Two neighboring 3-story landmarks face you here: the Opera House and Yates Bookshop Building, listed together on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and contributing resources in the North Broadway-Short Street Historic District. The Lexington Opera House was designed by Oscar Cobb and constructed by Herman L. Rowe in 1886 after a fire earlier that year destroyed Lexington's previous opera house. Its facade has been described as either Gothic Revival or Queen Anne, and above the third floor you can see a prominent sheet iron relief decoration made to look like cut stone.
Beside it the 3-story Yates Bookshop Building rose about two years after an 1873 fire destroyed the Broadway Hotel. That Italianate building was part of a row completed after the fire and is one of only a few of those post-fire buildings to survive urban renewal in the 20th century. Stand here and imagine the city rebuilding itself through fire and design, from Oscar Cobb's 1886 Opera House to the resilient Italianate row.
Notice the sheet iron relief above the Opera House's third floor, and the Italianate facade next door that survived twentieth-century urban renewal.