welcome to the
House & Spr ing Garden
A garden, an old house, a small business, an artist— what do they all have in common?
Beginnings
Tim Schipper did a lot of driving. Like his father, Cornelis, who had started a Dutch bulb import business by traveling all over the United States in an Oldsmobile coupe searching for customers, he was always out meeting landscape contractors and looking at gardens. He had moved his flowerbulb company, colorblends, into a warehouse on Barnum Avenue in 2006, and once in a while he’d end up on Clinton Avenue, admiring a handsome, crumbling Colonial Revival house with a huge side yard.
Colorblends needed a show garden. 893 Clinton seemed perfect; then one day in 2009 a “for sale” sign appeared out front. Although first drawn to the property by the size of the yard, once Tim and the Colorblends team stepped through the oak doors onto the mosaic floor of the vestibule, an unexpected vision for the house took shape. Not only would Colorblends plant a garden, it would renovate the interior to create a space where local artists could make and show their work.
It took Colorblends four years to buy the property and two more to make basic renovations and repairs. With time, the Colorblends team discovered stories of the people who built, lived in, worked in, and loved this old mansion over more than a century, and each spring Colorblends opens this beautiful house and garden to the community.
Cornelis Schipper with daughter Agnes in his 1953 Olds Super 88.
First inhabitants: 1903 – 1942
When albert, alice, and amy wells moved into their new house in the fashionable Stratfield district, Bridgeport was a city on the rise. With more than 82,000 residents, it faced all of the promises and challenges of a rapidly changing world. It was 1903. Downtown, Smith’s Colonial Theatre hosted out-of-town tryouts for Broadway-bound shows and even the occasional opera singer. Bridgeport’s yacht club held regular races and regattas in the harbor. Industry was booming. Burt Manufacturing had just moved its poker chip operation to town, and huge factories with products ranging from guns and ammunition to ornamental brass objects and iron chains lined the waterfront. Perhaps inspired by houses at 116 Elmwood Place and 865 Clinton Avenue, Wells chose as his architect Charles T. Beardsley Jr., a noted designer of private residences. Beardsley responded with a graceful plan for a commodious 13-room house that included a side porch overlooking shrub and perennial gardens and an interior embellished with quarter-sawn oak woodwork, coffered ceilings, stained and leaded glass, and a grand entry below a soaring two-story portico graced with Tuscan columns.
Wells had recently retired from Bridgeport Malleable Iron Works, but he still worked in the financial industry and served on the board of City Savings Bank. The Clinton Avenue house was considerably farther from the center of town than his previous home on rapidly commercializing Fairfield Avenue, but it was convenient to two streetcar lines. In choosing this location, Wells might have imagined taking the trolley into town to attend to his business interests, accompanied by his wife, Alice, on her way to Howland’s, D.M. Read’s, or the glass-roofed shopping arcade. He may have been disconcerted by the trolley strike that began in early May and lasted till July, making the national news. Bridgeport’s labor activists would win even more attention in the summer of 1915, when a series of strikes, led predominantly by women, successfully established the eight-hour workday in local factories and businesses. It would take years for most American cities to catch up to the Bridgeport standard.
Main Street, Bridgeport, 1903.
above: Bridgeport Evening Post, June 14, 1904.
below: Frisbie Pie Truck, 1938.
The Wellses settled happily into their new home. Brooklawn Country Club was only a mile distant. New neighbors included businessmen, fellow Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, and members of the Episcopal Church where the family worshipped. Alice entertained regularly in her lavish parlors, hosting meetings of church guilds, bridge clubs, and parties. Amy Wells’s marriage to Frank Slosson, a rising executive of R. G. Dun & Company, was a highlight of the 1904 social season. The Reverend L. B. Baldwin, who had married Amy’s parents, performed the ceremony, for which Amy wore her mother’s wedding dress, a gown she would pass down to her daughter and granddaughter. After the ceremony, the closest friends and family gathered at 893 Clinton, simply adorned with laurel leaves, to enjoy a wedding breakfast and admire the opulent gifts laid out in the main parlor.
In decades to come, many new neighbors arrived, lining nearby streets with homes that reflected evolving fashions. The Wells House aged gracefully. Its gardens grew and matured, and the rich oak woodwork deepened in color. Amy’s daughter Ruth played in the wide hallways; she eventually brought her daughters to play there, too. Though Albert Wells died in 1914, his family would remain at 893 Clinton for almost 40 years. In that time, Bridgeport’s population would more than double, as immigrants and the children of immigrants were drawn to jobs at some of the city’s more than 500 factories, including Remington Arms, Columbia Records, Wheeler & Wilson sewing machines, and the Frisbie Pie Company, whose pans inspired Wham-O’s popular toy — the Frisbee.
