Biography|Karen S. Lynch — Aetna's First Woman President Was Named in This Building

Aetna's headquarters at 151 Farmington Avenue has stood on Hartford's Asylum Hill since 1931.

James Gamble Rogers designed the Colonial Revival block with its temple roof and cupola.

At completion it was called the largest Colonial Revival office building in the world.

Karen Lynch arrived here in July 2012 as executive vice president and head of specialty products.

Three months later the company handed her the integration of Coventry Health Care, a deal then described as the largest health-care acquisition in years.

Aetna's own 10-K later fixed the next date with no romance: she became president on 1 January 2015.

She was the first woman to hold that title in a company whose Hartford life ran back to 1853.

Mark Bertolini remained chairman and chief executive.

She kept the president's office through the $69 billion combination with CVS Health, completed in November 2018.

CVS agreed, as a condition of the deal, to keep Aetna's headquarters in Hartford for at least a decade.

The building is still there.

The 1972 modernist addition sits beside Rogers's original block.

From this campus she ran the insurance company that would make her the internal candidate for the parent job.

The title change in 2015 is the turning point.

Until then she had been a strong operator.

After 1 January 2015 she was the public face of Aetna under Bertolini, and the person CVS would later tap when Larry Merlo prepared to retire.

Hartford's tax rolls still treat the Farmington Avenue campus as a civic fact.

The golden cupola is the thing you can see from the street.

Photo: Tichnor Brothers postcard of the Farmington Avenue home office, public domain, Boston Public Library collection, via Wikimedia Commons