Hartford

The XL Center, formerly known as the Hartford Civic Center, is a multi-purpose arena and convention center located in downtown Hartford, Connecticut,... USA. It is owned by the City of Hartford and operated by Anschutz Entertainment Group under contract with the Connecticut Development Authority . In December 2007, the Center was renamed when the arena's naming rights were sold to XL Capital insurance company in a 6-year agreement. The arena is ranked the 28th largest among college basketball arenas. Opened in 1974 as the Hartford Civic Center and originally located adjacent to a shopping mall , it consists of two facilities: the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and the Exhibition Center. On March 21, 2007, the CDA selected the Northland/Anschutz Entertainment Group proposal. It was revealed that Northland will assume total responsibility for the building paying for any and all losses, and will keep any profits. The Coliseum is the full-time home of the Connecticut Whale AHL hockey team and part-time home of the University of Connecticut men's and women's basketball teams.
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Armsmear , also known as the Samuel Colt Home, is a historic house located at Hartford, Connecticut. It was the family home of firearm manufacturer... Samuel Colt and is now a National Historic Landmark. Armsmear was planned for Colt's 1856 marriage to Elizabeth Hart Jarvis, and constructed in 1856 to designs by an unknown architect, possibly local architect Octavius Jordan or factory engineer H. A. G. Pomery, on grounds overlooking the recently completed Colt Armory. It was described by a contemporary thus: "an Italian villa in stone, massive, noble, refined, yet not carrying out any decided principle of architecture, it is like its originator, bold and unusual in its combinations." It features a low-pitched roof, heavy bracketed cornice, round-arched doors and windows, iron balconies, Italianate tower and details, and Turkish domes and pinnacles. The Colts occupied Armsmear in 1857 and promptly began to develop its gardens. Landscape architects Cleveland and Copeland provided the plans. Unusual, glass-domed conservatories, inspired by London's Crystal Palace, were added in 1861-1862.
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The R. and F. Cheney Building, also known as the Brown Thomson Building, is a commercial building designed by noted American architect H. H.... Richardson. It is located at 942 Main Street, Hartford, Connecticut, and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The Cheney Building was constructed 1875-1876 for the Cheney Brothers silk manufacturers in Manchester, Connecticut. It was originally a multipurpose structure with five small shops on the ground floor, and offices and apartments above. For many years it housed Brown Thomson's department store, and later the G. Fox and Company. As of 2007 it has been renamed the Richardson Building, and is now a residence hotel, offices, stores, restaurants, and rehearsal space for The Hartford Stage Company. The building dominates its corner location and, with towers and attic, is various described as containing five, six, or seven stories. Its facade is organized into three heavy, horizontal tiers of roughly cut, reddish brownstone punctuated with much lighter Berea limestone trim.
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A. Everett Austin House was the home of Wadsworth Atheneum director Arthur Everett Austin, Jr., in Hartford, Connecticut. Chick Austin built the... house in 1930 after seeing the Palladian Villas of the Veneto on his honeymoon. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1994. The house, only one room deep, is long and narrow, 86 feet in length by 18 feet in depth. In the front elevation, the central three-bay pedimented pavilion is flanked by four-bay wings. The bays are defined by shallow, two-story Ionic pilasters. The walls of the pavilion and wings are in the same plane, since the pavilion does not project. The planar effect is emphasized by the wall sheathing, which is flush boarding, tongue-in-groove. The twelve flat pilasters rise with entasis from bases of double torus moldings to stylized Ionic capitals. Two string courses, one at first-floor ceiling height, the other below second-floor window sills, establish a horizontal orientation to balance the strong upward thrust of the pilasters. Four stone steps lead up to the double front door in the central bay of the pavilion.
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The Old State House in Hartford, Connecticut is generally believed to have been designed by noted American architect Charles Bulfinch as his first... public building. The State House is currently managed by the Office of Legislative Management of the Connecticut General Assembly. The exterior building and the Senate have been restored to its original Federal style; the Representative's chamber is Victorian, and the halls and courtroom are Colonial Revival. The Hartford State House is, in appearance, very similar to the Town Hall of Liverpool, England, built in the mid-18th century and perhaps depicted in one of Bulfinch's architecture books. However, all materials came from the United States. Its first story is 20 feet high and constructed from Portland, Connecticut brownstone. The second and third stories are brick patterned in Flemish bond. The cornice is wooden. The State House has been modified somewhat since it was first built.
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The Mark Twain House and Museum was the home of Mark Twain from 1874 to 1891 in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. Before 1874, Twain had lived in... Hannibal, Missouri. The architectural style of the 19-room house is Victorian Gothic. The house is also notable for the major works written during his residency, including The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, A Tramp Abroad, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Poor financial investments caused the Twain family to move to Europe in 1891. When they returned to Connecticut in 1900 he lived in a house built for him in Redding, Connecticut, named Stormfield, where he died on April 21, 1910. His home in Hartford functioned as a school, an apartment building, and a library. In 1962 the building was declared a National Historic Landmark. Since 1974 it has had a multi-million dollar renovation and an expansion dedicated to showcasing his life and work. The house is facing financial troubles stemming in part from an overestimation of the number of visitors it would receive yearly.
