File:Pinckney Street, Madison, WI (52733892136).jpg

Built in the 19th Century and early 20th Century, these buildings are all clad in masonry, and are examples of the Classical Revival, Richardsonian Romanesque Revival, and Italianate styles.

On the left, built in 1924, this Classical Revival-style hotel was designed by Harold C. Balch and Henry Lippert Grover of Balch and Grover, and was built for Charles Piper to house the Belmont Hotel, replacing a previous building on the site, and the previous Belmont Hotel that was located across Mifflin Street. When it was constructed, the Belmont was the tallest building along Capitol Square, which generated controversy, leading to the implementation of height limits to limit the ability of future private development to obscure the adjacent Wisconsin State Capitol. The hotel offered 200 moderately-priced rooms and operated until 1968, when the building was purchased by the Madison YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) and turned into their downtown facility, with a twelfth floor clad in standing team metal panels added to the building’s roof, housing a swimming pool, and the interior was reconfigured for the YWCA’s needs. The building features a limestone-clad base two stories in height with fluted doric pilasters, windows and doors on the first floor with arched transoms, a main entrance on the Mifflin Street side of the building with a large arched transom and decorative metal canopy suspended over the sidewalk, a cornice at the top of the first floor, and a band of belt coursing running around the top of the limestone cladding at the first floor. Above the second floor or mezzanine level, the building is clad in red brick, with stone trim framing the windows on the ends and in the center, with replacement windows featuring stone sills on the third floor through the tenth floor. At the top of the tenth floor is a cornice that sits below the sill line of the eleventh floor windows, with the eleventh floor featuring paired fluted doric columns at the cones and a cornice at the top of the floor, which was the building’s original roofline, though a tapered twelfth floor, added in 1968, sits above the original parapet, and is clad in standing seam metal with a low-slope hipped roof. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, owing to its architectural significance. It continues to house the YWCA of Greater Madison, and contains gymnasium facilities, offices, and supportive housing for women in need.

In the middle, built in 1897, this Richardsonian Romanesque Revival-style building was constructed for Lydia Winterbotham. The building features a rusticated sandstone facade with a large contemporary first floor shopfront flanked by formstone cladding from when the building was modified in the mid-20th Century, central tripartite windows on the second and third floors with a paneled spandrel between them and above the third floor window, flanked by smaller windows, blind arches above the third floor windows, checkerboard stone motif alternating between squares of rusticated and smooth-faced stone blocks on the parapet, engaged columns on the stepped parapet, and a low slope roof to the rear. The building is an excellent example of great the small-scale commercial architecture that can be found in Downtown Madison.