North High Street Historic District

North High Street in Holyoke, Massachusetts, is a two-block commercial corridor of 37 buildings, most of them brick, lying between Dwight and Lyman Streets. Once known as "the Hill," it grew as one of the city's two major business centers during the mid-nineteenth century. The oldest surviving building is the Gallaudet Block, built around 1847. Most of the rest went up in the 1860s and 1870s, many for local businessmen such as Roswell P. Crafts and John Fuller. Earlier buildings are plain, with corbelled brick cornices, while post-Civil War blocks add round-arched windows, stone and iron trim, and elaborate cornices in the Italianate manner. Later additions include the six-story Ball Block of 1898 and a Jacobethan Revival building from about 1925. Storefronts have often been altered, but upper floors are largely intact. The district was listed because it is the largest and most coherent group of nineteenth-century commercial buildings left in Holyoke.