Hanover Square Historic District

Hanover Square is the commercial heart of Horseheads, a village in New York's Southern Tier near Elmira and Corning. The historic district contains 21 buildings, eighteen of them Romanesque Revival brick rows raised in the two decades after an August 1862 fire leveled the square. Most are two or three stories, with shops at street level and offices, apartments or storage above, topped by corbelled brick cornices. Three buildings differ in style: the Second Empire Ryant House, a former hotel, a Colonial Revival former Southern Oil Company office of 1929, and the Classical Revival Marine Midland Bank of 1927. The square grew with the Chemung feeder canal, which opened between 1829 and 1832 and closed in 1877, and it later served as a political and social gathering place. Cartoonist Eugene Zimmerman kept an office here. Although many storefronts have been altered, the upper stories preserve the look of a nineteenth-century small-town business center.