Resources
Preservation Guides
Beginning in the 1970s, interest in older houses in Connecticut’s urban neighborhoods experienced a great revival. Urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s, which often ignored or categorized these buildings as obsolete liabilities best dealt with through demolition, gradually gave way to revitalization programs focusing on the rehabilitation of older housing stock. This change in attitude was fostered by a number of factors, including an increasing recognition that (a) older houses make an important contribution to the special “historic” character of a city’s residential neighborhoods; (b) older houses often exhibit a level of craftsmanship rarely found in their modern counterparts; and (c) rehabilitation of older houses is increasingly becoming an affordable and productive investment for homeowners.
In 1985, the New Haven Preservation Trust, in cooperation with the City of New Haven and the Connecticut Historical Commission*, assembled style guides for some of Connecticut's most common nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban housing types: gable-fronted single-family houses, mixed-use row buildings, stacked duplexes, and triple deckers. The guides were also designed to provide owners of these buildings with some basic guidelines relating to effective maintenance and rehabilitation of their properties.
Text and drawings by Paul Loether and Preston Maynard
*The Connecticut Historical Commission is now the State Historic Preservation Office