The Quatranos: 1942 – 1967
Wartime Bridgeport was changing, its population growing by more than 27,000 between 1940 and 1942. In response to this explosion, Bridgeport issued rent controls to ensure that newly arrived workers could afford a place to live. Patriotic spirit was strong. Employees of the Bridgeport Brass Company mounted the musical Ready, Aim, Fire — a local hit that would travel all the way to the Stage Door Canteen in New York City to entertain servicemen on leave.
In 1942, three years after Frank’s death, Amy Wells Slosson sold 893 Clinton to a beloved local doctor, Joseph Quatrano. He had served in the Navy during the war, and his neighbors affectionately called him the “rear admiral of Clinton Avenue.” Dr. Quatrano moved into the house with his nineyear-old son, Charlie, and his wife, Anne, a nurse. He would live and practice there for the next 20 years.
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The first winter, the Quatranos placed their Christmas tree in the dining room. In those days the floor was plushly carpeted and the walls were papered with an intricate floral pattern, but the stained glass window above the breakfront was just as it is today.
The Quatranos led busy lives in the bustling city. Dr. Quatrano, a long-time staff doctor at St. Vincent’s Hospital, maintained a sunny home office in the south parlor of 893 Clinton, where patients could gaze out on the lush garden. Anne was an elegant woman with an eye for fine things. She traveled the world searching for antiques to fill the oak-trimmed rooms of her new home. The Bridgeport Post kept track of the Quatranos’ travels, noting a spring trip to New Orleans in 1957, perhaps so Anne could attend a furniture auction or two.
In 1959, Charlie — by now a student at his father’s alma mater, the University of Vermont — brought his baby girl to visit her grandparents.
right: Charlie Quatrano, dining room, 1940s.
below
St. Vincent’s Hospital, c. 1940.
That little girl, Annie, remembers the grand old house fondly, a place where she played inside and out, racing up and down the wide oak staircase and hiding in the many closets. Annie Quatrano grew up to become one of Atlanta’s most celebrated chefs, today a key figure in the Southern farm-to-table movement. She still owns most of the furniture her grandmother collected to fill these rooms.
When Dr. Quatrano died in 1962, Charlie had already settled elsewhere with his own growing family, and the old Wells House was more than Anne could manage alone. She explored many possible futures for the building, even applying to tear it down to build a 120-bed convalescent home in its stead. The Bridgeport zoning board refused.
Eventually Anne sold the house and adjacent garden to the University of Bridgeport, a relatively young institution in the midst of rapid expansion thanks to GI Bill funding for veterans returning from the Vietnam War. The university really had its eye on a private house at 239 Park Avenue, smack in the middle of its campus. UB offered its owner the Wells House (893 Clinton Avenue) in a swap.
Dr. Gerhard Coler walking his dog outside the Wells House, c. 1980.
Gerhard Coler: 1967 – 1989
top: Amber, Heather, and Marion Peebles, staircase landing, 1986.
bottom: Amber and Marion Peebles, dining room, 1986.
Gerhard Coler, who owned the park avenue house that UB coveted, was a fascinating man. An ethical humanist in every sense of the term, he left Germany in 1933 on an academic visa. He arrived in Bridgeport in 1945 and taught at BullardHavens Technical High School, where he established the school’s science fair. In 1952, Coler conceived of a tutoring center that would serve both the academic and emotional needs of students who might otherwise simply mark time until they could quit school at 16. Within a few years, he was running the growing center out of his home. His wife, Judith, an experienced social worker, had joined the staff of 30, and the couple occasionally offered rooms to students who had nowhere else to live.
The university’s proposed property trade would give Coler the opportunity to expand his programs. In 1967 he moved his center to Clinton Avenue, making space for students wherever he could. He fitted out the basement with 12 cinder block classrooms, added staircases, and enclosed the side porch to create a separate entrance. He broadened the center’s adult services to include marriage counseling. As the new president of Fairfield County’s Humanist Society, he frequently hosted public meetings beside the tiled fireplace in the north parlor. Participants pondered such questions as “Is Humanism a Modern Religion?” and “Women’s Liberation — Fact or Fiction?”
Coler furnished the house with antiques brought from Europe by his mother, who had bribed her way out of Nazi Germany in 1939 with a handful of diamonds. A Biedermeier settee stood in the parlor, a beautiful tall clock chimed through the halls, and crystal chandeliers lit the rooms. In the early 1980s, widowed and newly diagnosed with a debilitating illness, Coler invited long-time friends Gary and Alice Peebles and their three daughters to join him in the Wells House, where the Peebles family looked after him until his death in 1988.
Geodesic Dome, Parco Sempione, X Triennale, Milan, 1954.
In the 21 years that Gerhard Coler occupied the house, Bridgeport changed dramatically, seeing significant job loss and the flight of middle-class residents to nearby suburbs. While many of Bridgeport’s stately homes had been cut up into boarding houses or commercial offices, the best features of the Wells House remained largely unchanged. Richly figured wallpaper and built-ins with leaded glass still decorated the dining room where Coler shared many lively meals with the Peebles family.
