The Union League Conversation Room

In the heart of downtown New Haven, as automobiles began appearing alongside horse drawn wagons on Chapel Street, a series of glowing stained glass lunettes crowned the Union League Conversation Room. Installed in 1903 during the construction of the club’s grand new addition, artist Charles Edward Hubbell painted scenes celebrating American identity, endurance and defiance. The result was a room suspended between centuries, where New Haven’s civic elite gathered beneath symbols of the past while, just outside the windows, the future accelerated.

Source: https://rogershermanhouse.com/2023/08/22/president-theodore-roosevelt-toured-hartford-in-a-horseless-carriage-electric-car-designed-by-william-hooker-atwood-august-22-1902/

Transcript

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A painted lunette window glows from inside a recessed mahogany cubby, directly over a massive fireplace, depicting an impressionist sunrise over a river of lotus flower. But that glass was originally designed for an entirely different room. It was built for an eighteen ninety nine aesthetic that featured murals of windmills and Dutch canals. But in nineteen oh three the elite power brokers of New Haven tore that room apart. They had just done the unthinkable. They fractured their own fiercely partisan political club over bitter tariff disputes, stripped away the party requirements and opened their doors to anyone. They renamed themselves the Union League, and to celebrate their new nonpartisan identity, they built a massive addition facing Chapel Street, anchored by a room designed strictly for one thing, conversation. To understand the weight of this room you have to understand the ground it was built on. The physical space is a layered archaeological dig of American ambition. Long before the glass was painted, long before the mahogany was carved. This exact plot of land was cultivated by the Quinipiac people. By sixteen fourteen it was charted by a Dutch explorer navigating the coastline. In sixteen thirty eight, the Puritans arrived and colonized the area, laying out a rigid nine square grid that would define the city's geography for centuries, and on this specific plot of earth stood the home of Roger Sherman. He was the only person to sign all four great state papers of the United States, the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. He lived right here on Chapel Street with his second wife, Rebecca Prescott Sherman, raising their fifteen children and running the family store. The Sherman House eventually fell, and the land was claimed by a new kind of American royalty, the industrialists. In eighteen sixty a man named Gaius Fen Warner hired the prominent architect Henry Austin to build an Italianate villa on the site. Warner had made his fortune in the iron industry. He took a malleable iron castings business and built it into one of the largest operations in the country. He wanted a house that reflected that massive wealth, an estate sitting on an acre and a half of prime real estate right across from the old campus of Yale. But the life cycle of Gilded Age mansions was often remarkably short. By eighteen eighty the property had transformed again. Marshal Peter R. Carl bought the estate and erected an opera house on the grounds. Then in eighteen eighty four a group of politically motivated men purchased the old Warner House portion of the property. They called themselves the Republican League. They were fiercely partisan, dedicated to the political dominance of the Republican Party in late nineteenth century Connecticut. For fifteen years this building served as their fortress, a place for political rallies, backroom deals and closed door strategies. And in eighteen eighty seven the opera house next door was reestablished as the Hyperion Theater, creating an alleyway that would become a fixture of the local landscape. By the turn of the twentieth century the political ground was shifting beneath their feet. The Republican League began to fracture. A growing contingent of the membership found themselves breaking with the National Party over deeply contentious issues, particularly the tariff. The arguments grew heated. The unity of the club was shattering. The men realized that if they remained a purely political organization, the club would tear itself apart. So they made a radical decision. They chose fraternity over faction. They dropped the political requirements, changed their enrollment to nonpartisan and completely rebranded. They became the Union League. They envisioned a civic and social club where the most prominent businessmen in the city could gather regardless of their voting records. The decision was a massive success. Without the barrier of political affiliation, the club's membership boomed. They suddenly had more members than their old clubhouse could hold. They needed to expand, and they needed to do it in a way that signaled their new unified identity to the city. In nineteen oh two, the Union League hired architect Richard Williams to design a massive addition. Williams was a major figure in local architecture. He would go on to design churches and prominent public buildings throughout the region. His plan for the Union League was ambitious. The addition would absorb the front of the old Gaius Fen Warner House and extend all the way out to the Chapel Street sidewalk. It would more than double the square footage of the clubhouse, providing a large hall for banquets and a completely new facade. But the psychological heart of this new building was the conversation room. This was designed to be a sanctuary, a place where the industrial, artistic, and commercial elite of New Haven could sit in leather chairs, smoke cigars, and negotiate the future of their city. The interior design of this room required a delicate touch, it needed to feel heavy, permanent and masculine, but also cultured and refined. The previous iteration of the club had undergone a renovation back in eighteen ninety nine. That earlier design was heavily influenced by the Delft aesthetic. It was a Dutch inspired look that featured expansive murals of windmills and serene canals. It even featured a Trompe Loil ceiling. The ceiling was painted to look like an open blue sky, creating the illusion that the room was open to the heavens. It was a theatrical, highly stylized choice, but by nineteen