Watertown Public Square
— — the bricks the river city laid down first.
Not only on a wall.
“The five-sided plaza at the heart of Watertown, where Court, Arsenal, Washington, Public, and Stone streets all run in. Carriage routes once met here. The Paddock Arcade still stands a block off, one of the oldest covered shopping arcades in the country. The square keeps its shape through every century that tries to round it off. from the studio
Watertown Public Square, 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.
Public Square is the civic center of Watertown, a city of about 25,000 in Jefferson County, New York, twenty-five miles south of the Thousand Islands and the Canadian border. The Black River runs a few blocks north. The square is a five-way intersection rather than a true square, dating to the city's 1800 layout by Hart Massey and Henry Coffeen. Several historic structures sit within a short walk, including the 1850 Paddock Arcade on Washington Street and the 1904 Flower Memorial Library on Washington Street.
The brick and limestone buildings around the square mark the prosperity Watertown drew from the Black River's industrial fall, which drops more than 100 feet through the city. The Paddock Arcade, built in 1850 by Loveland Paddock, is one of the oldest surviving enclosed shopping arcades in the United States, with a glass roof original to its construction. The Flower Memorial Library, completed in 1904 by John Mead Howells, anchors the square's south face in Indiana limestone.
The square is open to walk in every season. Concerts and farmers markets gather here on summer Wednesdays through the Downtown Watertown business association. Winter brings heavy lake-effect snow off Lake Ontario; Watertown averages more than 100 inches a year, and the square is often the first plowed surface in the North Country. The Roswell P. Flower statue at the center, sculpted by the Augustus Saint-Gaudens studio in 1902, honors the former governor and Watertown native.