Northampton Downtown Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Market Street, at the northeastern edge of downtown Northampton, Massachusetts, holds thirteen commercial and warehouse buildings built between 1886 and 1915, along with one house from about 1700. Most are brick and one to three stories tall, set along a twenty-foot-wide street beside a railroad bed raised about fifteen feet in 1896. Warehouses are plain, with double loading doors, while buildings on the east side have zinc and wood cornices and brownstone window surrounds. The area began as housing, then became a wholesale district after the Connecticut River Railroad reached Northampton in 1845. A flour and grist mill complex burned in 1894, and the vacant land was subdivided in 1900 and rebuilt with warehouses and a cold storage plant. By 1915 the street was fully built. It is described as the only intact warehouse and wholesale area in the city, and it was added to the downtown historic district for that reason.