Newspapers once rolled out of the Hartford Times Building, the Beaux-Arts headquarters completed in 1920 for the now defunct Hartford Times, and its colonnade faces you now. The paper commissioned Donn Barber — the architect who designed the nearby Travelers Tower and the Connecticut State Library and Supreme Court Building — to create a new structure to house its office and newspaper plant. At its height the paper had the top circulation in the state in 1917, and this building was meant to match that civic presence.
When it was built it faced a street called Atheneum Square South, so from this approach the building was flanked by the Municipal Building and the Morgan Memorial wing of the Wadsworth Atheneum. Barber set the building on a high platform so its roofline would match those flanking buildings. His colonnade, he wrote, was inspired by Parisian examples such as La Madeleine, the Panthéon, and the Palais Bourbon, and made a suitable termination to the urban vista — an effect now softened and in part obscured by the trees on Burr Mall. Notice the colonnade and raised platform, echoing the Parisian examples that inspired Donn Barber's design.