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Philadelphia City Hall

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Philadelphia City Hall
City Hall from postcard, c. 1900
LocationPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania
Built1871
ArchitectMcArthur,John,Jr.; Walter,Thomas U.
Architectural styleSecond Empire, other
NRHP reference No.76001666 [1]
Added to NRHPDecember 08, 1976
City Hall at night, from Broad Street, 2005

Philadelphia City Hall is the seat of government for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At 167 m (548 ft), including statue, it is the world's tallest masonry building: the weight of the building is borne by granite and brick walls up to 22 feet thick, rather than steel; the principal exterior materials are limestone, granite, and marble.

Design

The building was designed by Scottish architect John McArthur, Jr., in the Second Empire style, and was constructed from 1871 until 1901 at a cost of $24 million. Originally designed to be the world's tallest building, by the time it was completed it had already been surpassed by the Washington Monument and the Eiffel Tower. With close to 700 rooms, City Hall remains one of the largest municipal buildings in North America. The building houses three branches of government, the Executive (Mayor's Office), the Legislative (City Council), and the Judicial Branch's Civil Courts (Court of Common Pleas).

The building is topped by an 11.3-m (36 ft, 4 in), 27-ton bronze statue of city founder William Penn, one of 250 sculptures created by Alexander Milne Calder that adorn the building inside and out. The statue is the tallest atop any building in the world. It is said that Calder wished the statue to face south so that its face would be lit by the sun most of the day, all the better to reveal the details that he had included in the work (from Hayes). Local legend has it that residents of the north side of the city paid a bribe to have it face them. A more credible reason (since it actually faces a little northeast) is that the statue faces Penn Treaty Park in the Fishtown section of the city, which commemorates the site where William Penn signed a treaty with the local Native American tribe. Yet another version for why the statue pointed generally north (from Craven) instead of south is that it was the current (1894) architect's way of showing displeasure with the style of the work; that by 1894 it was not in the current, popular Beaux-Arts style; that it was out of date even before it was placed on top of the building. Starting in the 1990s when one of Philadelphia's four major sports teams were close to winning a championship, the statue was decorated with the jersey of that team.

The free outdoor observation deck located directly below the base of the statue offers visitors an expansive view of the city and its surroundings. Penn's statue is hollow, and a narrow access tunnel through it leads to a small (22-inch-diameter) hatch atop the hat.

For many years, City Hall remained the tallest building in Philadelphia, under a "gentlemen's agreement." In 1987, it lost this distinction when One Liberty Place was completed. (The breaking of this agreement is said to be the cause of the so-called Curse of Billy Penn, under the supposed influence of which no major-league Philadelphia sports team has won a championship since 1983.)

City Hall is a National Historic Landmark. In 2006, it was named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.[2]

Site

City Hall is built on the area designated by William Penn as Centre Square. It was a public square from the city's founding in 1682 until the construction of City Hall began upon the site in 1871. It was one of the five original squares laid out on the city grid by Penn. It lay at the geographic heart of the city from 1682 until the Act of Consolidation, 1854 (although it was never truly the social heart of the city during that long period).

Weigley et al[3] tell us that Penn planned for Centre Square to be

"a central square or plaza of ten acres to be bordered by the principal public buildings, such as the Quaker meetinghouse, the state house, the market house, and the schoolhouse. Despite the two riverfronts [Delaware and Schuylkill], Penn's city had an inward-facing design, focusing on this central plaza."

However, the Delaware riverfront would remain the de facto economic and social heart of the city for over a century. Weigley et al[4] go on to explain that

"[…] hardly anyone lived west of Fourth Street before 1703. Consequently Penn's design of a center square as the hub of his community had to be abandoned. The large Friends meeting house which was built in 1685 at the midpoint between the rivers was dismantled in 1702. Efforts to develop the Schuylkill waterfront likewise collapsed. Of the merchants, tradesmen, and craftsmen who can be identified as living in Philadelphia around 1690, 123 lived on the Delaware side of town and only 6 on the Schuylkill side. One of the latter, a tailor named William Boulding, complained that he had invested most of his capital in his Schuylkill lot, 'so that he cannot, as others have done, Remove from the same.' Not until the mid-nineteenth century, long after the city had spilled northward and southward in an arc along the Delaware miles beyond its original limits, was the Schuylkill waterfront fully developed. Nor was Centre Square restored as the heart of Philadelphia until the construction of City Hall began in 1871."

See also

Bronze statue of William Penn atop City Hall tower

References

  1. ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2006-03-15.
  2. ^ "asce_news_Philadelphia City Hall Named as Historic Landmark". Retrieved 2007-04-03.
  3. ^ Weigley et al 1982:7.
  4. ^ Weigley et al 1982:16.

Bibliography

  • Gurney, George, Sculpture of a City—Philadelphia’s Treasures in Bronze and Stone, Fairmont Park Association, Walker Publishing Co., Inc., New York, NY, 1974.
  • Hayes, Margaret Calder, Three Alexander Calders: A Family Memoir by Margaret Calder Hayes, Paul S. Eriksson, publisher, Middlebury, Vermont, 1977.
  • Weigley RF et al (eds): (1982). Philadelphia: A 300-Year History. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-01610-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
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