Brendan Mahoney, Bureaucrat
I grew up in Avon and first started venturing to Hartford when I got my drivers license. I used to hang out on Constitution Plaza because it was futuristic and go to raves at the Municipal (they were all ages). For my senior year of high school, I attended the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts at the Learning Corridor for half of the day. I think it was November of that year when I saw Pierrot Lunaire at Trinity College when Hartford’s crypto-coolness emerged to me.
Cool things are always emerging and disappearing all around you, which requires you to be ever alert and open minded. With just a slight effort, you can be watching scientists set insect traps in the dunes off of Keney Park, partaking in jazz nestled in a café in Frog Hollow or attending an art show on New Year’s Eve in an unimproved store front at the base of a high-rise condominium. These things are continually revealing themselves to me, so the City hasn’t gotten old. Nonetheless, it’s not such a vast place that you’re overwhelmed and paralyzed.
I worked at various Hartford establishments while I went to college and upon graduation moved from my parents’ house to West End. Presently, I live in the South End in one quarter of 19th century Gothic mansion in an apartment with a spiral staircase with two marble mantles (with surprisingly low rent!).
If Hartford were a crayon, it’d be maize.