Civic Center roof collapse: 30 years ago today

It doesn't seem that long ago, but it's true: In the early-morning hours of January 18, 1978, a flaw in the "space frame" roof's design and about 5 inches of heavy, wet snow combined to cause the collapse. No one was hurt, but only six hours earlier, a crowd of about 5,000 had left the arena after watching a men's basketball game between the University of Connecticut and University of Massachusetts. A rebuilt Civic Center opened in 1980. Gallery of Hartford Courant file photos

An excellent idea

On his WTIC-AM talk show this afternoon, Colin McEnroe offered a great idea for reviving downtown Hartford: build a museum dedicated to the written word. Sure, we're already building a science museum -- but so is every other city, he noted. A written-word museum would not only make Hartford unique, he said, but it would also allow the region to draw on its long heritage of great authors, like Mark Twain, Noah Webster, Wallace Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. McEnroe described a museum where visitors would learn about everything from the Gutenberg press to the latest developments in computing. He also spoke of making the building distinctive by designing it to look like a letter of the alphabet. That's fine too, but I'd be reluctant to enter a building shaped like the letter "V." Colin McEnroe's blog

Things on my plate in '08 and books of '07

Happy new year! Among my resolutions: to thoroughly overhaul wwww.hartfordhistory.net and blog more regularly. On the latter score, I never got around last year to mentioning the publication of several books that deal in one way or another with city history. So I'll take the opportunity to list them here:

• "The Hartford Whalers" is another addition to Arcadia Publishing's indispensable series, Images in History. This pictorial tribute to "The Whale," put together by Brian Codagnone, traces the team's history from its membership in the upstart World Hockey League to its absorbtion into the National Hockey League, which eventually allowed the team to move to -- ugh! -- North Carolina. Relive the fun and heartbreak.
  
  
• "Victorian Hartford Revisited," another Arcadia photo book, is Tomas Nenortas's follow-up to his "Victorian Hartford," a compilation of postcards from Hartford's days as one of America's wealthiest and most beautiful cities. According to Arcadia, this volume contains "many never-before-published images."
  
  
• "House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City," tells the true story of five gifted Hartford boys who met as high school athletes and promised to stay in the city and work for its improvement. Intertwined with it is author Michael Downs' soul searching over whether to remain in Hartford, the scene of so much of his family's history. The book is published by the University of Nebraska Press.
  
  
• "Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir" actually appeared at the end of 2005, but I can't resist plugging this amazing book, which has since been published in paperback. Author Mary-Ann Tirone Smith uses the 1953 murder of an 11-year-old classmate as a spur to explore her Hartford childhood, which included living with an autistic brother who could not bear many everyday sounds -- this in a time when autism was little recognized, let alone understood. Those nostalgic for the kinder, gentler Hartford of the 1950s will find lots of fodder here, but Smith also dissects the repressive mindset that led the adults around her to all but pretend the death of her friend never happened. Smith's experience as a mystery writer shows too, as she gives a riveting, step-by-step account of the movements that brought her friend into the path of her killer. This is an absolute page-turner.