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Everything Old is New Again
Connecticut communities are learning the value of reclaiming historic but delinquent commercial buildings
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Business New Haven
9/17/2001
By: Priscilla Searles
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Downtown areas in cities across the country have gone through various stages of “redevelopment.” In decades past, thousands of companies moved into new quarters, some looking for more space, others looking for a more contemporary, modern environment.
The result: hundreds of beautiful, vacant structures. Many cities dealt with the problem by taking a wrecking ball to the structures, replacing them with office towers that often lacked style, grace and charm and utterly devoid of the outstanding architectural detail that was so much the hallmark of public buildings in much of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In some places, that's changing as communities seek to reclaim a measure of faded architectural glories. The name of the game now in many communities is to preserve, to update, and to identify new uses for these testaments of architectural design of the past.
Park City Treasures
Bridgeport's Central Business District contains a wealth of early commercial buildings, many with unusual design elements not found in contemporary office buildings.
The Park City's McLevy Hall has been around since 1854. The onetime City Hall has undergone multiple renovations over the decades, making it very different in appearance from the original structure. Considered an historically important building, it was visited by Abraham Lincoln in 1860. He gave a speech in Washington Hall, then part of the McLevy Building. Today the building houses some municipal offices and the probate court.
The building that draws the most attention is the P.T. Barnum building on Main Street. Opened in 1863, two years after Barnum's death, it was originally home to the Bridgeport Scientific Society and the Fairfield County Historical Society. It was renamed the Barnum Museum in 1968.
The upper floors of the red sandstone Victorian have ornamental belts and a frieze of terra cotta that illustrates historic periods of the Bridgeport area.
Located next to the P.T. Barnum is Bridgeport Center, home of People's Bank's corporate headquarters. Designed by Richard Meier, the building opened in 1989. The modern 500,000-square-foot structure, with its exterior recesses, curves and details, looms above the cluster of historic office buildings that surround it.
The building casts a long shadow over a three-story Classical Revival-style building that was once home to, yes, People's Bank. Built in 1914, the building is now a restaurant and a popular noonday feeding spot for people working in the Central Business District.
The Bridgeport Hydraulic Co. building, designed by Ernest G. Southey, is located across the street from the Barnum. Built in 1931, the two-story neo-Classical-style building now houses the Aquarion Co. The building is considered one of the finest examples of commercial construction still standing within Bridgeport's CBD.
Old Structures, New Uses
Identifying new and creative uses for buildings that were never intended to house offices is more challenging, but there is always someone with an idea for an old train station or a vacant library. Milford's Taylor Library building, designed by Joseph N. Northrop in the 1890s, is considered an outstanding example of “Richardsonian Romanesque architecture.” A landmark on the Milford Green, today the building houses the Milford Chamber of Commerce.
New Haven's Firehouse 19, located on Edwards Street, has had many lives. Built in 1873, the Victorian structure was remodeled in 1974 and now houses business offices and a restaurant.
Downtown New Haven has seen numerous buildings disappear, many of them during the “urban renewal” frenzy of the 1960s. But the trend now is to save the remaining historical structures. The 1909 Venetian palazzo-style United Illuminating Co. building at 124 Temple Street, recently became home to a restaurant/lounge known as Neat. On Chapel Street, the Union League Club, designed by Paul Williams and built in 1902, stood empty and neglected until it became home to a restaurant on the first level and offices on the upper floors. Three blocks to the west, the Yale Repertory Theatre has made fine use of a former church.
New Haven is also home to two buildings that are considered important architectural structures, but which remain stubbornly vacant. The Southern New England Telephone Co.'s former headquarters at 227 Church Street was designed in 1938 by Douglas Orr in collaboration with R. W. Foote; it is considered an outstanding example of Art Deco architecture.
A structure that gets a lot of attention (since about 200,000 people pass it each day on I-95) is the former Armstrong Rubber Co. headquarters, later known as Pirelli Armstrong, located on Sargent Drive. Not very old (it was built in 1968), the structure is nevertheless historically important because of its unusual architecture by Marcel Breuer with Robert F. Gatje. The building is supported on 758 pilings on the mud flats of the harbor. The space separating the upper levels from the lower level catches everyone's eye as they travel on I-95; the deep modeling was designed to create an instantly striking image of light and shadow when seen from a speeding car.
Blending the Old & New
In Waterbury, the Anaconda American Brass building, with its graceful curved façade and brass-bedecked entranceway, was once headquarters to one of city's “big three” producers. Today the building houses the courthouse. The challenge with the new courthouse was renovation and adaptive reuse of the historic Anaconda building and at the same time adding considerable space, along with a 365-car parking garage. The result was a blend of the old and the new.
The former Seymour High School, built in 1886 at the corner of Bank and Martha streets, remained in use until 1977. Today the school houses private businesses, while the Annex, located next to the school, is home to the Seymour Board of Education.
Meanwhile, Derby has turned the former Birmingham National Bank, constructed in 1882 on Main Street, into a restaurant.
Today old train stations become art galleries or museums, elegant houses of yesterday become offices. Old spaces are redesigned and upgraded. Saving the past for the future is finally in style.
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