Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • 31

THE HARTFORD COURANT SUNDAY, MAY 16. 2004 C5 PLACE COMMENTARY ABOUT WHERE WE LIVE RESTORING ASYLUM HILL TO AN OWNER-OCCUPIED NEIGHBORHOOD 9d LOT H'-g APT II MU. I 1 U'-O' ATT 1 I 1 1 'l i I I By CATHERINE JOHNSON ike many of Connecticut's cities, Hartford is trying to increase homeownership. Long-term residents are vital to the health -and well-being of a neighborhood and a city. But in order to attract a home buyer, there 5 has to be a home to buy.

This is a problem in the city 's Asylum Hill' neighborhood, which has a surfeit of small rental apartments. But there's a way to fix It From the 1950s to 1970s, developers flooded this historic neighborhood with efficiency apartments, hoping to attract secretaries from the neighborhood's three large insurance companies. Whether or not that Was a good idea at the time some lovely buildings were torn down that time has long since passed. Now the Hill has too many one-bedroom apartments. f-.

4 Thmking Outside r. 4 buildings might be considered starter kits. Row houses, duplexes and courtyard apartment buildings can be created out of them. A number of buildings in Hartford have been converted from six small apartments in a "perfect six" to two or three larger units. The exact configuration for subdividing buildings would depend on their location, orientation to the street and interior structure.

Some buildings would require removing a rear wing or other part of the building to create backyards and private parking. i One type that the brick box can be easily retrofitted for is the row house. There is a long history of row houses in the city. It is a very desirable type for urban living because it offers all the amenities and square footage a homeowner wants, all on a very small lot i The row house offers a variety of options. An owner can have a three-story house, or three one-floor apartments.

He can use one floor, say the ground level, for a home office, or rent it for additional income. It also gives him a backyard. Private on-site parking or a garage is possible in the rear of the lot A typical brick box is about 36 feet by 120 feet To retrofit this brick box as two row houses, the rear of the building would be demolished, leaving about a 35- to 40-foot depth. The interior floor plan of the typical brick box has two apartments on either side of a central hallway. One row house can be created by blocking up the doorways along one side of the hallway, building a wall in the cellar and a roof parapet An addition to the side of the building, about 6 to 10 feet wide, would be enough to make the remaining part of the building another row house.

The next step wpuld be building a bay in front of the 6-foot-wide windows. A projecting bracketed cornice, new lintels and sills would give the facade more presence. New windows and a door also would make a substantial difference in the facade. This smaller division of the window will help establish scale, something now missing in the existing facades. The space between two brick boxes is also wide enough for an additional unit to be built so a total of five row houses can be constructed out of two buildings.

As in all things, balance is the key. A street establishes a certain level of stability and stewardship, generally speaking, when homeownership approaches 50 percent To do so does not require all places to have only single-family homes. The greater the variety, the greater the chance of accommodating a wider range of homeowners in terms of age and family size, and the greater the chance of weathering changing economic times. Row houses, apartment houses of two to five units, courtyard apartments and other types would be an ideal mix, and are recommended in the 2002 neighborhood housing plan. Street by street the neighborhood can shift from residency of primarily those passing through to those who want to stay.

And Asylum HilL one of Hartford's oldest and most attractive neighborhoods, can once again be one of its most elegant addresses. I OfThe It I ,1 JiLJ L. I. lj ,1 ll .1 fif Krffl Tu i Sffl. 'a' 1 I Fl JJ 1 Jj- Bli i Of 7,500 housing units, approximately 5,500 are studios or one-bedrooms.

That is an extraordinary proportion of a single type of housing unit, and is nearly half 47 percent of all the efficiency units in the entire city. Most of these units are housed in 71 brick apartment buildings, unaffectionately called "brick boxes" because they have no detailing on the facade or inside. Built on lots meant for much smaller buildings, they occupy almost the entire lot There is no private outdoor space and rarely any parking area. A typical brick box built with 18 units may have been subdivided to create 36 or more studio apartments per building. These apartments are tiny, usually less than 500 square feet Thus it comes as no surprise that according to the 1990 and 2000 censuses, only 10 percent of the dwelling units in Asylum Hill were owner-occupied People who can afford another choice usually live elsewhere.

Unless something changes, Asylum Hill won't improve its homeownership rate and will continue to maintain a population that's often transient and living, for the most part, below the property line. The answer is to retrofit the brick boxes. These brick boxes have a few things going for them. One is that they are made of brick, which is very durable and virtually maintenance-free. Another is that they were built in a period of fairly decent construction, so they can withstand a renovation.

Any of these brick boxes could be converted to other building types that could attract homeowners. These Catherine Johnson is an architect and town planner in Middletown with an urban design practice devoted to rebuilding cities and creating livable neighborhoods. ONE WAY to increase homeownership in Hartford's Asylum Hill neighborhood is to convert existing "brick box" apartment buildings into row houses. The typical brick apartment building, top, could be converted by turning the hallway and apartments on the right side into one row house. By putting an addition on the left side, a second row house could be created.

