The Richardson Building on Main Street

The R. and F. Cheney Building, also known as the Brown Thomson Building, is a commercial building designed by American architect H. H. Richardson. Located at 942 Main Street, Hartford, it was constructed in 1875-1876 for the Cheney Brothers silk manufacturers. Originally a multipurpose structure with five small shops on the ground floor and offices and apartments above, it housed Brown Thomson's department store and later the G. Fox and Company. As of 2007, it was renamed the Richardson Building.

The building is now home to a Residence Inn by Marriott, Fastsigns, and a local restaurant named Pietro's Pizza. It also provides rehearsal space for The Hartford Stage Company. The structure is organized into three heavy, horizontal tiers of roughly cut, reddish brownstone punctuated with lighter Berea limestone trim. The lowest tier features a series of huge round arches in polychrome bands, a motif repeated in the stories above at an increasingly smaller scale.

The building is crowned with low, asymmetric towers at its Main Street corners. Until 2024, the building housed a local brewery called City Steam Brewery. It is currently listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a list of the Nation's historic places worthy of preservation [1].

Sources: [1] https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/index.htm

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons