About The Hartford Times

The Hartford Times

The Hartford Times was a daily afternoon newspaper published in Hartford, Connecticut, in the United States, from 1817 to 1976. It was founded by Frederick D. Bolles and John M. Niles as an anti-Federalist weekly, The Hartford Weekly Times, and it styled itself throughout its history as a champion of reform and an advocate for the people. For much of its life it was a leading newspaper in Connecticut: it had the largest circulation in the state in 1917, and as late as the 1960s its circulation exceeded 140,000.

The Times closed abruptly on October 20, 1976, after 159 years, with a circulation of less than 70,000. It had been owned for decades by the Gannett Company, which sold the financially struggling paper in 1973 for seven million dollars to the owners of the New Haven Register, who failed to turn it around. Its headquarters building of 1920, on Prospect Street in Hartford, survived it and later became the downtown Hartford campus of the University of Connecticut.

Founded in 1817 as an Anti-Federalist Weekly

The Times was started by Frederick D. Bolles and John M. Niles, the latter a future United States senator, as an anti-Federalist weekly by the name of The Hartford Weekly Times in 1817. It was established, as the Hartford Public Library's historical note put it, as an anti-Federalist newspaper, and throughout its history it remained more liberal in outlook than the Hartford Courant, Hartford's other principal newspaper. Connecticut records of important dates likewise recorded that the Hartford Times was founded by Bolles and Niles in 1817, the year of a political revolution in the state in which the Federalists were defeated by reformers.

That founding identity mattered. The Times presented itself as a champion of reform and an advocate for the people, in deliberate contrast to the older, more established Courant, which had been founded in 1764. Hartford was therefore a two-paper city with a clear difference of temperament between its papers for a century and a half: a morning paper of great antiquity and an afternoon paper that traced its legitimacy to a reform movement.

Early Editors: Gideon Welles and Alfred E. Burr

One early editor of the Times was Gideon Welles, who later became Secretary of the Navy during the Civil War. Welles's presence in the paper's early history connected a Hartford weekly to national politics at the highest level, and it illustrated the role that partisan newspaper editing then played as a route into public office — as it also had for co-founder John M. Niles, who became a senator.

The dominant figure of the paper's nineteenth century was Alfred E. Burr, who led the Times for over six decades, from 1829 until 1890. Burr made it a daily newspaper and, through that long tenure, acquired considerable political influence statewide. Sixty-one years under one leader gave the Times a stability and a recognisable voice that few American newspapers of the period matched, and it carried the paper from its weekly, partisan origins into the era of the modern metropolitan daily.

The Largest Circulation in Connecticut

The Times was a leading newspaper in Connecticut, with the largest circulation in the state in 1917. Hartford in the late 1950s was still a two-paper town, and the larger of the two papers was the afternoon Hartford Times; the Courant, despite being the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper, did not become the circulation leader until 1965, when it attracted 136,000 readers, two thousand more than the Times. As late as the 1960s the Times had a circulation of over 140,000.

Those figures are essential to understanding its fall. The Times in 1976 did not close as a paper that had always been second in its market. It closed having been, within living memory, the bigger of Hartford's two papers, in a market where the two papers together had sold about 270,000 copies fifty years before the Courant alone was selling about 60,000.

The Hartford Times Building of 1920

In 1920, at the height of its success, the paper commissioned architect Donn Barber to build a new headquarters, the Hartford Times Building at 10 Prospect Street. Barber had also designed the nearby Travelers Tower and the Connecticut State Library and Supreme Court Building. The Beaux-Arts building reused six massive green granite Ionic columns, and other architectural details, salvaged from the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York, a famous work of Stanford White that had been demolished. The openings in the building's arcade were also repurposed windows or doors from that church.

Behind the columns were original murals by the Connecticut artist Ralph Milne Calder, in a sgraffito, Renaissance style, allegorising Space, Time, Poetry and Prose. They illustrated the paper's motto: "News is an immortal bubble and the press endures within." The building became a Hartford landmark and a backdrop for speeches by four presidents — Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and John F. Kennedy, whose final speech of his 1960 election campaign was delivered there before a crowd reported at 100,000. The Times occupied the building until its demise in 1976.

Gannett Ownership From 1928

The newspaper was purchased by the Gannett interests in early 1928. Gannett, founded by Frank Gannett, was known for granting editorial autonomy to its different media while consolidating and standardising business procedures and purchases, and for playing down crime and scandal in its papers. The Times remained a Gannett paper for forty-five years, through its period of greatest circulation and into its decline.

