Raised in Hartford in a special house, he returned to do renovations for free on his childhood home – Hartford Courant

As a child, Tony Taylor lived all over the world — the Netherlands, Germany, Mallorca, Austria — but it was the small house where his family lived in Hartford that inspired his career and lifelong love of architecture.

Taylor moved to Hartford in 1964, when he was 12, and he, his mother and his brother moved into a Victorian-era cottage at 121 Holcomb St.

“The day we saw it for the first time, I was so eager to look inside I busted a cellar window. We heard it may have been the gatehouse for the big house on top of the hill,” he said. “I became fascinated by architectural history. I biked all over town and into Bloomfield to explore old houses.”

Taylor, 69, now lives in Maine. But he’s spending a lot of time in Hartford, working to restore that old house at the corner of Holcomb and Ridgefield streets, across from Keney Park in the Blue Hills neighborhood.

He and his painters come as often as they can, as weather permits, to do exterior stabilization and painting for the home’s current owner. Taylor offers his own service free of charge. He pays the workers. He charges the owner nothing.

“I came by here in 2008 to see the house. I met Diane Williams for the first time. I came again this year to see the house again. I was shocked. It was in distressed condition, peeling paint, peeling under the roof,” he said. “I decided right then and there I was going to fix it myself.”

Williams bought the house in 1995. It had been abandoned and crumbling for years, its shutters stolen by scavengers, and rodents and insects had the run of the place. Williams said neighborhood folks called it “the little gingerbread house” because of its quaint, unusual external design features.

Williams paid the city $1 for it. The “sweat equity” purchasing agreement required her to do extensive renovations to make it habitable again.

“We had to tear the walls out, to put in new wiring, insulation, sheetrock,” Williams said. “We fixed the floor. We fixed the door. We fixed where the mice and bees came in. We were always fixing something.”

The decades-long work to make her house a home embedded that home deep in Williams’ heart. “My four kids grew up here. This house is my blessing. I will not part with it. It’s sentimental. And it’s peaceful here,” she said.

After many years, all the renovations, as well as a few unexpected problems — a large tree limb falling on the roof, an insurance dispute, a garage burglary, plumbing failures — strained Williams’ finances.

Then along came Taylor, and his offer to do external renovations for free. He and his workmen would paint the house, stabilize the roof over the back door and do whatever else they could on a limited budget.

Williams jumped at the generous offer. “God is good to me,” Williams said.

The house is being painted her favorite color, blue, with darker blue for the architectural accents.

Taylor said he will spend a total of about $10,000 to work on the house, paying for labor, supplies, travel, lodging, etc.

The home was made in “stick style,” an architectural trend popular in the mid-to-late 19th century, emerging near the end of the Gothic Revival period. The style gets its name from the horizontal, vertical and x-crossed beams that decorate the exterior. “It’s like the exoskeleton of the house, but it’s on the outside,” Taylor said.

The house also features two pointed finials jutting upward from the peak of each side of the roof.

Mary Falvey, executive director of Hartford Preservation Alliance, said the house can be seen in an 1880 atlas of the city, but no more specific building date can be found.

“That was before we had building permits. We didn’t have building permits until 1893,” Falvey said. “At that time, Blue Hills was very sparsely populated. It was mostly farmland. The lot the house was on was the size of that whole block. In the ’20s it got divided during the big building boom.”

She added that the house is lucky to have survived the “demolition trend” of the 1990s that doomed a lot of old structures.

“Unfortunately in the ’90s there were community development block grants. The city went to neighborhoods and said to the people there, pick the five worst houses that are blighted and we’ll tear them down,” she said.

Falvey called the house “one of a kind,” adding that most stick-style houses are larger than Williams’ house.

Paul Simisky, who is doing the painting work with his brother Clifford, is writing an architecture book with Taylor. He said the house’s size, compared to other houses of its type, was crucial to the project.

“The fact that it’s so small made this job doable for us,” he said.

As the Simisky brothers painted the house, Taylor reminisced about the years he lived in the house. Back then, his and his brother Andrew’s surname was Schneider, after their father, from whom his mother was divorced.

“My mother, Marlaine Bartow, was a caseworker for the Hartford health department. She also was into social activism. She ran a program, Project BUSY, out of the house, and then out of the Keney Park Pond House. The project was to teach kids in the city basic home repair skills,” he said.

Charles Teale, retired chief of the Hartford Fire Department, was one of the youths who participated in the program, which was sponsored by the Urban League and financed by the Community Renewal Team.

“We painted basements, cleaned up garages, mowed lawns in various locations,” Teale said. “We were paid and that’s how I got my social security card. I remember that family very fondly.”

Taylor sometimes helped with Project BUSY and with his mother’s other projects. At other times, he explored the area.

His fascination with old architecture kept him occupied. He was always looking for houses to explore. His interest in architecture, and the skills he learned with Project BUSY, got the attention of the state Commission on the Arts. When he was 15, the commission recruited him to locate old buildings and help the owners with repairs.

The uncommonly young architectural historian was the focus of a Hartford Courant story on May 10, 1969. In the story, the commission’s Gregory Hesselberg said “I was surprised to find him so knowledgeable.”

His work with the commission didn’t last long. The family left Hartford in 1969 in the midst of unprecedented unrest in the city. Marlaine Bartow moved to Willimantic. The boys moved in with their father and graduated from high school in Brooklyn, New York.

“My dad was persuasive but I regretted leaving Hartford. I missed the architecture,” Taylor said.

After attending Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Taylor stayed in that town for several years in the 1970s. He got involved in efforts to preserve historical architecture.

“It initially thrilled me. All the historic buildings,” he said. “But I became disenchanted with urban renewal and urban planning. I felt I was born too late. I wished I could have helped the place 10 years earlier.”

He later moved to Maine, where he works as an old-house consultant and a handyman working on old houses. He also writes short stories.

In his historic preservation work and activism, Taylor came to the belief that people with little money sometimes tend to promote preservation better than people with lots of money, even if they don’t know they’re doing it.

“If you don’t have the money to take out the original parts and materials, you don’t do it. The original parts are preserved,” he said. “Often rich people have more money than they know what to do with and replace what doesn’t need to be replaced. It should be repaired, not replaced.”

Falvey said people like Taylor are at the heart of historic preservation.

“This is really what preservation is about. It’s not about having a nonprofit going around telling people what to do. It’s one person who finds an affinity for a house, whether he grew up there, likes the style or something that grabs them,” she said. “They did something with it. They are advocating for it.”

Wendy Pawlak, a volunteer who lectures on Hartford history at the Charter Oak Cultural Center, has befriended Taylor during his project. She said he is the perfect conservator, since he has a personal connection to the house.

“All buildings, even buildings that are not famous, have a story behind them, their own history,” Pawlak said. “He knows that history. He is part of it.”

Susan Dunne can be reached at [email protected].