It is a roughly rectangular area centered on West Main Street and Waterbury Green, the remnant of the original town commons, which has been called "one of the most attractive downtown parks in New England.

To the south Interstate 84 crosses the city and valley on an elevated viaduct, affording a panoramic view of the skyline to eastbound traffic on the upper level.

Industrialization began in the early 1820s, with makers of carriages, buttons and clocks attracted to the water power offered by the many streams draining into the Naugatuck in the area, the feature which had given the town its name.

[1] On Independence Day in 1825, the townspeople gathered to blast some stubborn boulders from the swampy, neglected two-acre (8,000 m2) remnant of the town common around which many of the original settlers had built their homes.

The dearth, in a region where many communities have 18th- and sometimes 17th-century buildings extant, is such that the local historical society has printed a brochure explaining the lack of such structure in Waterbury to visitors, and the city's daily newspaper once ran a contest to find its oldest house.

The first monument, a flagpole, was added in 1851, joined by rectilinear dirt pathways later in the decade (themselves replaces with the current curved concrete paths in 1873).

Wilfred E. Griggs' first building of note, the Odd Fellows Hall on North Main, with its rare American use of the Venetian Gothic mode, went up in 1893.

It was the first of two buildings he would design for local chapters of international fraternal organizations, reflecting their growing role in the city's social and political life.

[1] Wealthier residents built grand homes on West Main Street, like the John Kendrick House, as the expansion of the commercial district began pushing residential use out of that area.

Old commercial buildings and tenements in the area were demolished, and the streets realigned and straightened to create an appropriate neighborhood for the new Waterbury Union Station, which opened in 1909.

Although outside the district, its 240-foot (73 m) clock tower, modeled on the Torre del Mangia in Siena, Italy, has since become the city's distinguishing landmark owing to its dominance of the skyline.

[1] Within the future district, American Brass, the city's largest employer, built its Renaissance Revival headquarters in 1913 at the Grand and Meadow corner, facing the station.

It was complemented by the Georgian Revival Waterbury City Hall to the east designed by Cass Gilbert and completed in 1917, five years after the original building at Leavenworth and West Main was destroyed by an arsonist.

[1] During World War I the city's brass mills were in constant operation for military contracts, first from the Allies and later the federal government when the United States joined them.

The later years of the decade brought in newer styles like the Baroque Revival Immaculate Conception Church, a 1928 edifice reflecting the progress of Waterbury's Catholic immigrant communities.

[1] The last significant architectural style downtown, the Art Deco and modernist buildings, came at the end of this period, just before the Great Depression put a halt to most new private construction.

The most prominent examples of these styles in the district are the 1930 Brown Building at the corner of East and South Main, and the 1931 Art Deco post office on Grand Street.

While the bus routes that replaced the trolley lines continued to meet at Exchange Place, urban renewal programs later in the 20th century eliminated some major properties, most notably the McKim, Mead and White Buckingham Block at the corner of Bank and Grand and the neighboring Democrat Building.

At West Main and Bank, Baubee's Corner, a brick building inspired by Federal style rowhouses of the early 19th century, also met the wrecking ball.

[1] Newer construction continued in the district, with the new UConn campus taking up much of the cleared land in the east, obliterating Spring and School streets in the process.

[1] Downtown has remained the economic center of the city and its surrounding region of the Naugatuck Valley, with many local banks still clustering their offices around the Green.

The two-acre (8,000 m2) park between North, East and West Main and Leavenworth streets, the symbolic center of the city, links Waterbury to its early years, as a renovated fragment of the original town common.

Since its creation it has been the venue for many public events such as troop musters during wartime, demonstrations against those wars and economic hardship during the Panic of 1893 and Great Depression, and speeches by John, Robert and Ted Kennedy.

The state spent $2.2 million installing fiber optic, and set aside money for incentives to encourage businesses to locate in the zone.