This winsome four-story building is the earliest known remnant of the mid-nineteenth-century nascence of today’s Downtown. The simple, unprepossessing brick building with granite trim is typical of commercial buildings that first filled this area. As such, it provides a grounding sense of scale amid its ambitious high-rise neighbors. Its south end, extensively rebuilt to designs by Stone, Carpenter & Wilson in the late 1880s, is a charming essay in the vocabulary of Queen Anne style, usually restricted in this country (in contrast to its native England) to domestic expressions. As conceived and built, it seems more a large piece of furniture than a small building.

– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture