Main Street Springfield

Springfield Five Cents Savings Bank, Springfield, Mass

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The view looking from Court Square toward the corner of Main and Court Streets, around 1878-1885. Photo courtesy of New York Public Library.

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The scene in 2014:

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The ornate building in the center of the first photo is the Springfield Five Cents Savings Bank, which was built in 1876 at the corner of Main and Court Streets, diagonally across from Court Square.  The building is still there, although the Main Street facade was completely renovated at some point in the past 50 years or so.  However, the Court Street (today Falcons Way) facade is still largely intact, and reveals the fact that this building is not just another nondescript mid-20th century commercial building in the city.

Next to the Five Cents Savings Bank building in the first photo is the 1878 Republican Block, which was the home of the Springfield Republican newspaper.  I don’t know what happened to the building, but it apparently isn’t there anymore, unless it was renovated even more than its neighbor was.

Main Street, Springfield, Mass

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The view looking north on Main Street toward Elm Street and Court Square, around 1865-1875. Photo courtesy of New York Public Library.

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The scene in 2017:

The first photo has to be one of the earliest photographic views that I’ve seen of Main Street in Springfield.  Most of the views of Main Street that I have featured on this blog show a busy urban scene with large commercial buildings.  That wasn’t the case in this photo, which was probably taken right after the end of the Civil War.  There is certainly commercial activity going on in the foreground, in the immediate vicinity of Court Square, but further up Main Street it has not yet been developed to the extent that later photographs show, such as this one taken a block north and about 50 years later.

Many of the commercial buildings in this scene, especially the ones on the far left and far right, show the Federal style architecture that was common for commercial buildings in Springfield during the first half of the 19th century.  Most of these would be demolished by the turn of the century and replaced with larger, more modern buildings, such as the 1889 Chicopee Bank Building on the left-hand side in the 2017 photo.  Today, as far as I can tell, the only surviving examples are Byers Block just around the corner on Elm Street, Guenther & Handel’s Block on Stockbridge Street, and the Gunn and Hubbard Blocks on State Street opposite the Armory.

Almost everything from the first photo is gone today, including several blocks on the right-hand side, where the MassMutual Center was built in the 1970s.  However, there are at least two buildings from the first photo that still exist, in the block visible in the distance just in front of the church steeple.  This block was made up of three buildings, two of which survive today: the former Johnson’s Bookstore building and the Republican Block.  It is also possible that the 1865 Haynes Hotel (seen in this post) appears in the first photo, although from this angle it is hard to tell.

Corner of Main & Hillman Streets, Springfield, Mass

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The southeast corner of Main and Hillman Streets in Springfield, around the 1870s or 1880s. Photo courtesy of the New York Public Library.

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The scene in 2014:

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Nothing from the first photo still exists today; even the street network has changed.  The corner of Main and Hillman technically doesn’t exist anymore – Hillman Street now ends a block away from Main Street, and the rest is now a pedestrian walkway along one side of Center Square.  Further down the street, the church building is on the site of what is now the corner of Main and Harrison – this intersection was moved so that Harrison and present-day Boland Way were directly across from each other on Main Street.

There are a few notable buildings visible in the first photo, including the Third National Bank Building in the foreground.  This ornate building was the home of the bank, but the upper floors were the Evans House hotel, which was described in the 1884 King’s Handbook of Springfield as “the leading family hotel” and a “convenient, pleasant, and home-like hotel.” Today, neither the hotel, nor the bank, nor the building itself still exist, although the site is still used for banking, with TD Bank now occupying the site.

Further down the street in the first photo is First Baptist Church.  The congregation was established in 1811, and met in several different locations around the city before moving to the Main Street site and constructing the church building in 1847.  However, as the downtown area became more developed, property along Main Street became valuable commercial space, and in 1888 the church was sold and replaced by a commercial building, which can be seen in the center of this post, taken facing the opposite direction.

Corner of Main & Bridge Streets, Springfield, Mass

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The northwest corner of Main and Bridge Streets in Springfield, sometime in the early 1880s. Photo courtesy of New York Public Library.

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Main and Bridge in 1938-1939.  Image courtesy of the Springfield Preservation Trust.

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The same location in 2017:

The building in the first photo was the home of W.D. Kinsman’s store, which was described in the 1884 King’s Handbook of Springfield as a “fancy dry-goods and novelties establishment.”  According to the book, Warren D. Kinsman opened the business in 1866 and moved to the location at the corner of Main and Bridge Streets in 1880.  However, the engraving in King’s Handbook shows a building that is five bays wide on the Main Street facade, as opposed to the three which are seen in this photo.  This would seem to suggest a date of around 1880 for the first photo; the building must have been expanded to the right sometime soon after.  The Kinsman building was demolished by the 1930s, and Kresge’s 5 and 10 cent store was built on the site, as seen in the second photo.  Today, Kresge’s is also gone; it was replaced by the former Federal Building, which was renovated in 2009 and is now an office building.

Main Street, Springfield, Mass

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Looking north on Main Street in Springfield, toward Harrison Avenue, around 1910-1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The same location in 2014:

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These photos were taken facing the opposite direction of the ones in this post and this post, with the Haynes Hotel building on the far left and the Johnson’s Bookstore building on the far right.  These are the only two surviving buildings in the photo for several blocks down Main Street; everything on the right-hand side from Johnson’s Bookstore to the Fuller Block (the building in the distance with the onion dome in the first photo) at the corner of Bridge Street has been demolished.

Notice all of the trolleys in the first photo – and the pedestrians who seem to have no problem crossing right in front of them.  Today, there are no trolleys, far fewer pedestrians, and far more cars on this stretch of Main Street.

Forbes & Wallace, Springfield, Mass

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Looking south on Main Street from the corner of Harrison Ave., around 1910. Photo from Views and Facts of Springfield, Mass. (1910).

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The same scene in 2014:

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The Forbes & Wallace department store was established in Springfield in 1874 at the corner of Main and Vernon Streets (today Boland Way), and by the turn of the last century it had become a major shopping destination in downtown Springfield.  At some point after the first photo was taken, the building was demolished and replaced by a much larger department store building, seen in the photo in this article from the Springfield Republican.  However, with increasing competition from suburban shopping malls, the store closed in 1976 and the building was demolished in 1982.  It was replaced by Monarch Place, which was completed in 1987 and is the tallest building in the city.

The original Forbes & Wallace building may be long gone, but its neighbor to the south, the Haynes Hotel, survives to this day.  The hotel was built in 1865, and for many years was one of the city’s premier hotels.  It was used as a hotel until 1943, when it was converted into commercial and office spaces.  Today, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places, and although it is now surrounded by tall, modern skyscrapers, it still looks much the same as it did when it was completed 150 years ago.