A series of entries designed to capture the ongoing adventures of NINA! See how we came to be where we are today, and follow along as we enter the new century of social media!
Page: 8It’s spring. It’s a beautiful day, and I went nuts on photos of the flowering trees in front of 29 Ashley. Still, it’s an indication of how extraordinary this house will be – and how extraordinary Ashley Street already is.
Demolition began on the third floor, as we get ready for the new roof to be installed. This action brought a lot of sunshine into the house, so there are some additional photos of the second floor, too.
Also over at 29 Ashley Street today, Ken Johnson gave a guest lecture at the Connecticut Urban Legal Initiative, or CULI. CULI has served as NINA’s attorney for all of our real estate transactions and more, and Ken has given this lecture, once a semester, for over a decade.
The lecture always includes a field trip to see NINA’s latest projects.
The future kitchen is starting to take shape. The view from the third floor is extraordinary on a sunny day like today. That’s Tony Mein at work on the second floor. And then there’s a couple of shots of the front of the house, as the flowering trees start to blossom.
While I was there, I took some shots from around the campus of the American School for the Deaf. These include shots of the bronze sculpture of Thomas Gallaudet that replaced the original Gallaudet Memorial, a memorial to Laurent LeClerc, who joined Gallaudet in founding the school, and the Cogswell Heritage House, home of the school's museum and archive.
I'm working now on moving our walking tours online -- an exceedingly arduous process! -- and I'm looking forward to working with Jean Linderman to include a tour of ASD and its role in Asylum Hill's history as part of that effort.
From the ceremony's program: the monument had begun to crumble by the time the American School for the Deaf sold its Hartford campus to the Hartford Fire Insurance Company (i.e., The Hartford), and so the school decided to dismantle and store the monument in a barn in West Hartford. The monument was moved to storage on the school's West Hartford campus in 1954. In 2016, the school hired Francis Miller to assess the current state of the monument. In 2019, a school alumna provided a major donation to the school, and that contribution funded the renovation and restoration of the monument.
Miller preserved the original marble elements that remained intact and then replaced the missing elements with granite that matched to original monument. Steven Petersen, a deaf artist in Minnesota, used a cast provided by Miller to create a new bronze relief based on the orginal design -- this is the cast of Gallaudet spelled in the manual alphabet.
This ceremony marked a very special occasion for the school. The project to restore the memorial and return it to public display began three years ago, and today represented the culmination of that effort. Speaking today were Jeffrey Bravin, executive director of the school; Susan Bysiewicz, the lieutenant governor; Adrienne Billings-Smith, West Hartford Town Council; Usman, a student at the school; Barbara Cassin, vice president of the school's board of directors; Sandra McLennon, president of the school's alumni association; and Francis Miller, a conservator who restored the memorial.
Today, the American School for the Deaf held a ceremony to unveil the Gallaudet Memorial on their campus on West Hartford. Jean Linderman, who serves as the school's historian, invited me to attend -- she and I have been working together on the school's history on the Hill-- and today's ceremony was a very special event. The memorial, which had previously stood in front of the school's main building in Hartford, hasn't been seen in public since the school moved to West Hartford in 1921, so when the pulled the cover off of the memorial it was the first time it had been publicly displayed in over a century! Some more details will follow in subsequent posts, but it really was a thrill to be there today.
Interior framing has begun inside the house, while work on the siding continues outside. The back staircase, which had been a separate egress for an upstairs rental unit, has been removed. The third floor remains daunting. A very good sign is the arrival of the "ServCorps chairs," which means we are now well underway.