ILLUSTRATION BY CATHERINE JOHNSON Haunting Remains Of Hartford's Gilded Age more than 100 state branches of the suffrage association. Their efforts helped to ratify the 19th Amendment in 1920. Isabella Beecher Hooker and her husband, John, sponsored a law which passed in 1878 giving women legal and equal control with men over property in Connecticut Inside the state Capitol is a large bronze tablet honoring Connecticut women who helped win women the right to vote. Among the 31 names are Josephine B. Bennett Katharine H.

Hepburn and Isabella Beecher Hooker. Katharine Hepburn's "climbing tree," estimated to be 120-130 years old, is still standing. Alas, it is no longer alive, scorched by intense heat when the former Arrow-Hart factory, then the Hawthorn Center, burned in 1999. Today the area is strewn with brush, saplings, trash, piles of dirt and concrete. 4 il 4 The city has had a hard time controlling people who thoughtlessly left mattresses, tires, used chairs, boxes, cars, bags of trash and cement asphalt shingles and more, though there's been a recent cleanup.

The city recently filled the original driveway entrance with dirt Katharine's tree once stood tall and majestic but is now a gnarled, darkened piece of Hawthorn Street history. One can gain a sense of what the Hepburn house looked like because the Hooker house across the street is a duplicate, designed by the same architect Oc-taviusJordan. But how can anyone preserve an already-dead tree, a witness to history? The Bennett garage is still there as well but it is in very bad conditioa Until the 1990s, it was in terrific shape, used and maintained by the Arrow-Hart Co. But after the factory fire and transfer of ownership, it was left unprotected Vandals tore it apart, smashed walls, removed the double doors and set a fire that damaged the slate roof. Trash has been left inside and out Will we "listen to the song of life," or will these objects become additional memories of Hartford's past slowly fading into the dust of time, ignorance, selfishness and complacency? By ERNEST SHAW Tucked in a corner of Asylum HilL, on Hawthorn Street, not far from the "new" Hartford Public High School, are two silent skeletons, witnesses to a remarkable era in Hartford a century; ago, when the city named the age and produced its greatest actress.

One of the objects is a vandalized garage. The other is a scorched tree. Attorney M. Toscan Bennett and his wife, Josephine, moved to Forest Street in 1913. Behind the house the Bennetts built a two-car garage with a separate entrance on Hawthorn Street Mrs.

Bennett's father, George Day, was president 'and treasurer of the Pope Manufacturing Company, maker of the Pope-Hartford Automobile. "Jo" Bennett was the first woman in Hartford to drive. Three large, pink dogwoods still grow where the Bennett house once stood and survive among weeds, tall dried grass and trash of various description. Just east of the Bennett garage, a circular drive once lead to a red-brick Victorian, the former home of author and editor Charles Dudley Warner and later the home of Katharine Hepburn. Mark Twain and his wife, Olivia, began their lives in Hartford on Forest Street in the home of John and Isabella Hooker, in 1871.

In the Winter of 1873, Mark Twain was having dinner with the Warners and, after some discussion, Twain and Warner began to collaborate on a book, a satire about big business and corruption in government and politicians after the Civil War. Published in er sister, Katharine. When Katharine Hepburn was about 3, she began climbing a double hemlock tree in front of the house. Neighborhood women would call her mother, who would politely thank them for their concern, saying that Kathy had been up there before and that she would come down when she was ready. Actress Katharine Hepburn wrote about the tree, driveway and house in her 1991 book, "Me: Stories of My Life." The Hepburn house was torn down in the mid-1950s when the Arrow-Hart factory expanded: Below the mantel of the library fireplace was a quotation from, it is believed, Charles Dudley Warner.

Katharine Hepburn always remembered the quotation and adopted it as her own: "Listen to the Song of Life." That gets ahead of the story. When living on Hawthorn Street Kit Hepburn and her neighbor Jo Bennett were involved with women's suffrage, and later with birth control, recognition of blacks' rights and the fight against prostitution. At various times the Bennett and Hepburn children accompanied their mothers to fairs, meetings and to the state Capitol sometimes dressed in suffragette costumes for added effect They would all travel in Mrs. Bennett's car, leaving from the Bennett garage. When Kit Hepburn was president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association, Jo Bennett was president of the Hartford Equal Franchise League.

When Mrs. Hepburn resigned in late 1917 to accept a national position, there were over 38,000 Connecticut women members in S. PHOTOS COURTESY OF ERNEST SHAW THIS DOUBLE HEMLOCK in Hartford's Asylum Hill neighborhood was a favorite climbing tree for the young Katharine Hepburn. 'My S': Hi Hartford the following year, "The Gilded Age" was an instant success, but is now best remembered for its title, which Twain and Warner gave to the era that it described, a title born in their Hawthorn and Forest street homes. Dr.

Thomas Hepburn and his wife, Katharine "Kit" Hepburn, moved to the former Warner house in 1908. Their children were 2-year-old Tom and his young Ernest Shaw is owner and operator of Heritage Trails Hartford Sightseeing Tours. Tour information is available at www.charteroaktree.com. THE BENNETT FAMILY GARAGE on Hawthorn Street has been neglected since it was damaged by fire in 1999..