The housing stock in Hartford has examples of both towers and turrets. People seem to use the term “turret” to describe small rooms that stick up from the rest of the building and have their own roof. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong. I’ll admit to sometimes getting it wrong before I looked up the definitions.
Most of the time people are talking about an architectural feature that should be called a “tower,” since they are far more common. The difference between the two is in their base – how they connect to the building. Towers go all the way to the ground, and have their own foundation. Turrets emerge from the building part way up, hanging over empty space below. Turrets are less common, but there are some examples in the area.
The other day I was in the Asylum Hill neighborhood and saw three homes with towers on the same street. Two were round with conical caps on the top, while the third looks to have 7 sides (odd, I’ll have to go back and confirm).
Here is a picture of a turret in the West End neighborhood. In this case the feature begins on the second floor of the home, but still extends upwards beyond the roofline.
Towers are usually used to lock people in while Turrets are for archers to shoot at people…