What a way to go, indeed

The Journal Inquirer newspaper of Manchester had a great article over the weekend on the “theme” tours being held at beautiful Cedar Hill Cemetery, the final resting place of such notables as actress Katharine Hepburn, gun maker Samuel Colt, poet Wallace Stevens, robber baron J.P. Morgan, and anesthesia pioneer Horace Wells.

Writer Tom Breen took the “What a Way to Go” tour, which–you guessed it–focused on the gruesome deaths suffered by some of the famous and not-so-famous residents. Among the former was Horace Wells, who “eventually became addicted to one of the chemicals he was experimenting with and cut his own throat after throwing acid at two prostitutes,” Breen wrote. Also on the tour was Walter Treadway Huntington, a Harvard junior who left his family’s home in Windsor one night in 1929 to buy a pack of cigarettes and never came home. Mysteriously, his body was found the next morning “with a gunshot wound to the head, his pockets stuffed with bloody handkerchiefs and Chesterfield Kings stubbed out around his body.”

Breen reports that upcoming tours include:

  • “Angels Among Us,” an examination of the allegorical figures that decorate tombs, on July 24;
  • “Sunset Notables,” a tour on the evening of Aug. 9 that looks at some of the famous residents of the cemetery; and
  • “Arts & Letters” on Sept. 25, which focuses on writers, painters, actors, and other artists.

More Horace!

Speaking of Horace Wells, his sad story is told in the August issue of Connecticut magazine by Erik Ofgang, under the headline, “How the Hartford Dentist Who Pioneered Anesthesia in Medicine Was Driven Mad.”

Circus fire show airs Friday

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the 1944 Hartford circus fire. If you want to learn about it, there’s no better place to start than the audio documentary aired a few years ago by WWUH-FM, radio station of the University of Hartford. The station will re-air the program the program tomorrow at 12:30, the approximate time the fire started. You can listen online or at 91.3 on the FM dial. There’s also an event page on Facebook.

Here’s our page on the fire.

Photo of tent burning at Hartford circus fire, 1944.

When the Hartford kids invaded the beaches

Cover of the book "Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline"Few talk about Ned Coll today, but in the late 1960s and much of the 1970s he was constantly in the news. Raised in a middle-class, Irish-American household in Hartford, he quit his insurance job in 1964 to start the Revitalization Corps, a nonprofit whose volunteers provided tutoring, employment training, and other help to residents of the city’s largely African-American North End. The Corps also staged public confrontations to expose racism in Connecticut–not just the blatant kind, but the subtle racism of people whom Coll dubbed “armchair liberals.”

That’s why, starting in 1971, Coll and company began drawing attention to Connecticut’s beaches, many of which were effectively off-limits to people of color. There was no outright prohibition, but since the beaches ran through predominantly white and wealthy communities, it was easy to keep “outsiders” out; private beaches were restricted to members only, and public ones were restricted to town residents or visitors with enough money to pay sky-high parking fees. Coll thought the beaches should be open to all, and his tactic for making that point was simple: He simply loaded North End kids on buses, brought them to a beach, and challenged authorities to do something about it. The kids had fun, and Coll attracted a lot of publicity. But it took a lawsuit filed by a beach jogger in the 1990s to loosen some of the restrictions on beach access, though Coll testified on his behalf.

The full story of Coll’s campaign is told in a new book, “Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline,” by Andrew Karhl, an associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia. In an interview with Smithsonian.com, which has a great overview of the book, Karhl sums up Coll’s outlook this way:

“He understood, on an instinctual level, that the problem of racism was a problem of white people, and white people needed to solve it. So he targeted these very liberal but passive communities that, on the one hand, talked the talk, but didn’t walk the walk, and so often actually made the problems worse.”

For more on Coll and his legacy, check out this CT Viewpoints column by Tom Condon, who began his long career as a Hartford Courant reporter, columnist, and editor by covering the beach “invasions.”

“Have things changed since Coll began his journey?” Condon asks. “Somewhat.”

New trivia question

Hartford found itself in the national spotlight on October 14, 1975, when a limousine carrying President Gerald R. Ford collided with a car full of teenagers at a city intersection. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt. At what intersection did this occur? You’ll find the answer–and a photo of the scene–here.

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More old newspapers to go online

Congratulations to the Connecticut State Library for winning a third grant for its Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project. This allows the Library to digitize another 100,000 pages from the microfilm it holds from old Connecticut newspapers. Those pages will be added to the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America newspaper database.

The latest selections, scheduled to be online by the fall of 2019, include some Hartford-based publications; they’re listed below according to category, with their years of publication. The complete list is here.