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The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is a historic house in Hartford, Connecticut that was once the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's... Cabin. Stowe lived in this house for the last 23 years of her life. The 5,000 sq ft cottage-style house is located next door to the Mark Twain House. The house is part of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center which preserves the house and center's collections. The research library includes letters and documents from the family. The house includes original items from the family. In addition to the Stowe House, the historic site includes a 1873 carriage house and the Katharine Seymour Day House . The center offers tours of the house.
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Jeannine Taylor is an American actress. Taylor portrayed Marcie in the 1980 horror movie Friday the 13th and also starred in a TV film called The... Royal Romance of Charles and Diana. Taylor married James McConnell on February 3, 1990; the couple currently resides in Keene, New Hampshire.
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Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress of film, stage, and television. In a career that spanned 62 years as a leading lady, she was best... known for playing strong-willed, sophisticated women in both dramas and comedies. Raised in Connecticut by wealthy, progressive parents, Hepburn turned to acting after graduating from Bryn Mawr College. After four years in the theatre, favorable reviews of her work on Broadway brought her to the attention of Hollywood. She became an instant star with her feature debut, 1932's A Bill of Divorcement, and within 18 months received an Academy Award for Morning Glory. This initial success was followed by a series of commercial failures, and in 1938 she was labeled "box office poison". Hepburn masterminded her own comeback, buying herself out of her contract with RKO Radio Pictures and acquiring the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which she sold on the condition that she be the star. The movie was a hit, and Hepburn's career was successfully revived. In 1941 she joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and began an alliance with Spencer Tracy, forming a popular partnership that produced nine movies over 25 years.
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Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent... most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut. His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar", "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", all of which appear in his Collected Poems for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955. The son of a prosperous lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel , a young woman who had worked as a saleswoman, milliner, and stenographer. After a long courtship, he married her in 1909 over the objections of his parents, who considered her lower-class.
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John Mehegan was an American jazz pianist, lecturer and critic. Mehegan was born in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and began playing the piano at the... age of five. He taught himself to play by matching his fingers to the notes played on a neighborhood player piano. His mother gave him violin lessons, but he preferred piano. In 1941 he arrived in Manhattan where he lived with his first wife, Doris and their two children Carey and Gretchen. He had the opportunity to play at the legendary Marie's Crisis bohemian club in Greenwich Village. In 1946, he was appointed head of the jazz department at the Metropolitan Music School in New York. He wrote the incidental music for A Streetcar Named Desire which he performed on Broadway for two years. In the early 1950s he played a honky-tonk saloon piano player on The Gabby Hayes Show television series. Mehegan also had a run-in with the House Un-American Activities Committee where he was an uncooperative witness and this had a negative effect on his career, limiting some career possibilities for about a decade. Also during the 1950s Mehegan was a regular attendee at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts.
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Lewis Paul "Jerry" Bremer III is an American diplomat. He is most notable for his role as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority charged... with overseeing Iraq's occupation after the 2003 invasion. He reported primarily to the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and exercised authority over Iraq's civil administration. He served in this capacity from May 11, 2003, until June 28, 2004. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Bremer was educated at New Canaan Country School, Kent School and Phillips Academy. Bremer's father was president of the Christian Dior Perfumes Corporation in New York. His mother was a lecturer in art history at the University of Bridgeport. Bremer graduated from Yale University in 1963 and went on to earn an MBA from Harvard University in 1966. He later continued his education at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, where he earned a Certificate of Political Studies . That same year he joined the Foreign Service, which sent him first to Kabul, Afghanistan, as a general services officer. He was assigned to Blantyre, Malawi, as economic and commercial officer from 1968 to 1971.
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Stephanie McMahon Levesque better known by her maiden name Stephanie McMahon, is WWE's Executive Vice President, Creative., former professional... wrestling valet and occasional wrestler. She is the daughter of WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon and Linda McMahon, the younger sister of Shane McMahon, and wife of WWE wrestler and executive Paul "Triple H" Levesque. McMahon began appearing regularly on WWE in 1999 as a part of a storyline with The Undertaker. After a brief on-screen relationship with Test, she was linked to Triple H—whom she married both on-screen and later in real life—which culminated in the McMahon-Helmsley Faction storyline. She has held the WWF Women's Championship once. In 2001, she was the on-screen owner of Extreme Championship Wrestling during The Invasion. The following year, she was the SmackDown General Manager, but stopped appearing regularly on television after an "I Quit" match with her father Vince. After making sporadic appearances for several years, she began appearing regularly on Raw in 2008 as the Raw brand General Manager.
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Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress of film, stage, and television. In a career that spanned 62 years as a leading lady, she was best... known for playing strong-willed, sophisticated women in both dramas and comedies. Raised in Connecticut by wealthy, progressive parents, Hepburn turned to acting after graduating from Bryn Mawr College. After four years in the theatre, favorable reviews of her work on Broadway brought her to the attention of Hollywood. She became an instant star with her feature debut, 1932's A Bill of Divorcement, and within 18 months received an Academy Award for Morning Glory. This initial success was followed by a series of commercial failures, and in 1938 she was labeled "box office poison". Hepburn masterminded her own comeback, buying herself out of her contract with RKO Radio Pictures and acquiring the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which she sold on the condition that she be the star. The movie was a hit, and Hepburn's career was successfully revived. In 1941 she joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and began an alliance with Spencer Tracy, forming a popular partnership that produced nine movies over 25 years.