oh three the men of the Union League wanted something different. They wanted rich dark woods, they wanted gravitas, so they stripped away the windmills and the canals, but they kept one piece of that eighteen ninety nine aesthetic. They salvaged a single painted lunette window. A lunette is a half moon shaped architectural element, a semicircle that usually sits above a door or a larger rectangular window. This original lunette depicted an impressionist view of a curved river, dotted with lily pads and lotus flowers, set against a glowing sunrise. During the eighteen ninety nine design, the azure color at the very top edge of this glass had physically met the blue painted sky of the Tromple ceiling, seamlessly blending the glass into the plaster. In the new conversation room, Richard Williams relocated this window to the absolute center of the space. He built a recessed lunette shaped mahogany cubby directly over the massive fireplace and set the glass deep inside it. It became the glowing centerpiece of the room, a bridge between the club's past and its future. But a single window was not enough. The conversation room featured a line of large clear glass picture windows looking out onto the street. The men who bankrolled this expansion decided to commission five more painted lunette windows to sit directly above those clear glass panes. These new windows were presented as gifts to the Union League on the occasion of the grand opening of the new clubhouse, which was scheduled for october twelfth, nineteen oh three. The names of the donors read like a directory of New Haven's Gilded Age aristocracy. There was George B. Martin, the club president, and a highly successful businessman who guided the club through its transition. There was William S. Wells. There was Edward R. Jeffcott. Jeffcott was a prominent interior decorator and a purveyor of hand painted wallpapers. His involvement suggests a deep, meticulous obsession with the texture and atmosphere of the space. He understood how light passing through painted glass would interact with the polished mahogany and the heavy fabrics in the room. And then there was William Hooker Atwood. Atwood was the chairman of the building committee. He was the man responsible for navigating the brutal zoning and permitting challenges, answering the concerns of the neighbors and successfully shepherding the entire construction project through to completion. Atwood personally donated the middle stained glass window over the fireplace, but William Hooker Atwood was much more than a committee chairman. He was one of the most respected carriage designers on the planet. To understand the tension in the conversation room in nineteen oh three, you have to understand exactly what Atwood did for a living and what was happening to his industry just outside the walls of the club. A decade earlier, in eighteen ninety three, Atwood had served as a judge at the Chicago World's Fair. That event was quite possibly the greatest assemblage of carriage manufacturers in the history of the world. Atwood judged the finest horse drawn vehicles ever crafted. He was a master of wood, leather, steel and proportion. He was a staunch traditionalist who believed in the strict, elegant rules of what was known as a gentleman's carriage. But the world was moving on from the horse. In eighteen ninety six, an engineer named Hiram Percy Maxim was working for the Pope Manufacturing Company in Hartford, trying to develop a viable electric motor carriage. Maxim knew how to build the motor and the batteries, but he needed the vehicle to look acceptable to high society. At the time, the absolute rule of the infant auto industry was that a horseless carriage had to look exactly like a horse drawn carriage. Anything else was considered strange and vulgar. So Maxim and his partner George H. Day consulted with William Hooker Atwood down at the New Haven Carriage Company. They brought their blueprints to Atwood and his draftsman, Paul Steinbeck. Maxim had a radical idea. He suggested that they round off a few of the sharp corners on the carriage body to give it a more modern, fluid look. Atwood was appalled by the suggestion. He issued a sharp rebuke that became famous in the industry. He told Maxim Leave it sharp. That's smart and elegant. Maxim later admitted that he was hungering for lots of shiny nickel plate because it suggested fire engines and interesting machinery, but Atwood forced him to stick to the refined, understated aesthetics of aristocratic horse culture. Atwood designed a carriage body known as a Phaeton for Maxim's Mark I electric car. It was widely considered the most beautiful vehicle of its kind ever produced up to that point. It rolled onto the streets of Hartford in april eighteen ninety six. Atwood continued to refine the design, eventually creating the Phaeton Mark IV for the Columbia Electric Vehicle Company. This vehicle achieved the ultimate stamp of mechanical prestige. On august twenty second, nineteen oh two, President Theodore Roosevelt came to Hartford. The president was greeted with a twenty one gun salute and a grand tour of the city by electric car. As his horseless carriage climbed up Capitol Hill, a children's choir sang My Country Tis of Thee. And there was the president riding through the streets of Hartford in a state of the art electric vehicle designed by William Hooker Atwood of the Union League of New Haven. It was a massive triumph for Atwood's design skills. Yet there was a bitter irony to it. Roosevelt famously loved the strenuous life. He loved horses. He rode in Atwood's electric carriage for the demonstration, but he refused to adopt the automobile for his own use. Roosevelt continued using horse drawn carriages for all official government functions for his entire presidency. The White House wouldn't even build a garage for an automobile until William Howard Taft took office, so Atwood sat in the conversation room in nineteen oh three, having designed a vehicle that carried the president, knowing perfectly well that his entire way of life, his entire craft, was being replaced by machines. The men of the Union League needed an artist who could capture their sense of history and permanence. They turned to Charles Edward Hubble. Hubble was a decorator, an artist whose influence would eventually spread across the region. He was deeply embedded in the civic life of Fairfield