Terra cotta clads the Hager Building in front of you, a Lancaster landmark by architect C. Emlen Urban built between 1910 and 1911. You can read its story in the materials and proportions: a five-story, three-bay-by-five-bay steel-frame structure clad in terra cotta, rendered in a French Renaissance Revival style. This section measures sixty-three feet by one hundred and one feet, while the building’s overall dimensions reach two hundred forty feet, six inches by sixty-three feet — a footprint that includes an earlier central warehouse built between 1860 and 1890 and a brick northern extension added in 1923.
For decades the block was home to the Hager Brothers Department Store, a commercial presence whose memory lingers in the building’s scale and detailing. In 1979 the Hager Building was recognized on the National Register of Historic Places, cementing its place in Lancaster’s architectural story. Notice the terra cotta cladding and the steady rhythm of its bays rising toward the cornice, then follow the long façade into the streetscape it still commands.