Fifth and Main Historic District, Joplin

The corner of Fifth and Main in Joplin, Missouri holds three early twentieth century commercial buildings that went up between nineteen oh three and nineteen twenty, the height of the zinc and lead mining boom that made this city. The centerpiece is the Christman Building, a five-story Chicago-style brick block that dominated the block when it opened in nineteen seventeen. Architects August and Alfred Michaelis brought the structural steel logic of the Chicago School to the Ozark edge.

The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand six and absorbed into the larger Joplin Downtown Historic District two years later. What you are looking at is the commercial skeleton of a mining boomtown that briefly held ambitions equal to Kansas City.