L.H. Hamel Leather Company Historic District

This group of early 20th-century factory buildings sits at the western edge of downtown Haverhill, Massachusetts, between Essex, Locke, Duncan and Winter Streets and the old railroad corridor. Built between about 1886 and 1929, it includes five eight-story buildings, a seven-story building, a late 19th-century warehouse, and a 1920s power plant with a smokestack painted with the L. H. Hamel Leather Co. name. The large buildings show a change in industrial design during the 1910s. Some, such as the Pentucket Associates and Essex Associates Buildings, are brick Classical Revival blocks. Others, including the Burgess, Lang and Tilton Buildings, are Moderne structures of reinforced concrete with minimal ornament. The Shoe and Leather Associates Building of 1918 uses curtain-wall construction. The complex is one of the largest intact tracts of historic industrial buildings in Haverhill, a city whose economy depended heavily on shoe manufacturing in the early 20th century. Much of the surrounding area lost its older buildings to demolition in the late 20th century.