Welcome to your bi-weekly newsletter from Connecticut Explored with the latest stories, the newest Grating the Nutmeg podcast, programs and exhibitions from our partners to see/watch this month, and more!
Summer 2022 / Outsider Perspectives
Welcome to the Summer issue! In this issue we’re exploring people from outside of Connecticut, the impact they had, and how they viewed our state and its residents.
Architect Kevin Roche, Shaping Environments
Bob Gregson, who has brought us so many great stories about modern architecture (visit “Modernism in Connecticut”), does it again with his story about the Irish-born Kevin Roche who, after Eero Saarinen’s death in 1961, moved the successor firm to Hamden. Roche was principal designer and, along with a number of other talented architects, “produced buildings for Eero Saarinen and Associates that expanded the definition of modern architecture, and Roche was central to the process.”
Roche moved to the U.S. in 1948 for graduate study under the renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He stuck it out a year. He had his eye on the team designing the United Nations building in New York. Gregson quotes Roche saying, “I badgered the … people at the UN Planning Office until they gave me a job.” The job turned out to be little more than menial design tasks and clerical work, but it led to his introduction to Saarinen and a rich and varied career including design of the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, the innovative 12-story garden atrium of the Ford Foundation headquarters (1968), and in Connecticut, the Union Carbide headquarters in Danbury (1976 - 1982) and the iconic Knights of Columbus headquarters in New Haven (1969).
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Buckminster Fuller, Bridgeport, and the Car of Tomorrow
Buckminster Fuller’s impact on Connecticut was short but sweet. As Fairfield Museum’s Charlie McMahon writes in our summer issue, “Looking for a place to produce [his Dymaxion Car], Fuller and his team found suitable space in the shuttered Locomobile Company factory in Bridgeport. … Locomobile [founded in 1899 and relocated to Bridgeport in 1900] had gone bust in 1929. Perhaps attracted to the site’s storied spirit of ingenuity, Fuller’s team moved into the factory in 1933.”
There, Fuller and co-designer artist Isamu Noguchi produced exactly three prototypes. The first debuted in July 1933 at Bridgeport’s Seaside Park, “achieving a speed of 70 miles per hour, The (New York) Daily News reported.” It’s debut at the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago that October, however, did not go so well. Still, Fuller and Noguchi drove one in February 1934 to the social event of the Hartford season, with author and future Congresswoman from Connecticut Clare Booth Luce: the premier of Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts at the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Read the entire story with your print subscription. (Subscribe at CTExplored.org/Shop.)
Or, subscribe to CTExplored/Inbox PREMIUM to read full texts of stories online only, just $30/year.
Or try us out with our First One Free Offer.
The Latest from Grating the Nutmeg
146. Votes (and Markers) for Women!
Natalie Belanger of the Connecticut Historical Society talks with Joanie DiMartino, Connecticut State Coordinator for the National Votes for Women Trail. They discuss the origin of the trail’s marker program, and the criteria that went into choosing the Connecticut people and places honored with a marker. DiMartino shares her thoughts on why the markers matter, and what the story of the suffrage movement can teach us about social justice movements today. Visit the National Votes for Women Trail for an interactive map of trail sites throughout the United States.
Find all of our stories about the fight for women’s suffrage in Connecticut on our TOPICS page.
Programs and Exhibitions to Enjoy This Month
Sunset Tour, August 11
Discover the history and beauty of Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford on a Sunset Tour on Thursday, August 11, at 6:30 p.m. The guided walk will showcase the Victorian-era cemetery’s most celebrated residents and renowned monuments. Learn about Horace Wells, the discoverer of anesthesia, Academy-award winning actress Katharine Hepburn, and J. Pierpont Morgan, the man who saved the country from bankruptcy twice. Participants will enjoy watching the sun set over Cedar Mountain. Advance reservations are recommended and may be made online at cedarhillfoundation.org.
Cedar Hill Cemetery, cedarhillfoundation.org
Tech Revolution Begins in New Haven
The Quantum Revolution, a special exhibition on view at the New Haven Museum through September 23, explores tech history through a revelatory mix of scientific objects, artifacts, and tools used in recent quantum-computing algorithm experiments, accompanied by original drawings of distinctive handmade machines by Martha W. Lewis, the inaugural resident artist at the Yale Quantum Institute. The Quantum Revolution offers an intimate, first-hand look at untold local history as the world begins the evolutionary move from traditional computers to new dimensions of computing power.
New Haven Museum, newhavenmuseum.org
Tours and Talks at Twain
The Mark Twain House & Museum is open for guided tours year round. Due to COVID safety precautions, tour sizes are limited and tours often sell out ahead of time, so it’s best to reserve your spot in advance online. The museum offers a general tour filled with family anecdotes and history; living history tours featuring costumed actors portraying butler George Griffin, the Clemens family’s gossipy maid Lizzie Wills, and woman-of-the-house Livy Clemens, and a kids’ tour about the everyday life of daughters Susy, Clara, and Jean Clemens. For a full schedule and tour options visit MarkTwainHouse.org.
The Mark Twain House & Museum, MarkTwainHouse.org
Wilton’s First Families Explored
In Lives and Landscapes: Art from the Permanent Collection of Wilton Historical Society, rarely seen works capture something of the personality of the town through the faces and places depicted. Portraits of some of the members of Wilton’s first families—Lamberts, Beldens, and Grummons, among them—and more distant relatives of those families are featured. Town landmarks, such as the Wilton Congregational Church painted in an Impressionistic style en plein air by Robert Emmett Owen (above) and Lambert House by H.G. Thompson, are beautifully depicted. On view through October.
Wilton Historical Society, wiltonhistorical.org
The Handsomest Building in New England
On December 17, 1910 The Hartford Courant described the new Connecticut State Library and Supreme Court Building the handsomest building in New England. It was designed by New York architect Donn Barber of the firm Carrere and Hastings, in collaboration with architect Edward T. Hapgood of Hapgood & Hapgood of Hartford. Though both architects were born out of state, Barber and Hapgood made historic contributions by designing several buildings throughout Connecticut. Many of these buildings are still visible today, including the handsomest building in New England.
Connecticut State Library, Ctstate.library.org
Editors’ Picks
Stories we love from back issues to read now.
Early Automotive History: “The Horseless Era Arrives,” Spring 2005
Connecticut’s Frank Lloyd Wright-Designed “Running Waters,” Spring 2018
Grating the Nutmeg Podcast: Mad for Mid-Century Modern in Connecticut
with Bob Gregson and Peter Swanson
“Motoring with the Hickmotts,” Spring 2008. When travel by car was an adventure
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