Cass Gilbert's City on Field Street

In the early nineteen hundreds, Waterbury had a problem and a patron. The problem was a devastating fire in nineteen oh two that had burned through a swath of downtown. The patron was the Chase family, owners of Chase Brass Company, one of the industrial dynasties that had made Waterbury the Brass Capital of the World. Together, catastrophe and money produced one of the most remarkable civic complexes in New England.

The Chases turned to Cass Gilbert, at the time one of the most sought-after architects in America. Gilbert would later design the Woolworth Building in Manhattan and the United States Supreme Court, but he brought enormous ambition to this Connecticut commission as well. Between nineteen fourteen and nineteen nineteen he designed five coordinated buildings on Field and Grand streets: City Hall, a police and fire building, a library, and two companion structures, all in the Georgian Revival and Second Renaissance Revival styles, clad in brick and limestone.

City Hall opened in nineteen fifteen and was unusual for its era in housing not just the mayor's office and council chambers but also the police and fire departments under one roof. Across the complex, the Chase Building followed in nineteen nineteen, its Renaissance Revival style complementing but deliberately distinguishing itself from the Georgian Hall next door.

Architectural historians note that no other body of work by Gilbert matches the Waterbury complex in coherence and ambition. It functions less like a collection of buildings than like a single planned composition, a set piece of civic architecture built at the moment when American cities were investing in the physical expression of democratic governance.

The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district in nineteen seventy-eight. Drive past Field Street and you are looking at the vision of one architect working at the peak of his powers, built by the brass fortune that defined this city.