The Wadsworth and Travelers Tower frame Bushnell Tower, the State Capitol, and Bushnell Park, for a lovely postcard image of Hartford, Connecticut.
Wadsworth and Travelers
Tag: City
Snowy Clement and Hartford
White covers Trinity’s campus and accents the Neo-Gothic architecture, but the modernist skyline of Hartford in the distance perpetually suggests what else might architecturally be. Though I love twentieth century architecture, there’s little argument that it would have been the wrong choice for a small liberal arts college. It wasn’t until recently that I came to realize that many of these old-looking buildings are less than 100 years old; in essence, they were built to be old-fashioned from the start. Most east-coast schools are a sort of academic Disneyland—one constructed long enough ago that we forgot about the artifice and now see only authenticity.
Bushnell Park Returns
After a summer spent under construction to fully overhaul the pond, work is finally complete and our city park looks more beautiful than ever. In the distance, the State Capitol is lit by the last of the warm early-autumn sunshine.
Hartford is Where the Rainbow Ends
Though the laws of optics may prevent me from ever reaching the literal end of a rainbow, this double (nearly triple) rainbow over Hartford certainly captures the emotional content of my central-Connecticut experiences.
Belgium Bicycling
If I’m ever feeling too warm, I look back to Belgians bicycling in the rainy winter and feel the chill set in immediately.
Marathoners IV
Emerging from the shadow of Bushnell Tower in downtown Hartford, marathon runners bunch and clump and distribute stochastically through the otherwise-empty streets.
LSC and Hartford
With Hartford’s skyline looking on in the background, the brutalist facade of Trinity College’s LSC matches the carefully graded dirt of its adjacent quad before a thick layer of new sod was applied.
Connecticut State Office Building
Bushnell Theater and the Connecticut State Office Building across the street look warm and inviting in the dusk light—friendly in a way I wouldn’t otherwise associate with massive facades.
Bushnell Tower Face
Legend has it that the southern face of Bushnell Tower is nearly windowless because it was meant to closely face a mirror twin of the building (never constructed); now it remains a mysterious facade that adds character to the historic structure.
Perfect Summer in Amsterdam
The call of a perfect summer afternoon on a bike crossing Amsterdam—dodging crowds, slipping from old building to new building, under a blanket of white clouds and green trees—sounds utopian.
Weird Fog
A fog of Macbeth/Shakespeare/Weird-Sisters-level strangeness descended on Hartford last night.
Bicycle Pause: Amsterdam
No idea how this standard Amsterdam bicycle came to rest in the middle of a canal bridge, but the combination of transportation modes speaks to the Dutch experience pretty effectively.
Exam Dawn
Waking pre-dawn to be sure an NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant and a Statistical Mechanics exam are both finished when they need to be turns out to have some upsides—namely, this gigantic panorama of an incredible Hartford dawn. (This one is definitely worth clicking through to Flickr and further clicking to zoom to 100% scale.)
Fall Flying in Hartford
Halloween season brings the most New-England-y aesthetics to New England, and nowhere more than in a city park. The foliage adds a perfect contrast to blue-hour colors, and the park lights (as in the foreground) highlight the evening walkers.
Connecticut’s Marine Layer
This is a sight I haven’t seen since I lived in the Bay Area: a layer of low-lying clouds caused by a temperature inversion that look remarkably like the marine layer. Though I know the origins aren’t the same in the Central Valley of Connecticut, that mix of perfectly clear sky and rolling clouds brought me back in time and made rising at dawn worth it.
Decaseconds 