Ancient Burying Ground

An old cemetary occupies a prime location on Main Street in Hartford.  On one side is First Church of Christ (previously Center Church) and on the other side is a tall office building occupied by one of Connecticut's biggest companies. 

The cemetary got there first, in 1640, just four years after Rev. Thomas Hooker and his followers settled the city.

In the summer, school children volunteers give tours of the graveyard.  I felt badly that I was in a hurry and couldn't let the little girl give me the tour she offered.

Pond in Bushnell Park

Bushnell Park is downtown Hartford's park.  The park is below the state capitol and at the edge of a ring of high rise office buildings.  It offers a peaceful lunchtime sanctuary to office workers.

Katherine Seymour Day House

The home of Katherine Seymour Day stands next to the home of Harriett Beecher Stowe on Forest Street in Hartford, just off Farmington Avenue.  Ms. Day was Stowe's grandniece. 

In 1941, Ms. Day founded the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, a history museum, program center and research library.

Chick Austin House

Chick Austin was a revered director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford's principal art museum.  Austin was appointed to that position when only 26 years old.  He was an innovator who expanded the museum's exhibition space and mounted shows as varied as Italian baroque paintings and Picasso.  Austin also championed modern music, bringing Stravinsky and Satie works to this conservative city. 

Austin married into a moneyed Hartford family.  When in Italy on his honeymoon, he was attracted to the architecture of Palladio.  Austin and his wife built this house on Scarborough Street in the West End of Hartford.  It is very long but only one room deep.  The house is now on the National Register of Historic Places.  Austin's family donated the house to the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1985.

Bushnell Park Carousel

The Carousel in Bushnell Park is about 95 years old.

I haven't figured out yet how to take photos of moving objects and still focus on one of the elements, but I thought this came out pretty well for a beginner.

See what Oakland Daily Photo did with a similar carousel moment out on the West Coast last week.  I SWEAR I didn't know about that photo when I took this picture and put it into auto-posting.

General Israel Putnam

Israel Putnam was a general in the Revolutionary War.  These days he occupies a prime site in Bushnell Park, below the Connecticut Capitol. 

General Putnam was a Connecticut native who had connections with my Massachusetts hometown.  One of my classmates was a descendant.  Regrettably, I must have skipped class on the day we learned his role in history, because I don't remember.

However, his house was re-made into a very nice ice cream store and some of the prettiest girls in town were hired to scoop ice cream there.  I worked at a competing ice cream store and wasn't anywhere near as good looking.  We sold much less ice cream.  I do remember that . . .

Theme Day: Bright Colors

Sol Lewitt was born in Hartford.  He developed his interest in becoming an artist as a child taking Saturday art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Lewitt is credited as a founder of Conceptualism and Minimalism.   He often expressed the plan for a wall installation and then left it to the art students or other volunteers to execute.  Two installations were "ten thousand straight lines and then ten thousand not straight lines" and "fifty randomly placed points all connected by straight lines."  It is an unusual way for an artist to create -- more cerebral than manual skill -- but I find his works fascinating and sometimes exciting.  Would you paint the walls below a very ornate skylight like this?  It wouldn't have occurred to me.

The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford has a Lewitt exhibition that ends on August 15, 2010, though the painted walls will be there after the exhibition closes.  A spectacular exhibition at Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, is showing through 2033, so you can see it if you hurry.

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