Nashua Main Street downtown
— — a brick mile that kept its shopfronts.
Not only on a wall.
“About a mile of brick storefronts running north from the river, in a mill city of just over 91,000 people on the Massachusetts line. Nashua's Main Street still holds the Hunt Memorial Building from 1903, City Hall, the Indian Head Plaza clock, and a long line of street-level windows that lived through the textile years and the slow rebuild after them. Money magazine called Nashua the best small city in America in 1987 and again in 1997, twice. — from the studio
Nashua Main Street downtown, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Nashua sits at the confluence of the Nashua and Merrimack Rivers in Hillsborough County, the second-largest city in New Hampshire with a population of about 91,300 as of the 2020 census. Main Street runs roughly a mile north from the Nashua River through the downtown commercial district. The corridor includes Nashua City Hall, the Hunt Memorial Building of 1903 designed by Ralph Adams Cram, and the Nashua Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. The city grew on Merrimack-powered textile mills founded in the 1820s.
The downtown is a brick city. Most Main Street buildings are two to four stories of red Hillsborough County brick, with granite sills, cast-iron storefronts, and a few Romanesque arches at the corners. The Hunt Memorial Building, a 1903 Beaux-Arts library donated by John M. Hunt, anchors the south end with carved granite trim. City Hall further north is a 1939 Colonial Revival in red brick with a white cupola. The Greeley Building and the Odd Fellows Block carry the nineteenth-century commercial line.
Main Street holds the city's calendar. The Nashua Holiday Stroll takes over the corridor on the Saturday after Thanksgiving with the City Hall tree lighting and the Plaza skating rink. The Winter Holiday Stroll, the Multicultural Festival in September, and the ArtWalk weekends in spring close traffic and put performers, food trucks, and craft stalls in the street. Money magazine named Nashua the best place to live in America in 1987 and again in 1997, the only city to win the ranking twice.