The 145-acre Downtown Roswell Historic District covers most of Main Street and a few cross streets, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. It contains a couple of hundred buildings dating from 1880 to the 1950s — banks, hotels, stores, churches — in a typical southwestern Beaux Arts and Mission Revival mix.
Most striking are the modifications made since the 1990s when the city embraced its UFO reputation: alien-shaped streetlights, alien-eye storefront windows, alien-themed murals on otherwise ordinary brick buildings. The combination of serious architectural heritage and self-aware kitsch is genuinely fun to walk through.