Downtown Ames is concentrated on a few blocks of Main Street between Duff and Clark avenues, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Ames Main Street Historic District. The buildings date mostly from the 1880s to the 1920s and form a coherent streetscape of two- and three-storey brick commercial blocks, with the kind of detailing — cornices, recessed entries, decorative parapets — that has been stripped away in many other prairie-town main streets.
It is the most pleasant part of Ames to wander, with independent shops, several decent restaurants, a couple of bars, and the Octagon Center for the Arts housed in the 1885 Masonic Temple. Friday and Saturday evenings are the liveliest. A monthly farmers market spills along the street in summer.