LITCHFIELD – During a tour Friday, court reporter Robin Mitchell couldn’t help but stare at the high ceilings in the second-floor main courtroom of the county courthouse, now redeveloped as the Abner Hotel.
The guest list was limited to those who work or do business here, including judges.
“I was looking for cracks, peeling paint, creaking floors,” Mitchell says. Gone are the days. Attorney Stephanie Weaver noticed that after a three-year, $15 million renovation from basement to rooftop, while original elements of the 136-year-old granite building remained intact, little of its original fabric remained. The steep, black granite staircase leading up from what was once the main entrance, now closed, remains unchanged.
“When he put his shoes down they got caught in the bottoms and the officer was looking up not knowing how to get them,” Weaver recalled.
The former office of Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Stearns, who worked there for 29 years, is now a bedroom on the first floor, and retired Judge John Pickard peered around the corner into another of the 20 bedrooms where jurors once deliberated.
Retired Administrative Judge Ann C. Dranginis, whose desk once sat in a high-rise office in the rear corner, recalls a west-facing window overlooking Lake Bantam. Though an elevator now blocks the view, the original wood cabinetry remains and an artificial flame flickers in one of the original marble fireplaces.
“This is a great reuse of a building that will be used by the community for years to come,” said Dranginis, a longtime local elected official who returned to private law practice.
She said there would have been no way for the town to reuse the unique space and bring it into compliance, and either way, the place she’d known for nearly half a century was falling apart.
A few steps from where the judge’s bench once stood, in a hallway where judges once passed prisoners, a bottle of Campari is reflected in the bar’s mirror. A vintage German-made 1930s oil burner, long since vanished from the basement, bears the scar of a erased swastika; it hummed near the chain-link fence known as the holding cell where prisoners were held. No one knows yet whether a pesky ghost named Harris, known for shuffling papers, still haunts it.
At an open-air rooftop bar called “The Verdict,” Stearns recalled the maze of vents and old air conditioning units, where he would sometimes help maintenance staff troubleshoot leaks and heating and air conditioning problems.
The Abner Hotel opened to paying guests and diners on Thursday. The building’s owner, Lexington Partners of Hartford, has contracted with Salt Hotel Group to manage the property. Blending the iconic old granite with the brick addition was a tricky project, but the benefit of preservation is an authenticity and soul that can’t be manufactured. As with any historic project, sometimes the reconstruction seems easy. For example, old windows were held open by weights that had to be rebuilt around the crumbling framework, CEO David Bowd said.
Boud wasn’t sure if he could save the old windows, but excellent craftsmanship made it possible.
It was easy to doubt the building’s potential, Boud said, but walking down West Street three years ago in December, it was impossible not to see the building and its Norman Rockwell-esque magic of downtown America.
“It was snowing,” he says, “and that’s when we knew we had to do this.”