With Coler’s death, 893 Clinton Avenue was for sale once again.
Zane Yost: 1989 – 2003
A protégé of visionary architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, Zane Yost was a forward thinker. He built a geodesic dome based on his mentor’s most famous architectural innovation while only a sophomore at MIT. Later, Fuller charged his student with supervising construction of another dome at the 1954 Milan Triennale.
Yet despite his interest in futuristic design, Yost was a man who appreciated the beauty of the past. He admired the ideas of the early Roman architect Vitruvius, who identified the three essential elements of successful architecture as sound structure, form accommodated to use, and aesthetic appeal. These ideas — embodied in Fuller’s dome — informed Yost’s work both as an architect and planner and as owner of the aging mansion at 893 Clinton Avenue. He adored the stained glass windows on the landing of the central staircase and the ornamental woodwork throughout the house. He bought the property as a
headquarters for his business in 1989, and he entertained family and clients with inimitable and often charming stream-of-consciousness musings on the building’s architectural features and those of its High Georgian and Victorian neighbors.
In the early years of his career, Yost divided his time between designing homes, condominium developments, and country clubs for private clients and rethinking public housing for many New England cities. He strove to create livable, human-scale projects that reflected his commitment to Vitruvian principles. By the time Yost moved his offices into the Wells House, he had established himself as a leader in the affordable housing field and an architect who put principles ahead of profit. Yost loved Bridgeport and saw the Wells House, with its landmark designation, as a symbol of the city’s glorious past that might be used to inspire its future. He felt certain that with sufficient political will the city could build an educated and engaged populace along with a stronger economy, allowing it to regain its stature among New England cities.
Yost had first worked with the city in 1968 on Marionville, an AIA Award-winning low-income condominium development in Bridgeport. Twenty-five years and many projects later, sitting at a drafting table in the south parlor of the Wells House, he envisioned a residential community to replace Bridgeport’s most notorious housing project, Father Panik Village. The old development was razed, but Yost’s new community was never built.
In 2003, after weathering Bridgeport’s rising crime rates and several local and national recessions, Yost was unable to keep up with taxes and maintenance costs. He sold the mansion where he so loved to work to the highest bidder and moved away.
above: Aerial view Bridgeport, 1969.
below: Zane Yost.
Limbo: 2003 – 2013
with yost’s departure, the future of the Wells House grew uncertain. Along with the rest of the country, Bridgeport’s real estate market dropped precipitously beginning in 2007, with the decline continuing for the next four years. Unable to sell 893 Clinton, the new owners gradually stripped away its chandeliers, sconces, and bathroom fixtures — anything that could be sold — renting out every possible room, even the dank cinder block classrooms in the basement. Eventually the bank foreclosed, forcing a short sale. Exterior stucco cracked, plumbing corroded, and the leaky roof sent streams of water through plaster ceilings and walls while shrubs and trees grew to obscure the beautiful façade.
The new era: 2013 – present
When Colorblends took possession of the house in 2013, the team let its instincts guide the renovations. Coler’s classrooms were the first to go. The construction crew pulled more than a thousand cinder blocks and half a dozen mattresses out of the basement. Next the enclosed porches were opened and the bay windows, stained glass, and copper roof restored. The bathrooms and kitchen — long ago stripped of any original architectural elements — were updated to meet today’s needs.
The most recent renovations restored the soaring portico columns and added hardware for hanging artists’ work during the annual spring open house. Many former residents have come to visit, including Dr. Quatrano’s nephews, Bernie and Joe Pellegrino, who used to come for a week every summer to live the high life, playing football in what is now the garden, watching their uncle’s TV, breakfasting at a table set with linen and silver — all this plus a bedroom and bathroom all to themselves.
A garden, an old house, a small business, an artist — what do they all have in common? They are all works in progress, bringing the past into the present, evolving toward a future, changing intentionally yet organically as time and resources allow.
The Wells House today.
Architectural Features
With its wood frame construction, stucco finish, copper roof, and stained glass windows, the Albert S. Wells House remains a glorious example of Colonial Revival architecture more than a century after it was built. It is one of the jewels of the Stratfield Historic District.
A. The two-and-a-halfstory house is crowned with a balustraded widow’s walk.
B. The oak entry doors are centered under a two-story Tuscan portico.
Corresponding pilasters decorate each corner of the house and support the onestory side porches.
C. The south elevation is asymmetrical, with a semihexagonal stair bay at the center.
D. The interior entry vestibule has a mosaic floor.
E. The parlor and dining room fireplaces include tile surrounds and oak mantels.
F. The main hall leads to a great stair with a paneled wall below and colored glass sash at the landing.
G. The dining room features a coffered ceiling, a fireplace, and a colored glass sash.
H. The parlor is entered through a high arch supported by ionic columns.