Grid, Interrupted: Budding Flower Street

It is a dumping ground for snow or a makeshift parking lot on parade days, now that the barricades have rendered Flower Street a nothing of a place, a glorified driveway for the Hartford Courant on one end and the same for Aetna on the other.

The road was previously divided before, with the stretch between the Park River and Farmington Avenue known as Flower Street, and what was south of the water, known as Lawrence. Other times, Lawrence was only the continuation south of Capitol Avenue. There have been various bridges before the covering of the Park River, showing how the desire for connectivity has spanned centuries.

Currently, poor infrastructure decisions reign in the Capitol-to-Farmington area, with the highway, and now busway, dicing up neighborhoods. In the 19th century, this area did more than provide commuters with a speedy way in and out.

Defined in an 1858 city directory as spanning “from Little River, north to 13 Farmington,” Flower Street appeared on record. Queen Street, north of the railroad tracks, connected Flower and Broad.

In 1880, Saint Joseph Cathedral’s parochial school was at the south west corner of Capitol and Broad, now occupied by a gas station. The Weed Sewing Machine Factory owned property along Capitol Avenue from Lawrence Street to Babcock Street, with it also on the property where the vacant Hartford Office Supply sits today. Pratt & Whitney was sited west of Flower Street, from near where the Park River and railroad tracks met.

Howard Street, south of the tracks but north of the river, connected Flower and Broad, according to a map from this time. Several large houses could be seen in this area.

Nothing remains the same, but in 1896, the area still had thriving manufacturing businesses close to a residences and a religious institution. The Hartford Machine Screw Company sprawled from the Park River and Capitol Avenue to mid-block. The Pope Manufacturing Company was a neighbor on Capitol, across from Babcock Street. Pratt & Whitney, next to that.

Image from Google Maps, 2014. Notice that they have already worked on removing Flower Street.

The Pratt & Whitney Company Store was at Lawrence/Flower and Howard. Queen Street, north of that, could be seen crossing Flower to meet with Beach. The Hartford Theological Seminary was at the corner of Broad Street and Farmington Avenue.

Two years after, Pratt & Whitney, located at One Flower Street, was advertising “planers, shapers, drilling machines, lathes, drop hammers…” along with “machinery and tools for bicycle manufacture.”

The area offered more than just employment, with several grocers listed on Flower Street and this area of Capitol Avenue, along with a restaurant — Capitol Ave House — at 276 Lawrence, and a laundry on Flower.

You may be led to believe that such a bundle of businesses would make for some power, and you’d be right.

After fighting a familiar battle for access from one neighborhood to the next, a temporary compromise-of-a-bridge was installed in 1878 for the price of $464.50. Area businesses then, unlike some of the major companies in the vicinity today, were not afraid to step up and make demands of those running the show. The small bridge clearly did not meet the needs of residents and commerce, so more petitioning took place and a stone and brick $19,557.24 bridge was installed in July 1885.

At the same time, these powerful entities made headlines for dragging out otherwise routine processes, like liquor license renewals. In an 1888 edition of the Hartford Courant, the paper editorialized in what was presented as a straight news piece, claiming that the manufacturing companies’ opposition to saloons was not extremism: “it should be understood that this is not a fanatical temperance movement.” In an 1887 Courant article, a Pratt & Whitney employee was described as testifying that “he had often seen little children carrying beer away in pails” from an existing saloon on Flower Street. William Carrigan of 12 Queen Street, was one grocery/saloon operator who dealt with pressure from not just Pratt & Whitney, which thought the saloons located 150 yards from the factory were too convenient for workers, but also from Colonel Pope and Charles E. Billings in 1895. Carrigan was described as having built up his successful grocery from around 1872. In this case, he was able to get his liquor license renewed, but large companies in other towns were influential enough to dissuade their leaders from allowing alcohol near the factories. In 1920, a “grocery” on Howard Street was fined for breaking dry laws. In that piece, the Courant did not say whether or not that penalty was the work of a “fanatical temperance movement.”

