University Wins Connecticut Main Street Awards

The University of Hartford and its partners were presented with three excellence awards at the Connecticut Main Street Center’s 2005 Annual Meeting & Awards Presentation last month in Waterbury.

Upper Albany Main Street and the university received the “Best Preservation Success Story” Award for the “Now & Then: Albany Avenue” photo exhibition. Christine Dalenta, a faculty member at the Hartford Art School who oversaw the work of the student photographers, accepted the award. The exhibit matches historical photos of Albany Avenue businesses, houses of worship and parks from the early 1900s with photographs of the enterprises at those locations today.

Margery Steinberg, associate professor of marketing at the Barney School of Business, accepted the “Best Private Sector Partnership” Award for her students’ work with the Simsbury Main Street Partnership on the Simsbury Downtown Retail Marketing Project. Entrepreneurship students at the Barney School worked with Simsbury merchants to help them analyze their marketing efforts and enhance those efforts to deal with the opening of a major new retail development in neighboring Canton.

Upper Albany Main Street and the Hartford Courant received the award for “Best Image Enhancement Campaign” for “Uptown,” an eight-page insert that described all of the new activity and investment going on in Upper Albany and was published in the summer of 2004, and “Avenue of Opportunity,” a series of editorial commentaries that described the promise of Albany Avenue.

In addition, Pipat Pinyawat, who recently graduated from the Barney School, was recognized for his work. Pinyawat was a member of the Students in Free Enterprise team that won a regional competition for its Micro Business Incubator program and worked with Main Street members in Upper Albany, Rockville and Simsbury.