Barber's colonnade (inspired, he wrote, by famous Parisian examples such as La Madeleine, the Panthéon, and the Palais Bourbon), made a suitable termination to the urban vista, now obscured by the trees on Burr Mall.

That church, while built only twelve years before and acclaimed as one of Stanford White's finest works,[3] was being displaced by an expansion of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

It proved necessary to replace the original Corinthian capitals with Ionic and to add a plinth to each column base to provide the desired height for the number of stories of the new building.

[8] The building had been in disuse for more than a decade and was the subject of various redevelopment proposals, including as an expansion of the Wadsworth Atheneum[9] and as a home for the Thomas Hooker Brewing Company.

[10] In 2017, the site was rebuilt and expanded to provide a new home for a downtown campus for the University of Connecticut designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects.