Hancock Apartment Building
building in Springfield, Massachusetts
The Hancock Apartment Building. also known as the Schaffer Apartments, is a historic mixed-used retail and residential apartment building at 116-118 Hancock Street and 130 Tyler Street on the east side of Springfield, Massachusetts. Built in 1912, it is good local example of an early 20th-century Classical Revival apartment house, built as the city's outer neighborhoods grew as streetcar suburbs. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.
Description and history
The Hancock Apartment Building is located in Springfield's Old Hill neighborhood, at the northwest corner of Tyler and Hancock Streets. It is a four-story brick structure, with an exterior of orange brick, a pressed metal cornice, and a flat roof. Decorative brick banding joins the tops of the windows, and runs just below the sills of the upper-level windows. Some of the upper-level windows are set in decorative metal panels in groups of three. The building underwent a certified historic rehabilitation in 2014, in which interior features such as trim and pressed metal ceilings were preserved.
The building was constructed in 1911-12 to a design by Burton E. Geckler, a local architect whose works include apartment blocks like this, single-family residences, commercial buildings, and churches both in Springfield and nearby Longmeadow.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Hancock Apartment Building” is building in Springfield, Massachusetts. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hancock, Apartment and Building, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “building in Springfield, Massachusetts” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22073816. Authority coordinates are 42.107, -72.569. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1912, 2015, 2014 and 1911.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Hancock Apartment Building” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.