County. A few years after painting the Union League windows, Hubble would become the driving force behind the construction of the new Canon Town Hall in nineteen oh eight. He was part of a tight knit group of creatives, heavily influenced by the Beau Arts movement and the city beautiful movement which sought to bring classical architecture and monumental grandeur to American towns. Hubble was also deeply involved in the new Canan Library. When the library built in addition in nineteen thirteen, Hubble personally painted the elaborate Egyptian Revival murals in the salon room. He helped design the Ponus Ridge Chap, a beautiful field stone building dedicated in nineteen eleven for non denominational worship, and even donated the land. Hubble was a man who understood how to embed heavy symbolic meaning into public architecture. He later practiced as an architect in New York before eventually moving out to Hollywood in the nineteen thirties, but in nineteen oh three his canvas was the glass of the Union League. Hubble created five distinct scenes of American history for the new Lunette windows. The architectural setup for these windows was brilliant in its contrast. Below the painted glass were large, completely clear picture windows. If a club member sat in a leather armchair and looked straight out, they saw the vibrant, chaotic reality of New Haven. They saw Chapel Street packed with pedestrians, merchants and the increasingly common sight of automobiles dodging horse drawn wagons. They saw the New Haven Green with its towering elm trees and centuries of civic history. They saw the alleyway leading to the Hyperion Theater, where crowds gathered for vaudeville shows and theatrical performances, and they saw the old campus of Yale University, a fortress of academia, staring right back at them. The clear glass offered the present tense, but if that same club member tilted his head back and looked up at the lunettes above the clear glass, he saw the idealized mythological past. Hubble's five painted windows served as a narrative arc of the American experiment. The sequence of the windows is a deliberate march through time, beginning with the raw struggle of survival. One window depicts the Mayflower at sea. Hubble painted the tiny, fragile ship completely isolated in the vast expanse of the Atlantic. It is a portrait of profound vulnerability. The Mayflower window does not show the triumphant landing at Plymouth Rock. It shows the perilous journey, it captures the terrifying realization that there is no turning back. This theme of isolation continues into the next window an adaptation of Boton's painting Pilgrim Exiles, here showing just a single solitary seated female figure resting on a high barren bluff. She is turned away from the interior of the continent, looking out across the desolate waters of the sea. Far off in the distance, just barely visible on the horizon, are the white sails of a tall ship heading back to England. The ship is leaving. The link to the old world is severed. The figure is not crying. She is simply watching the last vestige of her former life disappear over the curve of the earth. She has to turn her back to the ocean and walk into the dark woods of New England wilderness to build a civilization from scratch. The third window depicts the Whitfield House of Guildford. It was built in sixteen thirty nine by Reverend Henry Whitfield, who led a group of English refugees across the Atlantic to escape religious persecution. Instead of wood, they built with massive granite stones pulled from local ledges. The house was not just a home. It served as a church, a meeting hall and a fortress. Its thick walls represent the defense of values, and the refusal to be displaced. The fourth window is an adaptation of Charles DeWolf Brownell's painting of the Charter Oak. According to legend, in sixteen eighty seven, when Royal Authority threatened Connecticut's self government, the colony's charter was hidden inside a hollow oak tree to keep it from being seized. The tree became a symbol of defiance and ingenuity. The final window depicts the moonlit battle of Flambro Head in september seventeen seventy nine, between the Bonham Richard and the Serapis. It captures the moment John Paul Jones refused to surrender, declaring that he had not yet begun to fight, before turning the battle into a brutal close quarters struggle that ended in victory. The Bonholm Richard window was a fitting gift from William S. Wells, president of New Haven's General David Humphreys branch of the Sons of the American Revolution, a Navy veteran, and a historian of naval warfare. Wells authored a definitive account of the construction of the USS Monitor, the ironclad warship that electrified the Union during the Civil War, much as the Bonham Richard had rallied support for American independence during the Revolution. These five windows represent risk, isolation, endurance, defiance, and victory. On october twelfth, nineteen oh three, the Union League officially opened its new building. The dedication was a major event, attended by Governor Abiram Chamberlain, state officials, club representatives, and prominent citizens. There was music, refreshments and speeches. A few nights later the club hosted a ladies night, welcoming guests into the decorated parlours filled with flowers and music. When the celebrations ended the members took their seats in the conversation room. They looked up at the glowing delft lunette over the fireplace, a remnant of their past. They looked out through the clear glass at the modern city, electric lights and the growing presence of automobiles, and they looked up again at the painted lunettes, reminders of the long and often brutal history that made their world possible. They were men standing on the fault line between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, trying to hold time still while the future gathered speed just outside of the world. inside their windows. At the first annual banquet in the new clubhouse, Governor Chamberlain toasted the club and quipped that if he were a young man faced with choosing between a Yale education and Union League membership, he would choose the latter. To say the least, that started a conversation. If you found this story compelling, please share this episode with a friend who appreciates the hidden histories behind the architecture we walk past every day.