Water Street Commercial Buildings

Two blocks along the north side of Water Street in Sandusky, Ohio, hold fifteen commercial buildings put up between 1855 and 1890. They are built of brick, limestone, granite and stuccoed stone, in Romanesque Revival, Renaissance Revival, High Victorian Italianate and Second Empire styles. Features include bracketed or corbeled cornices, hooded round-arched windows and cast-iron ground-floor piers. Fronts are ornamented, while the rear elevations facing the old waterfront are plain rubble stone and brick. Water Street was the city's original mercantile center, and the buildings housed produce merchants, dry goods dealers, tailors, hardware and grocery stores, and express companies. Sandusky was a busy lake port served by three railroads, and local limestone made for sturdy construction. Fisher's Hall, built in 1867, hosted musical and dramatic events for fifty years, and the Cosmopolitan Art and Literary Association had galleries in Hubbard's Granite Block. The blocks across the street have mostly been cleared for parking, leaving these two as the surviving remnant of the lakefront commercial district.