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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Lynchburg, Virginia

Today’s city government is housed in Lynchburg’s third federal building, a Depression-era project completed in 1933. It originally did duty as a post office and courthouse. The facade is punctuated by two-story recessed windows nestled between Ionic pilasters.

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Fort Wayne, Indiana

This is another creation of John S. Wing and Marshall S. Mahurin, built in 1893 as the town hall. Sandstone was used to execute the monumental Richardsonian Romanesque style, based on the work of Boston designer Henry Hobson Richardson, the most influential American architect of the post-Civil War era. Hallmarks of the style seen here include powerful arches, broad gables and corner turrets. The city government remained here until 1971 and since 1980 it has been the home of the Allen County-Fort Wayne Historical Society which operates The History Center here.

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Derby, Connecticut

Derby’s government has operated out of an armory, an opera house, its own place and, since 2005, here in an old bank. More specifically the last headquarters of the Derby Savings Bank that opened with much fanfare in 1976. 

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Canton, Ohio

Canton waved goodbye to its grand Victorian City Hall on Cleveland Avenue in the 1950s and replaced it with a standard issue modern office building.

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Atlanta, Georgia

Early in Atlanta’s history if you needed to transact business with the town government you had to seek out officials in their offices in local hotels and grocery stores. In 1854 the first official city hall was constructed where the Georgia State Capitol stands today. When the state capital moved from Milledgville it actually did duty as the state capitol. That two-story brick structure was demolished in 1885. 

The current City Hall came from the pen of Geoffrey Lloyd Preacher, a major figure in southeastern architectural history, in 1930. Preacher made his reputation with large-scale hotels but his creation of the elaborate Gothic-inspired Art Deco City Hall is probably his best known design. The building rises 14 stories with setbacks from the soaring, cathedral-like entrance. Preacher covered the reinforced concrete building with cream-colored terra cotta tiles.

In 1864 the home of Georgia attorney and jurist Richard Francis Lyon stood here when General William Sherman took it as his headquarters during the Union occupation of Atlanta. The house was one of the few that Federal troops did not destroy on the way to Savannah.

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Albuquerque, New Mexico

Carrying the name of two-term Albuquerque mayor Harry E. Kinney, this public space fills with more than 20,000 people during events. In addition to fountains and a bronze statue of Kinney the Plaza, carved from two city blocks in 1972, contains City Hall and Bernalillo County Courthouse, early 1960s additions to the Albuquerque streetscape.

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Williamsport, Pennsylvania

A signature piece of the remarkable Eber Culver, the Old City Hall is located on the former site 

of the Ross Park Cemetery that was sadly neglected on the northwestern edge of the Victorian 

business district. During a tour promoting his new book, Mark Twain spotted it, and, disgusted 

by its neglect, wrote a newspaper article entitled, “Remarkable Dream,” which records the 

thoughts of a disgruntled resident of the cemetery, though Twain omitted Williamsport’s name. 

The remains in the cemetery were later moved. This beautiful Victorian Romanesque building 

is a fine example of 19th century taste. This building is also on the National Register of Historic 

Places. The statue in front is the Sailors and Soldiers Monument erected as a tribute to the men 

who served in the Civil war. 

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Walterboro, South Carolina

In 1975 this building was remodeled with a Palladian facade of four Doric columns to compliment the courthouse across the street. The original structure was completed in 1940 as a Depression-era project.

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Utica, New York

Utica’s first right and proper City Hall was constructed in 1852 of yellow bricks in the Italian Renaissance style on plans drawn by Richard Upjohn. Dominated by a tall, square campanile the building stood on the southeast corner of Genesee and Elizabeth streets for 115 years before the elegant City Hall was torn down over the objections of hardly anybody. This is its replacement.

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Toms River, New Jersey

This was the location of the Toms River blockhouse that was overrun by Loyalist troops seeking prized saltworks in the waning days of the American Revolution. Later Captain John Holmes built a Greek Revival brick home here that became Town Hall. The Town Hall, like several locations around Toms River took a star turn in the movies in 1979 when a house at 18 Brooks Drive was selected to stand-in for the Long Island, New York house in the Amityville Horror.

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Santa Fe, New Mexico

With plenty of government funds available for building during the Great Depression of the 1930s John Gaw Meem and his draftsmen were busy with populating the town with Territorial Revival-style public buildings. The Municipal Building was one of those projects.

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Salisbury, North Carolina

The Salisbury government operates out of this Neoclassical box that is wrapped in corner quoins and boasts fluted Ionic pilasters between its five bays. It began life as a Security Bank and Trust building.

