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Waterbury earned its nickname the Brass City in the 19th century, when the mills along the Naugatuck River produced the majority of America's brass goods, from curtain rings to artillery shell casings. The Waterbury Clock Company, founded here in 1857, became famous worldwide for inexpensive, reliable timepieces, eventually evolving into the Timex Group, still headquartered in Connecticut. The workers who staffed the mills arrived from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Lithuania, and the churches they built on Waterbury's hills represent nearly every European Catholic tradition in compressed architectural form.

The city's downtown retains the ambitions of its prosperous industrial peak.

The Chase Building (1914), the Howland-Hughes department store, and the Municipal Building by Cass Gilbert, who also designed the Woolworth Building in Manhattan and the US Supreme Court, stand as evidence of what brass money bought. The Mattatuck Museum in the former Masonic Temple on the Green holds a serious collection of American art and Waterbury industrial history that most visitors to Connecticut overlook. The city has faced significant economic challenges since deindustrialization, but the bones of a remarkable working-class city remain visible in nearly every block.