Hartford’s Bedford-Garden Streets Historic District is under consideration for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places (NHRP).
The area under consideration is roughly bounded by Mather, Brook, and Bedford Streets and includes 30 buildings that historically served as dwellings, commercial properties, and religious facilities.
According to the application from the state’s historic preservation office to have the district placed on the NHRP, the district consists of a “6.18-acre residential development on the west end of the Clay-Arsenal neighborhood in the North End section of the City of Hartford” and encompasses 28 residential building, 2 mixed-use residential and commercial buildings, 2 religious buildings, and 6 vacant lots.
All buildings in the district were constructed between 1922 and 1925 and are “contributing resources” to the district’s character.
Three of the district’s vacant lots originally contained residential buildings that have since been demolished. Two lots were never developed. According to the application, the vacant properties are not a contributing resource to the district.
The district’s architecture, which includes 28 small-scale brick apartment buildings and two mixed-use buildings, is also a contributing factor to the state’s application for NHRP consideration. The architecture includes a mix of Classical Revival, Jacobean Revival, and Mediterranean Revival styles. Additionally, two former synagogues were built in Romanesque Revival and Classical Revival styles.
According to the state’s application, the district “retains its historic layout and architectural character, with densely spaced rows of similarly designed, early twentieth century masonry apartment houses.”
The application includes detailed descriptions of the buildings in the district, including considerable detail about architecture and a brief history of the building’s use. In some cases, buildings in the district have already been separately listed in the NHRP.
Among those buildings is the Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Synagogue, a Romanesque Revival style building constructed during the early 1920s by Hartford-based architects Berenson and Moses. The building was individual listed on the NHRP in 1995. The Chevry Lomday Mishnayes Synagogue, built in 1924 in the Classical Revival style, was also listed on the NHRP in 1995 and is one of the buildings included in the state’s current application for the Bedford-Gardens Historic District.
The application for NHRP consideration requires a statement of integrity on the property or district under consideration. The Bedford-Forest District, according to the application, “possesses integrity of location” with the buildings in the district maintaining their original foundations and positions. In addition, the majority of the district’s architectural elements remain with only minor alterations that have “only minimally impacted integrity of materials and workmanship and have not changed the overall significance of the District.”
In addition, the application states that most of the buildings still serve their original function, mostly as multi-family institutions. One change is the district’s former synagogues, which were converted into churches after the district’s original Orthodox congregations moved in the 1960s. However, the buildings still function as houses of worship.
Overall, the application concludes that the district “continues to convey strong feeling and association with its early twentieth-century residential history as a speculative subdivision characterized by densely spaced rows of modest, working-class, similarly designed masonry apartment buildings.”
The application states that the district meets two criteria for inclusion on the NHRP, that of a property associated with events that have made a significant contribution to broad patterns of American history and that of a property that “embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction.”
The register, maintained by the National Park Service, currently contains more than 98,000 properties. Properties that appear on the list are eligible to receive a number of benefits, including federal preservation grants, federal investment tax credits, and state-level tax benefits and grant opportunities.
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