COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS

NORWICH, CONNECTICUT

Downtown Norwich is rife with great architecture. It positively OOZES cool buildings. Some date from colonial times.

 

Some are from more modern times.

 

Norwich has also suffered from what much of the industrial Northeast has experienced; changes in economic conditions. What started as a shipping center in the 18^th and 19^th centuries morphed into a center of specialty manufacturing by the turn of the 20^th century. The might and profit of the mills birthed many beautiful multi-storied commercial buildings in the hilly downtown, and place positively buzzed with commercial life.

Alas, as happened with the steel, furniture, and clothing businesses in other parts of the country, the expansion of overseas trade ended much of the manufacturing done by the local mills. Some mills have been converted to other uses, some sit empty. Their future is uncertain, but it is likely many will be put to other uses at some time.

It’s just too expensive to knock the damn things down; they’re all built like brick chickenhouses. Hopefully they’ll have a fabulous reuse.

               Abandoned Textile Mill, Taftville, Connecticut, a few miles from Norwich

And where there are successful mills, the commercial districts are fairly opulent. So it is with downtown Norwich. Sadly, though, many of the buildings sit idle, vacant, and unused. Great bones, few tenants. The Norwich Community Development Corporation, a local nonprofit that advocates for the restoration and reuse of the commercial district structures, has a plethora of economic incentives and programs to help investors make profitable use of these buildings.

But there are a lot of them, and some owners are more responsible than others.

My featured building for this post is the Plaut-Cadden Building.

 

The storefront was boarded up when this picture was taken in September of 2012, and it likely still is. At five stories, it is of middling height for this town of 40,000 souls, but it has some absolutely wonderful features. I only wish I took better pictures of them.

I’m sure the building is unoccupied, and several aspects have been altered. I have no idea if the weathered wood window frames are original (probably) but the vertical planks above the awning are undoubtedly an addition. Either that, or they are the backing for a veneer long since gone, perhaps enameled sheet metal as in Young’s Block. The weathered condition of the window frames saddens me, but as all the window designs are uniform, I imagine they are original (or all replaced at the same time, which I doubt). The transoms are all pretty much uniform through the second and third floors, though on the second story they are divided and on the third they are not.

The horizontal brown stripe above the second story window is hardly decorative, but appears to be a large piece of steel that spans the larger windows below and carries the weight of the building above. I just wonder if it had another covering at an earlier time.

But it is the semi-rococo masonry above the third floor that..floors me. The interior detail is nearly Greek, with its squared designs, but the Egyptian seems to shine through as well. The whole thing, when viewed from a distance, lends itself to Morocco or Algiers.

 

Then the builders topped the whole thing with a magnificent molded cornice made from pressed sheet copper and sent me reeling.

See what there is in the city if you just look around? I wonder how many people walk by this building every day without noticing those elements. I nearly got run over just trying to photograph them.

Downtown Norwich is a treasure just waiting to be discovered. To be invested in. To be turned into a go-to destination. It reminds me of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a town like no other. Built upon a steep mountainside, this healing-water city from the 1880s was built from local carved stone and baked brick, with each two-story building growing to five on the lower slope. It enjoyed a booming economy until the patent-medicine/healing waters craze of the early 20^th century faded. Then the buildings sat empty until groups of hippies came through in the 1960s and pretty much bought up the town. They opened artist’s studios and small restaurants. They dressed up the town with flowerbeds and made sure the word got out among the Hippie Elite. And they came. And they stayed.

Eureka Springs is now known worldwide as a cool, hip, fun destination.

All because of a few longhairs, some vision, and hard work.

I think Norwich, with its fine waterfront, great architecture, winding, hilly streets, and great location, could be a far cooler destination than Eureka Springs.

Go there. You’ll see.

JOSEPH CARPENTER STORE

NORWICHTOWN CONNECTICUT

 

Norwichtown is the oldest section of Norwich, Connecticut. Located on a high hill on the west side of town, it’s a living neighborhood with Colonial homes so authentic that you’d expect Myles Standish to come out one of the front doors. Indeed, the huge rectangular town  square, often referred to as a ‘parade ground’ in Connecticut towns, is surrounded by beautifully restored homes, many of which were taverns back in the goodle days.

