herr2ck: Aurora Trip, pt. 3

June 2025.

Aurora’s Broadway Historic District is one of the city’s newest, having been listed on the National Register in 2023. However, I couldn’t find a PDF of the write-up anywhere online, so this post is largely gonna be my comments on each building with a mild sprinkling of whatever history I was able to find. I did stick to the boundaries pretty well--its north and south borders are New York Street and Benton Street, which are pretty much where I began and ended anyways. I’ll start on the south edge like usual, at Benton Street, and proceed northward to Galena Boulevard. I had to truncate it halfway for length reasons, and the next post picks up where I left off.

Flatiron Building [missed]

(Google Maps)

Aurora has a Flatiron Building, too…I documented the one on the eastern side of the tracks by Downer Place, but I didn’t see this one’s oddness in plan, as I didn’t proceed any farther south than 62 South Broadway. This is a very bare building, possibly altered, but it does retain its original storefronts and stone sign.

Aurora Opera House/Strand Theater [demolished] + PNC Bank [missed]

The Opera House. That building next door is great too! (City of Aurora on Facebook)

While researching the Coulter Opera House, I searched “opera house” in quotes to try and dig up more information, but all the sources were talking about this building instead. This is the Aurora Opera House, designed in a fancy interpretation of Renaissance Revival with an elaborate balcony. It opened in 1891 and could seat 1,202 patrons. It was sold to Jules J. Ruben and Associates by 1915 and was renamed the Strand Theater. Unfortunately, the building met an early end, and it burnt down in 1929 due to a spark from ongoing renovations that struck a gas tank.

(Google Maps)

The site later became a gas station. Much of this block was demolished by the mid-century era and replaced by what was the PNC Bank until recently. Admittedly, this is a decent Modernist building, and looking back I regret not taking photos of it.

Marshall Hotel [demolished]

Looking north on Broadway. (discoveringaurora on Instagram)

The only thing I could find about this hotel was this picture, so it must have been demolished not long after its construction. It was a simple Chicago School/Commercial style hotel. The lot remains empty today.

62 South Broadway

1936 photo of the east side of Broadway. Ward & Jones is second from right. The building immediately south of Sears was called the Cooper Building and seems to be very elaborate, but I couldn’t find anything about it. (discoveringaurora on Instagram)

This is an interesting building compositionally. It has a flat buff brick facade, but the fenestration is emphasized by a protruding course of terra-cotta. Along with the rosette above, these features decorate the building. It is currently vacant, but Aurora recently voted to convert the building into apartments.

The building next door at 60 was boring, but some ancient cast-iron column from the demolished Cooper Building remains in the party wall:

59 South Broadway

This interesting Gothic Revival commercial building abstracts the style but incorporates telltale ornamental features. The piers and pilasters add vertical emphasis. The quatrefoil motif along the roofline is a giveaway of Gothic influence, as well as the balustrade thingy (I’m sure there’s some term for it that I don’t know) beneath the windows:

The metal sash windows are probably original, but they’re rusting away today.

57 South Broadway

This building is a really great example of what Victorian architecture could achieve even at smaller scales. It is very simple compositionally, only having a standard storefront and three bays above, but many choices across the design ennoble it. Most prominent is the turret on the north side. It may have sported a conical roof originally, but the flat cornice also makes sense, and if anything works better. The result is a touch of asymmetricality within the facade and in plan, but the building remains unified.

I’m unsure if the building was originally purple, but it contrasts excellently with the molded lintels (which have been painted a shade of gold). When it was built, the limestone sills would have achieved a similar effect against the red or purple masonry.

I also really like the cornice. Fancy carved ornament is great, but there’s something special about these smaller-scale designs that work with common materials such as brick to achieve the same textural effect. Here, a special rounded brick is used for dentils, and a checkerboard pattern forms the bulk of the remainder. I’m guessing this cornice remained because it was built into the walls and thus was prohibitive to remove when it went out of fashion.

Sears, Roebuck, & Co. [demolished]

Historic photo of the demolished Sears store (right), as well as the Coulter Opera House (second from right), some long-demolished Victorians in between, and the Aurora National Bank (tall building at middle left). (City of Aurora on Facebook)

Chicago’s famous Sears, Roebuck, & Co. used to have a store in downtown Aurora, since demolished. The only concrete information I have is this above picture and the city’s brief blurb that it used to operate here. Another source has more, but it is a blog like mine that doesn’t cite its sources:

Aurora’s first Sears opened in 1928 on River Street, but it moved into this building on the corner of Downer Place and Broadway between 1935 and 1936. The structure clearly dates to an earlier period, as it has Queen Anne-esque bay windows and Romanesque Revival vaulting and bundled engaged columns.