African American:

  • Hartford-Springfield Chronicle, 1940
  • Hartford Chronicle, 1946-1947
  • Connecticut Chronicle (Hartford, Conn.), 1948
  • New England Bulletin (Hartford, Conn.), 1949

Labor:

  • The Examiner (Hartford, Conn.), 1881-1888
  • The Weekly Examiner (Hartford, Conn.), 1890-1901
  • Hartford Labor, 1894
  • The Labor Standard (Hartford, Conn.), 1910-1922
  • The Connecticut Craftsman (Hartford, Conn.), 1932

Of cookbooks, redlining, and heels

Grating the Nutmeg,” the podcast co-produced by State Historian Walt Woodward and “Connecticut Explored” magazine, continues to deliver the goods, proving itself as essential listening for anyone interested in Hartford history and Connecticut history in general.

Cover of "United Tastes"Hartford’s one-time prominence as a publishing center comes up in this episode, in which Woodward and co-host Brenda Miller of the Hartford History Center at the Hartford Public Library interview Keith Staveley and Kathleen Fitzgerald about their book, “United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook.” The title refers to “American Cookery,” first published in Hartford in 1796 and commonly regarded as the first cookbook published in the United States. The identity of the author remains a mystery; the name on the title page–Amelia Simmons–turns up in no other records from the period. There’s no mystery, however, about the publisher. The partnership of George Goodwin and Barzillai Hudson were already publishing the Connecticut Courant (today’s Hartford Courant) and couldn’t keep up with the demand for another title of theirs, Noah Webster’s spelling and grammar book, widely known as the “Blue-Backed Speller.” As Woodward notes in the podcast, the cookbook appeared to fit into Hudson & Goodwin’s effort in those years, just after the Revolution, to promote “Americanism.”

***

Another episodeCover of "On the Line" deals with the Hartford region’s history of housing discrimination through redlining, steering, exclusionary zoning, and property covenants. The guest is Trinity College’s Dr. Jack Dougherty, whose online book, “On The Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and Its Suburbs,” uses West Hartford as a case study.

Though titled “The Challenge of Fair Housing in Connecticut’s Suburbs,” the podcast episode deals in several respects with Hartford. For instance, when the federal government sought to revive the home mortgage market as an antidote to the Great Depression in the 1930s, it partnered with lenders to create maps that would highlight some neighborhoods as better-than-expected risks for mortgages. But the maps also showed the poorer risks–based not just on the prospects of repayment, but on such social criteria as the percentage of foreign-born or African-American families. As a result, these so-called poor-risk neighborhoods (color-coded as red on the maps, hence “redlining”) became still less attractive to lenders, which in turn made them poorer. Dougherty notes that in Hartford’s case, the neighborhoods red-lined in the ’30s tended to lie along the Connecticut River, then known as the East Side.

Then there’s the discriminatory obstacles that Jewish families in the city’s North End faced in trying to move to West Hartford and other suburbs following World War II — a story that would be all too familiar to other racial and ethnic groups that initially settled in Hartford.

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Cover of "Wicked Hartford"Still another Grating episode spotlights Steve Thornton’s new book, “Wicked Hartford.”  Rather than the vice and tabloid scandal implied by the title, Thornton’s work focuses on the struggles of Hartford’s 99 percent. “I wanted to talk about the unsung heroines and the overrated heels,” Thornton tells CT Explored Assistant Publisher Mary Donohue in the podcast. “I wanted to talk about people who were enslaved and people who were entitled. I wanted to make that contrast, because history is usually written for and by the ‘great’ white men of our past.” Among Thornton’s heels is Hartford’s most revered industrialist, gun maker Samuel Colt, who is called out for selling weapons to the South as well as the North in the lead-up to the Civil War — something widely known at the time but largely ignored now. “It’s really amazing that we’re willing to overlook that,” Thornton says.

The book also brings to light, among other things, the city’s Seyms Street jail, which became so notorious for its deplorable conditions that it drew national attention; the plight of “newsies” and other child laborers; and the struggles city residents faced during the Great Depression.

David Rosado: the latest in a long line of police chiefs

In light of David Rosado becoming Hartford’s new police chief, it seemed appropriate to track down and publish a list of previous chiefs. It wasn’t as easy as expected; the list below comes mostly from from an archived page of the Police Department’s old website.

As for Rosado, he’s new to the Department but hardly new to Hartford. He grew up in the old Charter Oak Terrace housing projects and graduated from Bulkeley High School, returning there last week for a swearing-in ceremony meant to send a message to city kids. “Bulkeley means something to me; that’s where I grew up,” Rosado told the Hartford Courant. “There’s significance to that; it sends a message to kids there that ‘You too can accomplish something if you set your mind to it.'”

Here’s video of the ceremony by NBC Connecticut (WVIT-TV).

After graduating from the University of Connecticut, where he also obtained a law degree, Rosado rose through the ranks of the Connecticut State Police, including stints leading Troop H in Hartford, Troop W in Windsor Locks, and the internal affairs unit. He was a a lieutenant colonel, with more than two decades of service, when he left the state police to take the Hartford post.

In a January 23 news release from City Hall, City Councilman Thomas “TJ” Clarke II referred to Rosado as the city’s first Latino police chief.