One of my favorites is the Joseph Carpenter store, built around 1772. This gambrel-roofed beauty has the clapboard siding and vertical plank doors common to homes of that era, but the windows and their treatments are what caught my eye.

 

The side windows are quite typical of this type of house, with nine-over-nine lite double-hung sashes, but in front, the fifteen-lite single sashes are not double hung. Rather, they appear to be of the casement type, with sashes that swing inward on side hinges. It’s possible that they are fixed, but Yankees are a pretty practical lot, and ventilation would seem necessary. Just why one of the sashes is made as a twenty-lite, I have no idea.

This being a store, I imagine (correct me if I’m wrong, Norwichians) that the double entry gave ingress to a residence on one side and a commercial space on the other.

But it is the shutter treatments I like best.

 

Hinged horizontally, they appear to be original, or at least close to the age of the home. Built from nailed planks, the shutters seem sturdy enough to repel an Indian attack, though in 1772, there were few threats from Native Americans in this area. Perhaps because it was a store that the shutters were needed. There was a local war that erupted in Massachusetts in the latter half of the decade, and though I have no knowledge of the British invading Norwich, it was undoubtedly on the minds of the locals at the time.

The hardware that keeps the upper shutter open is definitely hand-forged. Likely right there in the neighborhood.

 

I’ve not seen anything like these shutters or the hardware anywhere else in New England, but I’ll wager they aren’t singular.

YOUNG’S BLOCK

NORWICH CONNECTICUT

Norwich, located in the eastern side of the state, is an ex-mill town at the confluence of the Shetucket, Quinebaug, and Yantic Rivers. The three rivers converge to form the Thames River (pronounced ‘thaymes’ by the locals), a beautiful, wide estuary with towering forested cliffs that run all of fifteen miles to the Atlantic Ocean.

 

The town is quite an architectural treasure, with winding streets that twist and climb the granite and schist hills above the river. The mills have long since been abandoned, though a few have been converted to other uses. But the downtown flourished as the mills prospered, and the buildings there still hold the past out at arm’s length for all to see. It’s worth a visit.

I’ll be featuring some of the best and worst of some of this architecture in some of the following posts.

I’m going to begin with a building that might be in Anytown, U.S.A.

 

Young’s Block is the name on the moniker stone, and I never did find out if Young had more of the block under his thumb or if it was just this building, but it caught my eye as soon as I saw it. I was touring the town for the first time, and became so captivated by the area I decided to move there. It hasn’t happened yet, but give it a few months.

The building looks like a small diner or restaurant or even more like a drugstore with a soda fountain. I like the operating clock (with the correct time, yet), the stainless steel trim around the enameled sheet steel edges and as rocket-jockey (rocky- jocket?) wings around the clock and at the angles. I especially like the modernist flat bricks at the parapet; all these together speak of late 1940s or 50s. I can see the bobby sox, poodle skirts and white leather sleeves on lettered jackets. I can smell the burgers and hot dogs, the yellow mustard, the Brylcreme. I can hear Chuck Berry, Perry Como, and Jerry Lee Lewis. The phone rings, and Murray, the owner, answers.

“Billy, ya maw sez ya gawta get home!”

The façade looks to be mostly original, though the doors look 1960s or 70s. A good look at the moved-over trim on the right side makes me think there were wood doors that did not make it through the years. I wonder about the foundation vents; what could they possibly be ventilating?

I like the retro streetlight (made in Mexico), the flowers (real petunias; how do they water them?), and the ‘chopped’ storefront, which gives the façade its retro charm. I also like that it’s a short-term employment office called “Labor Ready.” There is a place in our culture for these, and the fact that they advertise “Work today, paid today” makes me smile. The few times I worked at Manpower back in my pre-salad days, I had to wait two weeks for a check.

Apparently they also sell safety equipment. Good mix; day labor and safety equipment.