The store as it appeared in the 1940s. (tracyduran.com)

By the 1940s, their building was altered, receiving new storefronts and losing its bay windows. Sears moved to the Northgate Mall in the 1960s (which coincided with the decline of the traditional “Main Street”), and the building was probably demolished soon afterwards. It is a parking lot today.

Coulter Opera House/Merchants National Bank

This richly detailed Italianate building was built in 1874 by John Coulter to hold his opera house. It occupied the third and fourth floors starting that year, though it closed soon after in 1890. The main floor’s seats were designed to be removable so it could be used as an event venue, but the more permanent and fancy seats were in the gallery behind.

The building was later occupied by the Merchants’ National Bank, but the only stuff I found online while searching was unrelated. It is currently occupied by Fifth Third Bank on the first floor and affordable housing above.

This Neoclassical-ish first floor is almost certainly an alteration, and an early one at that. Italianate buildings used similar classical precedents, but they would not employ such a visually heavy base. Additionally, it is built of nicer stone masonry, as opposed to the brick seen elsewhere on the building.

The masonry has been painted a lovely shade of beige, which makes the facade appear much flatter than it actually is. However, the segmentally arched lower and fully arched upper windows retain their hood molds. A slight denticulated cornice crowns the building, with a short parapet above.

Based on the base’s extension to this portion, my guess is that the original building was expanded around the turn of the 20th century, and the addition later received this PoMo facadectomy.

Detail of the coffered arch surrounding the doors:

Ornament above the windows:

15 South Broadway

This very elaborate Renaissance Revival building features heavy ornamentation for its small scale. A filigreed pilaster rises the height between each bay on the second floor, and the center of the cornice has three panels with similar motifs:

These inset panels have floral motifs, swags, and a large shield in the central one. The parapet is accented by an egg-and-dart pattern. Below, the string course is denticulated, and the storefronts feature other decorative borders:

13 South Broadway

A less ornamented Chicago School design, 13 South Broadway has a terra-cotta facade and large Chicago windows. A small cornice crowns the top of the building, but beyond that the lone ornamental feature is these lions, which may have held a canopy like the Stanley Furniture Store:

Aurora National Bank Building/APS Tower

The only historic photos I could find of this building--some rando’s originals of the construction progress. (eBay)

The Aurora National Bank Building was built in 1926 by architect Frank B. Gray in the Beaux-Arts style. Its original design featured a massive vaulted portal as well as commercial space in the two-story wings surrounding the main shaft. I really like the way it appeared after it was built, though later alterations have stripped the building of most of its character.

A matchbook c. 1960s depicting the building’s condition at that time. (eBay)

By the 1960s, the main entrance had been covered by similar limestone panels, but the remainder of the building was intact. A later addition from either that decade or the one following fully obscured the rest of the base. Today, the only intact portion is the main shaft.

Aurora National Bank seems to have gone defunct since, and the building is currently occupied by Old National Bank on the ground floor. I think the office floors are vacant, as the city recently approved plans to remodel this building, too.

The adjacent buildings were either already gone or demolished for the expansion of the base here. This has the effect of making the original tower look like some bastard Lever House. The main shaft:

Detail of the carved ornament:

These originally surrounded the central portal, but now they make less sense contextually. It’s really obvious where the entrance was patched, as the limestone neither matches the bond nor shade of the original. Luckily, the cornice remains wonderfully intact:

The north facade--I think the vaulted clerestory windows might be there still, but it was difficult to get a good view:

German-American Bank

A George Elmslie design, as indicated by the Prairie School design and Sullivanesque ornamentation, the German-American Bank was completed in 1923. The bank itself had existed on the site since the 1890s, in an older Italianate building called the H. H. Evans Block, but it was completely demolished apart from its basement for the construction of the existing building.

The bank had changed its name to the “American National Bank” after anti-German sentiment during World War I, but most sources refer to it as its old name, despite the fact that this building was constructed afterwards. The American National Bank failed during the Great Depression.

In 1931, the ground floor’s facade was altered to a more generic design for retail use. The building housed Walgreens for many years after the bank departed. It originally had more terra-cotta ornament, as well as stained-glass windows.

Walgreens departed before 2007, and the city of Aurora used the building as offices for a time, but their signage has since been removed. The bank building is either sparingly used or vacant today.

I think this is the most successful of Elmslie’s bank buildings. It is more sculptural and three-dimensional in its expression, and it appears quite similar to some of Sullivan’s banks, such as the Peoples Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Its rich ornamentation highlights the building’s articulation.