corporate offices (Union Carbide, place 38), took their places in a landscape of widely scattered construction linked by new roads.
FIGURE 49. 2 Arnold Street, Havemeyer Park, Greenwich, 1950. Greenwich Historical Society
While suburbanization has well-known social and environmental problems, it represented a broadening of the housing market. Subdivisions like Havemeyer Park in Greenwich (1946; figure 49), intended largely for returning veterans of World War II, or individual houses like that of Axel Nelson (place 22), offered convenient, spacious, and affordable housing to a larger share of the population than ever before.21
Connecticut is best known nationally for the Fairfield County communities linked to New York City. Featured in books such as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (published in 1946 and made into a movie in 1948) and in television shows of the 1950s such as I Love Lucy, Connecticut gained a national reputation as a retreat for New Yorkers weary of city stresses and crowding.22 Commuters had been traveling to New York from Fairfield County towns as early as the mid-nineteenth century, first by steamship and, after 1848, by railroad. By the 1860s developers were laying out middle-class neighborhoods close to railroad stations, such as Prospect Avenue in Darien, built by Melville Mead in 1865. In the meantime, the very rich were building opulent estates in the countryside (figure 50).
FIGURE 50. John H. Duncan, “Walhall,” residence of Jacob Langeloth, Greenwich, 1912–1914. Greenwich Historical Society
Automobiles greatly increased the rate of growth in Fairfield County. In addition to providing a bypass to the chaotic Boston Post Road, the Merritt Parkway (place 54) was promoted for its potential to open new territory in the county’s backcountry to development. Always keeping one eye on New York, Fairfield County’s suburban towns can seem a world apart from the rest of the state. Nonetheless, the dominance of the Colonial Revival continued to provide cultural linkage to New England.
Outside New York’s sphere of influence, suburbs also grew up around Connecticut’s own cities. Some, like Norwich or Torrington, had space for suburban development within their own boundaries. In other cases, towns like West Hartford or Hamden connect almost