East Fourth Street Historic District

Three narrow, five-story brick commercial buildings stand together on the south side of East Fourth Street in downtown Cincinnati, at 123, 127 and 135-37. Built around 1860 as plain four-story Italianate structures, they later gained Mansard attic stories and other updates, so each now reflects a different phase of commercial style, including Second Empire, Commercial and Second Renaissance Revival features. Their matching scale, massing, materials and unified first-floor storefronts make them read as a cohesive group. They are among the few small-scale commercial buildings left from the era before 1900 to 1913, when bank and office towers remade the street into the city's financial center. The middle building was home to the John Holland Gold Pen Company from about 1860 to 1981, a maker of fine fountain pens sold worldwide. The Pounsford Stationery Company occupied 135-37 from 1876 to 1928. Rehabilitation work was restoring or sympathetically recreating the storefronts and cornices.