During the 1940s the paper owned a radio station named WTHT, extending the Times into broadcasting in the manner of many metropolitan newspapers of the period. Gannett owned and operated the Times for many years before September 30, 1973, and the paper's long Gannett tenure meant that its identity in the mid-twentieth century was that of a locally edited, chain-owned afternoon daily in Connecticut's capital city.

Television and the Afternoon Paper's Problem

The structural problem that overtook the Times was the one that overtook afternoon papers across the United States. In the next decade after the mid-1960s, television news replaced the afternoon paper in many homes. A former Hartford journalist of the period recalled that, when he left the Courant for the CBS affiliate in Hartford in 1961, the station offered thirty minutes of local and network news in the evening and fifteen minutes at 11 p.m., but that soon expanded to an hour and then two hours in the evening and a couple of hours in the morning. That expansion did not hurt the morning Courant in the same way, but television viewers found they could do without the company of the afternoon paper.

Commentary after the closure added a second explanation: that the newspaper lost its way editorially. The Courant did investigative reporting and doubled down on it in the immediate post-Watergate period, while the quality and consistency of the Times declined. Andrea Nissen, an assistant city editor at the time of the demise, attributed the failure in part to constant changes in management, recalling three or four different editors and publishers in its last years and a loss of confidence both in the community and inside the newsroom. Structural change and internal instability therefore worked together: a weakening market position made stable leadership harder, and unstable leadership made recovery less likely.

Sold in 1973 to the Register Publishing Company

Prior to September 30, 1973, and for many years before that date, the Times had been owned and operated by Gannett. After negotiations culminating in a closing on October 10, 1973, Gannett entered into a purchase agreement to sell the Times to The Register Publishing Company, which published two newspapers in New Haven, Connecticut. Gannett sold more than ninety-nine percent of the shares of The Hartford Times, Inc., together with all outstanding stock of Community Offset, Inc., for an aggregate purchase price of $7,000,000, subject to adjustments based on the balance sheet prepared for the Times.

The new owners — described in summary accounts as the owners of the New Haven Register — failed to turn the financially struggling paper around. Three years after the sale, the Times was finished. The transaction itself then became the subject of litigation, in the case of Gannett Co., Inc. v. Register Publishing Co., in which the question was whether the Register was entitled to rescind the contract by which it had agreed to purchase the Times. The court record noted that the paper's own obituary notice had stated that it had been "strangled by litigation."

Closure on October 20, 1976

On October 20, 1976, the Hartford Times ceased publication. It closed abruptly, after years of financial struggle, in the phrase used by the Hartford Public Library, with its circulation down to about 69,000 — described in its catalogue entry as less than 70,000 at closure — after 159 years of publication. Hartford, which had supported two daily newspapers since 1817, became a one-paper city, and the Courant survived as its sole daily.

The Times left tangible remains. Its photograph morgue — its archive of images — was eventually acquired by the Hartford History Center at the Hartford Public Library, where the Hartford Times Image Collection amounted to seventy-five linear feet of photographs, including many images of Hartford during the third quarter of the twentieth century. That collection preserved, in visual form, the city the afternoon paper had covered in its final decades.

The Building After the Newspaper

After the Times' demise in 1976, the Hartford Times Building came under government ownership and was used as an annex to the adjacent Municipal Building. It then stood disused for more than a decade and was the subject of various redevelopment proposals, including as an expansion of the Wadsworth Atheneum and as a home for a brewing company. In 2017 the site was rebuilt and expanded, to a design by Robert A. M. Stern Architects, to provide a new home for a downtown campus for the University of Connecticut. The State of Connecticut owned the building, and its current tenant was the university.

Few defunct American newspapers left so prominent a physical monument. The granite columns salvaged in 1920 from a demolished New York church, the murals and the motto about the endurance of the press remained part of downtown Hartford long after the press whose endurance they celebrated had stopped.

Legacy

The Hartford Times was remembered as the reform-minded, more liberal counterweight to the Courant in a capital city that sustained a genuine two-paper contest for 159 years. Its history included a co-founder who became a senator, an early editor who became a wartime Secretary of the Navy, a sixty-one-year editorial tenure under Alfred E. Burr, state-leading circulation in 1917 and again a circulation above 140,000 in the 1960s, and a headquarters building that became a platform for presidential speeches.

Its end, in 1976, came before the internet era that later reshaped newspapers, which made it an early and instructive case: an afternoon paper with a distinguished history could be undone by television's capture of the evening audience, by editorial and managerial instability, and by an ownership change that produced litigation rather than recovery. What survived — the building on Prospect Street, the photograph archive at the Hartford Public Library, and the court record of its sale — documented a newspaper that had served Hartford, Connecticut, from the age of the anti-Federalist weekly to the age of broadcast news.