The Davis Opera House, built around 1885, is the oldest commercial structure in the district. Theaters of its era served as the entertainment centerpiece of small American cities - venues for traveling theatrical companies, opera and musical performances, lecture series, and the broad cultural calendar that defined urban life before radio and movies. The Davis stood for decades before Huntington's later movie palaces eclipsed it, but the building itself has survived. The Love Hardware Building, also from around 1884, anchors another corner. Together these structures are the earliest commercial survivors from Huntington's first generation of post-railroad construction, the wooden and brick buildings that emerged in the first decade after the city's founding.

Larger anchors followed as the city grew. The Frederick Building dates from 1906, the Huntington City Hall from 1915, the West Virginia Building from around 1924, and the Huntington Arcade from 1925. The Anderson-Newcomb/Stone and Thomas Building - now the Marshall University Visual Arts Center - dates from around 1902 and represents the kind of substantial department store that defined American downtown shopping for the better part of the twentieth century. The 1928 Keith-Albee Theatre, separately discussed, is one of the great surviving movie palaces of its era and probably the district's most architecturally distinctive single structure. Each building marked a phase of the city's growth, with the most ambitious construction concentrated in the 1900-1930 period when Huntington's economic and demographic peak coincided with the high water mark of American downtown commercial architecture.

The district includes five historic churches, each a substantial congregation building in its own architectural idiom. Trinity Episcopal dates from 1882, the oldest of the group. First Presbyterian was completed in 1895. Johnson Memorial Church traces its lineage through three building dates of 1886, 1912, and 1935. First United Methodist (originally First Methodist Episcopal) opened in 1913, and Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in 1916. The churches are clustered enough that downtown Huntington has the distinct character of an American small city built when religion was a public institution that anchored neighborhoods with substantial stone and brick architecture. The buildings are still active congregations, not converted to other uses - a notable preservation success.

Several civic buildings within the district are separately listed on the National Register. The Cabell County Courthouse anchors local government. The U.S. Post Office and Court House represents federal presence in the city. The Carnegie Public Library at Fifth and Ninth, built in 1903 as Andrew Carnegie's gift to the city, served as the public library until 1980 and is now home to Huntington Junior College. The Campbell-Hicks House is a residential survivor preserved within the commercial district. The cluster of public and quasi-public buildings - government, education, library, postal - gives the district more institutional density than a purely commercial historic district would have.

From the air, downtown Huntington reads as a tight rectangular grid of blocks pressed against the south bank of the Ohio River. The river runs east-west; the avenue numbering runs from First Avenue near the river up to higher numbers as you move south. The cross streets run from First Street near the eastern edge of downtown to higher numbers as you move west. The historic district occupies the densest core of this grid, with the tallest surviving buildings clustered around the Fifth and Ninth Street axis. The original C. P. Huntington layout is still legible - this is one of the more intact nineteenth-century railroad-town grids in the eastern United States, with most of its original buildings still standing in much of their original form. The grid is the bones. The district is the flesh that grew on those bones.