Railroad Terminal Historic District

Several blocks north of downtown Binghamton, a cluster of brick buildings records the city's years as a railroad hub. The district holds 19 contributing buildings put up between 1876 and 1910, plus a 1932 addition, arranged around the rail yards that cross Chenango Street. They include the 1901 Lackawanna passenger station with its Italian Renaissance campanile, freight houses for the Erie and the Delaware and Hudson, the six-story Kilmer Building of 1903, the 1910 Newell and Truesdall grocery warehouse, and rows of Victorian warehouses and commercial blocks with corbelled cornices and cast-iron storefronts. Four railroads, the Erie, the Syracuse Binghamton and New York, the Delaware and Hudson, and the Lackawanna, built stations and freight houses close together here. The district matters as the commercial and industrial center of that rail era and as an unusually intact group of buildings. Passenger service has ended and most commercial freight moved to trucks, leaving the railroad buildings vacant or used for storage.