Thursday, June 9, 2022

Through Factory Windows, 2011 — St. Anne's from the attic of the Holmes, Booth & Haydens Lampworks, Waterbury

From the north end of the attic of the brick Lampworks (c.1880), where Holmes, Booth & Haydens once made brass burner mechanisms for oil lamps, the view across the sawtooth roof of the tube mill (c. 1918) took in one of Waterbury’s most prominent landmarks, St. Anne’s Church (1906), formerly the Shrine of St. Anne's. In 2019 the distinctive stone spires of St. Anne’s were determined to be unstable and demolished. The view in this photo was already gone, as the Lampworks had burned to the ground a year earlier. It had been empty since 2012, the year the tube mill shut down and the elaborate machine shop which had previously maintained the machines of tube-making was emptied and the lathes and presses sold off and taken away.