There’s a sort of “second downtown” in Dubuque, up north away from the other downtown south of 10th Street. This northern downtown doesn’t have as much rehabbing (but it does have some, such as the beautiful row above), but it does lay claim to having Dubuque’s lovely City Hall, which you can see below.
I guess it would best be described as Greek Revival, but that’s not a perfect description? The cupola on the top is Colonial Revival, sort of. It is a replacement, rebuilt in 1990.
Heading north on Central Avenue, there are a wide variety of beautiful buildings.
There’s a bank building, in the traditional Beaux-Arts style you see around 1900.
But there’s a certain grittiness to many of the buildings; they look like they received a “freshening up” back in the 1960s, back when the mills and factories began to close, and then time stopped, so to speak.
But the are still plenty of interesting buildings, nonetheless, and many murals, which I see throughout Dubuque.
I like buildings such as the one below; openly idiosyncratic and unbalanced.
City Hall is Italianate. The arches between the pilasters and the brackets under the eaves are the signs of that. I would call the cupola Neoclassical; it is a bit to fussy for Colonial Revival, but there is a fine line between early Twentieth Century styles.
This series on Dubuque’s architectural heritage has been a good one.