This list dates back to 1901, though the Police Department was formally created in 1860. Anyone with material on the Department’s history is welcome to send it to kevin@hartfordhistory.net or P.O. Box 370202, West Hartford, CT 06137-0208.

Hartford police chiefs

David Rosado: 2018-

James C. Rovella: 2012-2018

Daryl K. Roberts: 2006-2011

Patrick J. Harnett: 2004-2006

Mark R. Pawlina: 2003-2004 (acting chief)

Bruce Preston Marquis: 2000-2003

Joseph J. Croughwell: 1994-2000

Jesse Campbell: 1993-1994

Ronald J. Loranger: 1989-1993

Bernard R. Sullivan: 1982-1989

George W. Sicaras: 1980-1982

Hugo J. Masini: 1974-1980

Thomas J. Vaughn: 1968-1974

John Kerrigan: 1963-1968

Paul Beckwith: 1958-1963

Michael J. Godfrey: 1944-1958

Charles J. Hallissey: 1941-1944

John J. Butler: 1939-1941

Garret J. Farrell: 1913-1939

Cornelius Ryan: 1901-1904

Thank you, David Zwick

It’s easy to paint the second half of the 20th Century as a time of decline for Hartford and most other American cities, but let’s remember the work of environmentalists who succeeded back then in forcing a clean-up of our rivers—a vital precursor to all the waterfront revivals we see now, including Hartford’s. Without laws like the federal Clean Water Act of 1972, there probably would be no Riverfront Plaza today. After all, who’d want to hang out by a stinky, polluted Connecticut River?

One of those instrumental in writing and securing passage of the Clean Water Act was David Zwick, who died on Feb. 5 in Minneapolis, at age 75. The New York Times has published an inspiring obituary of him, including quotes from activist Ralph Nader, who recalled recruiting the young Vietnam-veteran-turned-law-student for “Nader’s Raiders.” In 1971 Zwick and Marcy Benstock wrote “Water Wasteland,” a lengthy report that detailed the nation’s failures up to that point in trying to control water pollution. He then went to work on drafting the Clean Water Act, helping to make it bulletproof from opponents’ attempts to undermine it.

The Times noted that when it came time to commemorate the Act’s 25th anniversary in 1987, then-Environmental Protection Secretary Carol M. Browner remarked: “By any measure, this landmark legislation has been hugely successful. Once-dead rivers, lakes, and estuaries are now pulsating with life. People are returning to them — to swim, to fish, to ply the waters in their boats and to relax on their shores.”

The work of connecting people to the Hartford and East Hartford riverfront is continued today by Riverfront Recapture, founded in 1980.

History getting unstuck on Pearl Street

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It’s nice to see progress in the plans to rehabilitate the long-vacant office buildings at the corner of Pearl and Trumbull streets.

The Hartford Business Journal reports that a New York-based partnership has secured $12.6 million in financing to convert the 12-story building at 101 Pearl Street in 157 market-rate apartments. The partnership also intends to convert neighboring seven-story building at 111 Pearl Street into 101 apartments.

Those of us who frequented downtown watering holes in the early 1980s best remember 111 Pearl as the home of Sean Patrick’s, a basement-level bar; you could look down into it through street-level windows on the Trumbull Street side.

The building was to have been torn down in the early 1990s to make way for one of several downtown skyscraper projects that, thanks to an epic real-estate collapse, came to nothing. The 101 Pearl site would have become the Cutter Financial Center, planned as the tallest building in New England. The project never made it to the demolition stage (developer Anthony F. Cutaia ran out of money and eventually ended up in prison for running a Ponzi scheme in South Florida), but the other sites weren’t so fortunate. For more on those debacles, read “What Hartford Was Supposed to Be,” an article on the Connecticut Historical Society’s website.

H/T Facebook’s “Old Hartford” group

 

 

Capital Community College hosting local history lectures

Capital Community College will kick off its Hartford Studies Lecture and Discussion Series on Thursday, January 25, with a public talk by historian William Hosley, who will outline how local art, architecture, and archives can “attract talent and foster innovation and teamwork” in Hartford.

The lecture begins at 7 p.m. in the Centinel Hill Hall Auditorium of the college, which occupies the former G. Fox & Co. department store at 950 Main Street. The auditorium is on the 11th floor.

Hosley’s talk will be the first in a series of four lectures on city history, with the other three held on the last Thursdays of February, March, and April. The series, curated by Hosley, is co-hosted by the Hartford Heritage Project and College Foundation as part of  Capital’s 50th anniversary commemoration.

Hosley is a cultural resource development and marketing consultant, historian, preservationist, writer, and photographer. He was formerly director of the New Haven Museum and Hartford-based Connecticut Landmarks, where he cared for a chain of  house museums, including Hartford’s Butler-McCook and Isham-Terry houses. Prior to that, he served as curator and exhibition developer at Wadsworth Atheneum, where his exhibit “Sam & Elizabeth: Legend and Legacy of Colt’s Empire(1996) helped spawn the Coltsville National Park.

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