Intersection of Flower/Lawrence and Capitol Avenue in 2014

As Hartford entered the 20th century, manufacturing remained strong, with The Hart & Hegeman Manufacturing Company joining this area at what is now a surface lot on the corner of Flower and Capitol. The Hartford Theological Seminary expanded to the south side of Queen Street. A map from 1917 shows the seminary on Hopkins, what was almost an extension of Queen Street, but which angled from Broad to Farmington, around the former Hartford High School site. And, Pope Manufacturing was off the map, replaced entirely by Pratt & Whitney.

Just as hard as it may be to imagine the “Bushnell neighborhood” as being heavily populated in the past, so may it be for this area, but the area around the factories included tenements.

For better or worse.

The headlines of the time mocked residents for their struggles with alcoholism, not acknowledging it as a disease. In one case, a woman’s so-called “love of drink” resulted in the break up of her family. As the Courant boasts of its older-than-the-nation origins, it might also not conveniently gloss over its at times insensitive and archaic attitude, such as when race was selectively pointed out, as in, when reporting at all on a “colored” person, it became relevant. On such example could be seen in a report about a police officer in 1914 who had fired shots at two men stealing lumber from a yard on Flower Street. It was named as the second shooting in two days. The article described the previous day’s shooting by an officer at “Joseph Jackson, a negro charged with stealing an automobile tire.” Only stories involving Irish immigrants seemed to relish in reporting someone’s ethnicity as much.

At other times, the paper reported on knife fights and squabbles between boarders and operators, with one of the latter eventually getting fined for stealing from his tenants. One resident was jailed for whistling in court. A woman sued her landlord ($25,000) for falling through the floor into the tenement apartment below after she had repeatedly complained about the floor conditions. Despite making complaints, there was a continuous gas leak at Flower and Capitol for four years. Detection of that gas leak involved lighting a match. One could draw parallels to today, when issues are repeatedly brought to the attention of officials, only to be ignored for, well, years.

Queen Street made its way into the newspaper for runaway teen girls, workers’ injuries, and for someone jumping from a balcony. Howard Street’s headlines involved a possibly rabid dog rampage, a “child-wife,” an arsonist, and a doughnut thief.

Flower, Queen, and Howard Streets seemed plagued with fires, including a 1914 blaze at Pratt & Whitney (Flower and Capitol) that began in an oil vat.

Buildings along Capitol Avenue in 2014

The Hartford Courant’s archives show a tendency toward sensationalism, reporting on each incident at the Flower Street railroad crossing in a way that initially suggests that the crossing itself had been the problem. Upon reading follow-up articles or deep into the one at hand, the reader finds that rarely were train-versus-people collisions the result of anything beyond inebriated or bold individuals trying to cross. A man killed by train near Flower Street in 1912 was reported by witnesses to have walked under a gate! A railroad employee found dead by the tracks was reported to have been inebriated before death. In 1891 an older man found dead on Flower Street was reported to fallen out of a train while intoxicated. Yet another involved someone jumping off a moving train and getting hit by another one. Another headline (1897) reading “Injured at Flower Street Crossing” deceives, with the story explaining that the person got hurt by falling, not by anything connected to the train. There had been a long push to get the at-grade crossing on Flower Street closed, so it takes little imagination to see why stories were churned out that might make the crossing out to be the issue at first blush. Only the death of a boy who touched the electrified and unprotected third rail in the early 20th century seemed absolutely the blame of the railroad, and this resulted in a lawsuit.

The 1923 city directory listed upwards of 66 “householders” on Flower Street and 32 “householders” on Queen Street; in 1909, Pratt & Whitney gave its tenement occupants one month’s notice to vacate, as the company had plans to expand, displacing more than a dozen families. Again, there is not much imagination needed to discern how a bustling factory neighborhood grew to be this nothing that it is now. When we talk about tenements — poor and working class housing — we know that those with the most control over them are not putting the health, livelihood, or well-being of residents first. Concrete and cars were prioritized over housing. We saw that with the Front Street neighborhood by the other river.