Bishop, William D., Cottage Development Historic District

The William D. Bishop Cottage Development National Register District consists primarily of one of Bridgeport's first extensive tract developments a community planned especially to provide an innovative housing scheme for lower-income workers. It can be said almost with certainty to be an important work of the Palliser Brothers, a Bridgeport architectural firm until 1882 which was instrumental in elevating the style of workingmen's architecture to a level equal to the mainstream of late-Victorian taste.

William Darius Bishop was an important figure in the developmental history of Bridgeport. He was the son of Alfred E. Bishop, builder of the Morris Canal across New Jersey as well as the Housatonic Railroad between Bridgeport and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. William was a one-time Congressman from Fairfield County, served as president of both the Naugatuck and the New York and New Haven Railroads, and was actively interested in the acquisition and subdivision of real estate. His South End holdings were in an area considered at the time to be ideal for low-income housing--in close proximity to both factories and Seaside Park, which provided opportunities for recreation for those unable to afford carriages to escape the city, yet in an area where land prices were still relatively inexpensive.

The architectural partnership of George and Charles Palliser was probably of more wide-ranging importance than any other such firm in the city's history. Their national clientele is evidenced by examples used in their numerous pattern books from across the United States. Apparently buoyed by the success of their first development for P.T. Barnum and David W. Sherwood in the mid-1870s, they became involved with various other members of the city's commercial and industrial elite in the erection of workers' housing. A cottage village very similar to Bishop's, for example, was built along Bassick Avenue in the West End for retired gold miner Edmund C. Bassiek in 1882-4. It included a similar number of cottages, several l-family frame tenements, and a block of brick row houses.

The probable Palliser row houses at 256-70 road Street are important as an element of an apparent major effort by the firm to acquaint Bridge port with this type of urban architecture. Up to this time, the city's dwellings outside the fire zone were almost entirely of wood-frame, detached construction. Between 1880 and 1884 the Pallisers were responsible for a large number of these brick blocks in many sections of the city, usually built as an income property for wealthy citizens who resided elsewhere. At least a dozen of these survive. Apparently, these blocks did not find favor in Bridgeport, and only a handful was constructed between the time of the Pallisers' departure and the beginning of the World War I housing boon. In fact, the original design concept for the Bishop Development as outlined in the Bridgeport Standard of 12 November 1880 called for "four or five" blocks of row housing with only 12 cottages--the popularity of the cottages would seem to have been the reason for the alteration in plans.

Originally the cottages were named after tree species ("Elm Cottage", "Oak Cottage" etc.) rather than numbered, with signs over their entrances. The Bridgeport Standard of 22 May 1882 commented "The idea is a very pretty one, and useful as well, as it enables a stranger to distinguish one from the other, a very important consideration when it is remembered that the cottages are almost exactly alike in outward appearance".

The original occupants of the Bishop Development were the German, Irish and rural New England workers who made up the bulk of the city's labor force at the time. A listing of Cottage place residents gleaned from the Bridgeport City Directory of 1882 reveals that this development was the home in the 1880s of the noted inventor Charles F. Ritchel Ritchel, a friend of Thomas Edison and an associate of P.T. Barnum, who invented and flew the powered flying machine in 1878, and was also responsible for the invention of such diverse objects as the roller skate, magnetic can opener, and convex amusement park mirror.

The Bishop Development was an early precursor of a concept that was to bring Bridgeport housing to national prominence in later years-- that of the insular workers' village, an enclave of innovatively-designed, often identical housing units for the lower-income populace usually situated in the midst of an otherwise-unplanned urban sprawl. Preceded only by the Barnum-Sherwood Development, this idea was to be further developed at Bassickville (1882-4) and Armstrong Place (located in the East Bridgeport National Register District-- 1881-6) and reached its culmination in terms of worldwide recognition in the developments of the Remington Arms Company (19.15-16) and the Bridgeport Housing Company (1917-18).