Tulsa, Oklahoma

This glass box came online in 1969 as the home for the city government, culminating construction on the Tulsa Civic Center that had been on the drawing board since 1924. When hatched nearly a half-century earlier the “Tulsa Plan” called for a series of highly ornamented classical buildings but property acquisition and building clearing did not begin until 1952. So the plan was executed with a set of modernistic steel-and-glass boxes.

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Reno, Nevada

Reno’s City Hall has its roots back in 1902 when optimistic moneymen in town came together to organize the Farmers & Merchants Bank with Richard Kirman at the head of the enterprise. Although only 26 years old, the Virginia City-born Kirman had already righted the fortunes of one failing bank. He set the course for Farmers & Merchants while charting his own in politics; Kirman would be elected mayor of Reno in 1907 and eventually governor of Nevada in 1935. By that time Farmers & Merchants had changed its name to First National and was the only one of Reno’s five banks to survive the Great Depression. It gobbled up banks in Las Vegas, Elko and elsewhere and as First National Bank of Nevada financed much of the state’s construction around the emerging gambling industry. In 1963 First National constructed this 16-story, International Style tower as its headquarters. It was known as the Cal Neva Building in 2004 when the City of Reno bought it for $5.5 million and after another $4.8 million was poured into renovations it became the home of city government.

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Pawtucket, Rhode Island

New Deal funding in the 1930s made possible this mammoth civic building. John O’Malley designed the new city hall in the Art Deco style - unusual for New England - with a soaring central tower that displays the clean lines emblematic of the Art Deco movement. The tower is marked by four splendid concrete eagles. City Hall, now on the National Register of Historic Places, has been restored twice. in the first go-round back in 1974 somehow it was deemed a good idea to cover the 143-foot tower in unsightly yellow brick and strip away the eagles. The most recent restoration put the soaring eagles back in flight and won a preservation award.

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Orlando, Florida

The winner of Orlando’s design competition for a new city hall backed out of the project in a dispute over fees so a consortium of companies was cobbled together to execute the design by Heller & Leake, a San Francisco firm. The exterior of the nine-story government center is clad in precast concrete instead of costly stone, except for a few granite accents. The copper dome is decorative and does not reflect a great domed hall below. Revenue from the adjacent office towers was expected to defray the $32 million tab for City Hall that was finished in 1992.

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Oakland, California

The New York-based architecture firm of Palmer & Hornbostel came out in 1910 to design Oakland a replacement seat of government to replace its predecessor that was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Completed in 1914, Oakland’s fifth City Hall was the first high-rise government building in the United States and the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. Likened to a multi-layered wedding cake, the Beaux Arts structure is faced in white granite and terra cotta. The three-story bottom tier is where the mayor’s office and council chambers reside. A three-tiered, 36-cell jail and outdoor exercise yard for the inmates is located on the 12th floor, although it hasn’t been used since the 1960s. Poking out of the office tower is a 91-foot clock tower.

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Montgomery, Alabama

This has been the historic site of the city hall in Montgomery. An early structure evolved into a block-filling Victorian building that contained a city market at the street level and municipal offices and an auditorium above. The building was gutted by a fire on the first day of spring 1932. Funds were hard to come by at the height of the Great Depression and a replacement would not be finished until 1937, executed on Neoclassical plans drawn by local architect Frank Lockwood.

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Milwaukee, Wisconsin

When City Hall was finished in 1896 only the Washington Monument was a taller structure in the United States. Its 353-foot bell tower lorded over a town of mostly two-and three and four-story structures. Milwaukee architect Henry C. Koch designed the civic centerpiece in a Flemish Renaissance Revival style and sunk 2,584 pine pilings into the marshy ground along the Milwaukee River to support the building. On top of the pilings were placed two floors of black granite and six floors comprised of eight million pressed bricks, about half of which were used for the bell tower. Inside the Common Council Chamber is the largest in the country - quite an upgrade for a government body that had started in the 1840s in a small church and then moved to the second floor of a livery stable.

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