Ethereum

Highrise #46

Collection

Highrises

Description

**Travelers Tower** **Art by:** Chris Hytha **Story by:** Mark Houser Rather than leasing floors for income, as is typical of most office highrises, this one always has been occupied almost entirely by employees of the company it is named for. Travelers opened a new, nine-story Beaux-Arts headquarters in 1907, widened it just a few years later, and added the tower as a second expansion to accommodate the bigger sales force needed to meet demand for a popular new product: automobile insurance. The son of a stone carver, Travelers founder James Batterson went from making gravestones to supplying granite and marble for major public buildings, including the Library of Congress, and Civil War monuments at Gettysburg and elsewhere. A trans-Atlantic voyage introduced Batterson to the European concept of accident insurance for travelers, and upon returning he launched the first U.S. company to offer such a policy. Batterson’s quarries supplied the granite for this building as well as the Connecticut State Capitol across town. Celebrated New York architect Donn Barber, who did all three Travelers projects, died at age 53 just weeks before he was supposed to speak at the 1925 Paris exposition that gave birth to the term “Art Deco.” Public tours to the arched observatory atop Travelers Tower were discontinued in the 1990s, when winds blew an original spire encircled with brass globes off the cupola.

Traits

Style

Neoclassical

City

Hartford

Region

Northeast