ADDITION TO POST ON 201 WASHINGTON STREET

Sorry for spamming, but I wanted to make sure everyone got this new information! I concluded my last post with some uncertainty over exactly how or when the house at 201 Washington Street in Hartford came to an end. A mid-1800s mansion, the house became a restaurant in about 1941 and survived into the 1970s. After I shared a link to the post on Facebook, the son of one of the owners (his father and two uncles operated the restaurant as D’Angelo’s in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s) noted that it was sold to a new owner and later caught on fire. I was then able to find an article about the fire. I have updated the final paragraph of that post and I’ve included it here as well:

In 1971, the establishment was owned by Carmella and Michael LaConche of Three Coins, Inc. In what was likely a nod to the earlier owners, the restaurant was called Brothers Three. Throughout much of the house’s period as a restaurant there were apartments on the upper two floors. In another Zoning Board of Appeals public hearing on March 7, 1972, the new owners received a special exemption to extend the liquor license to the second floor, where they planned to replace about 40 apartment rooms with a larger banqueting space. The end of the restaurant, and probably the house itself, came because of a three-alarm fire that started in the basement in the early hours of October 30, 1973. Two employees of the restaurant, both men in their late 60s who lived on the building’s upper floor, were awakened by the smoke. They escaped to the roof where they were rescued by firefighters. After the fire, there were no further advertisements for the restaurant in the Hartford Courant and, as noted above, the building was gone by 1980.

This brief history of 201 Washington Street reflects the changes the neighborhood experienced in the twentieth century. A mansion of the wealthy became a clubhouse, briefly a private hospital, and then a restaurant. By the time it was finally lost, it had long been one of the few architectural survivors of what was once the city’s most elegant residential street.