We'll begin with The Arcade Building (what most of us remember as the Boston Store) and the Oneida National Bank building, then known as the Munson Building.
Bleecker Street runs across bottom of this view.
Above: Marching Clubs were popular in the 1880's and 90's and Utica had a number of them. Each year the clubs formed a parade through downtown. Some represented the various trade groups. In this photo they are marching North past Franklin Square just below the Busy Corner. That's the Devereux Building breaking frame right, a triangle shaped building that formed the point of Franklin Square.
The Fraser Store was what most of us
remember as Woolworth's in the 1950s.
Below is a drawing of the Fraser Buildng Fire. The building on the right is the familiar structure on the "southwest" Busy Corner before the Utica Trust & Deposit, then the Rexall, etc. The artist appears to have been sitting in the window of the pool hall that had been on the second floor of a building on Lafayette Street.over a century. He seems to have gotten the facade of the Fraser wrong.
 | ||
| Syracuse-Utica electric Trolley passing Franklin Square |
 | ||||
| The Utica Trust and Deposit was on Genesee and Layfayette and was razed in 1938. Many of the earliest Busy Corner photos show a different white building with a mansard roof that may have been a hotel. (See photo third from top of this post, above.) That older building is also in a photo with an early automobile parked outside, so if it was shot between 1910 and 1920, the Utica Trust building above wasn't up for very long. Possibly less than 20 years. |