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Eugene Francis Alan Pitney, known as Gene Pitney , was an American singer-songwriter, musician and sound engineer. Through the mid-1960s, he enjoyed... success as a recording artist on both sides of the Atlantic and was among the group of early 1960s American acts who continued to enjoy hits after the British Invasion. Pitney charted 16 Top-40 hits in the U.S., four in the Top 10. In the UK he had 22 Top-40 hits, and 11 singles in the Top Ten. He also wrote the early 1960s hits "Rubber Ball" by Bobby Vee, "He's a Rebel" by The Crystals, and "Hello Mary Lou" by Rick Nelson. In 2002, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Pitney was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in Rockville, now part of Vernon, Connecticut. His early influences were Clyde McPhatter, country-blues singer Moon Mullican and doo-wop groups like The Crows. He attended Rockville High School, at which he was named "the Rockville Rocket", and where he formed his first band, Gene & the Genials. He made records as part of a duo called Jamie and Jane with Ginny Arnell , and in 1959 recorded a single as Billy Bryan.
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Lewis Paul "Jerry" Bremer III is an American diplomat. He is most notable for his role as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority charged... with overseeing Iraq's occupation after the 2003 invasion. He reported primarily to the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and exercised authority over Iraq's civil administration. He served in this capacity from May 11, 2003, until June 28, 2004. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Bremer was educated at New Canaan Country School, Kent School and Phillips Academy. Bremer's father was president of the Christian Dior Perfumes Corporation in New York. His mother was a lecturer in art history at the University of Bridgeport. Bremer graduated from Yale University in 1963 and went on to earn an MBA from Harvard University in 1966. He later continued his education at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, where he earned a Certificate of Political Studies . That same year he joined the Foreign Service, which sent him first to Kabul, Afghanistan, as a general services officer. He was assigned to Blantyre, Malawi, as economic and commercial officer from 1968 to 1971.
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Stephanie McMahon Levesque better known by her maiden name Stephanie McMahon, is WWE's Executive Vice President, Creative., former professional... wrestling valet and occasional wrestler. She is the daughter of WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon and Linda McMahon, the younger sister of Shane McMahon, and wife of WWE wrestler and executive Paul "Triple H" Levesque. McMahon began appearing regularly on WWE in 1999 as a part of a storyline with The Undertaker. After a brief on-screen relationship with Test, she was linked to Triple H—whom she married both on-screen and later in real life—which culminated in the McMahon-Helmsley Faction storyline. She has held the WWF Women's Championship once. In 2001, she was the on-screen owner of Extreme Championship Wrestling during The Invasion. The following year, she was the SmackDown General Manager, but stopped appearing regularly on television after an "I Quit" match with her father Vince. After making sporadic appearances for several years, she began appearing regularly on Raw in 2008 as the Raw brand General Manager.
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Rebecca Rose Lobo-Rushin is an American television basketball analyst and former women's basketball player in the Women's National Basketball... Association from 1997 to 2003. Lobo, at 6' 4", played the center position for much of her career. Lobo was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the youngest daughter of RuthAnn and Dennis Joseph Lobo. Her father is of Cuban and Polish descent and her mother is of German and Irish heritage; Lobo was raised a Catholic. Her brother Jason played basketball at Dartmouth College and her sister Rachel played basketball at Salem State College. Both her parents were teachers; in addition, her father was a basketball coach. Raised in Southwick, Massachusetts, Lobo was the state scoring record-holder with 2,740 points in her high school career for Southwick-Tolland Regional High School in Massachusetts. She held this record for 18 years until it was eclipsed by Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir of the new Leadership Charter School in Springfield on January 26, 2009. More than 100 colleges recruited Lobo, but she chose the University of Connecticut due to proximity and her belief in its academic excellence.
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Linda Evans is an American actress. She is known primarily for her roles on television, and rose to fame playing Audra Barkley in the 1960s Western... TV series, The Big Valley . Her most prominent role was that of Krystle Carrington in the 1980s ABC prime time television soap opera Dynasty, a role she played from 1981 to 1989. Born Linda Evenstad in Hartford, Connecticut, Evans was the second of three daughters to a couple who were professional dancers. "Evenstad" was the name of the small farm in Nes, Hedmark in Norway from where her paternal great-grandmother emigrated to the US in 1884 with her young son and a couple of relatives. When Evans was six months old, the family moved from Hartford to North Hollywood. To bring her out of her shyness her parents insisted that she take drama at school. When she started her professional career, she changed her last name to "Evans". Evans has been married twice, first to actor and film producer John Derek from 1968 to 1974. Derek left Evans for Bo Derek who was 30 years his junior. Evans' second marriage was to Stan Herman, a property executive, from 1976 to 1981.
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