Hanover Square Historic District

Hanover Square Historic District is a group of seventeen commercial buildings arranged around a small triangular park in downtown Syracuse, New York. The square formed where the street grid met the diagonal Genesee Turnpike, and the nearby Erie Canal helped drive early commerce here. After a fire in 1834, a row of narrow brick Federal style buildings known as the Phoenix Buildings replaced the burned structures along the canal side, and the Franklin Buildings followed along Genesee Street. Later additions include Second Empire office buildings by Horatio White, the 1894 Gere Bank with Sullivan-style fenestration, two neo-classical banks of 1896, and the 1927 Art Deco State Tower Building, the city's tallest. Fifteen buildings date from the 19th century, with no vacant sites or intrusions, and brick and stone give a consistent scale and texture. The district was listed as a remarkably intact record of Syracuse's downtown business past.