Market Street Historic District

Market Street in Potsdam, New York, preserves the village's entire surviving nineteenth-century commercial core: twenty-seven buildings along two blocks of Market Street and one block of Raymond Street, built between 1820 and 1900. Two to four stories high, they are mostly sandstone or brick in reddish tones, giving the streetscape a uniform scale and color. Federal, Italianate, Romanesque Revival and Classical Revival styles are all represented. Early shops used Potsdam sandstone laid in the slab-and-bind manner, and later blocks such as the Cox Block of 1888 show elaborate Romanesque detailing. Many were built by local merchant-developers, including Martin Van Buren Ives. Fires in 1890 and 1896 destroyed older buildings and prompted new construction, and fires in the 1940s removed some upper floors and cornices. Potsdam grew from 1806 on its river water power, railroad connections and later its teachers college. The district was listed because it records that commercial and architectural history so coherently, despite one modern one-story intrusion.