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Hartford's Character

The Bones Of The City's Architecture Help Shape Its Personality

By ANDREW FRIEDMAN | Special To The Courant | Illustrations by Ananda Walden and Bob MacDonnell | The Hartford Courant

June 20, 2008

Architectural details are not the limbs of architecture — they're the personality. Thanks to them, the streets of Hartford crowd with flirts, snobs, scoundrels, busybodies, dreamers, rebels and dandies, and that's before you even get inside the houses.

In an 1872 Hartford Courant, a man calling himself only "a practical stone cutter" asked: "Can there be an American Architecture?" Critics fussily wrote back: "We are not an art people here in Connecticut; it is opposed to all the principles of our plain Puritan life."

The houses of Hartford beg to differ. Here is a selection of the pleasantly preening spotlight hogs that render the living space of the Insurance City anything but drab.

Reprinted with permission of the Hartford Courant. To view other stories on this topic, search the Hartford Courant Archives at http://www.courant.com/archives.
| Last update: September 25, 2012 |
     
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