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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Henry Hornbostel, who had come from New York City to Pittsburgh in 1904 to design the Carnegie Technical Schools (now Carnegie Mellon University), won the design competition for the City-County Building in 1913. Rather than compete with the towers and pointed roofs of the Allegheny Courthouse next door, Hornbostel limited ornament at the City-County Building to the high triple-arched portico, the Doric colonnade above it, and the barrel-vaulted interior galleria. That ground floor interior is one of Pittsburgh’s finest interior spaces - a 43-foot high by 150-foot long light-filled corridor flanked by bronze columns and framed, at either end, by great arched windows spanned by catwalks.

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Louisville, Kentucky

Architect John Andreartha, who won a design competition in 1867, tapped the era’s two most popular architectural styles - Italianate and Second Empire - for this government home. Limestone from White River quarries near Salem, Indiana was used in construction and the confection was completed in 1873 at a final cost of $464,778, even though the building was planned to be three times as large. The original clocktower burned in 1875 and Henry Whitehouse directed the mansard-roofed replacement the following year. Up close, the building is generously appointed with stone carvings honoring the importance of agriculture in the early history of the town.

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Lexington, North Carolina

At Lexington City Hall and the adjacent Mayor’s building there are no signs honoring the great politicians that shaped the town but there is a plaque remembering that this was the place where barbecue was first sold in town. The slow-cooked meat was prepared on open pits for folks on court business and farmers peddling their wares on Saturdays and sold under tents.

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Hagerstown, Maryland

Hagerstown’s first City Hall was a combination marketplace and office structure in the square. The first floor was an open-air market, farmers would drive their wagons through the enormous open archways to sell their goods. In 1818 City Hall was rebuilt one block north of the square and in 1941 the current City Hall was built. A model of the original City Hall is on display on the first floor.

Little Heiskell, Hagerstown’s symbol, is a weathervane in the shape of a Hessian soldier. He was designed for Hagerstown’s first City Hall in 1769 by a German tinsmith named Heiskell. During the Civil War, a sharpshooter used Little Heiskell as a target and shot him through the heart. Undaunted, Little Heiskell remained atop City Hall until 1935 when he was removed to the Hager House Museum in City Park. A replica can be seen above the current City Hall.

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Amherst, Massachusetts

The present Town Hall was constructed on the site of the Palmer Block, a large brick building named after leading citizen Dwight Palmer which burned at the height of the blizzard on March 11, 1888. Since Palmer Hall was already the location for town meetings, the Town immediately purchased the block and constructed a sturdy, fireproof Town Hall. The popular Richardson Romanesque Style was designed by H.S. McKay of Boston and built for a total of $58,000!

This building, now cherished by the town, caused so much controversy and dissent as it was being constructed that the Amherst Record had this comment in 1890:

“We should bear in mind the fact that the architect of the Cathedral at Milan, backed by the wealth of the universe, could not have designed a village horse-shed that would meet with universal favor at the hands of the citizens of Amherst.”

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Vineland, New Jersey

The city office building of concrete and brick was constructed in 1971 at a cost of $4.4 million. It was designed in such a way that the the heat generated by lights in the interior of the building is actually re-used to heat the peripheries. So you may see City Hall lit any time of the night since it is actually creating a net savings.

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St. Paul, Minnesota

John Augur Holabird and John Wellborn Root, Jr. were the sons of pioneering skyscraper builders who helped define the Chicago Style of architecture. Holabird and Root formed their own design partnership and created some of Chicago’s most impressive Art Deco buildings. For St. Paul’s City Hall in 1932 they emphasized the verticality of their Deco design with columns of windows linked by plain, flat black spandrels. The exterior is faced in smooth Indiana limestone into which relief sculptures have been carved at the entrances by Lee Lawrie, one of America’s foremost architectural sculptors.

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Savannah, Georgia

Savannah’s City Hall is sited on Yamacraw Bluff overlooking the Savannah River where General James Oglethorpe landed in 1733. The government first conducted business here in the City Exchange in 1799, side-by-side with the post office and the town’s newspaper office. The building was razed in 1904 and replaced with Savannah’s first building constructed specifically as a City Hall. Local architect Hyman Wallace Witcover did the design honors with a proportional Renaissance Revvial plan, working with a budget of $205,167 that included ornate statues of chariots and horses atop the structure that were never built.

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Sacramento, California

Rudolph Herold was the go-to architect in Sacramento when you needed a substantial building erected in the first decades of the 20th century. He was born in San Francisco and taught architectural drawing as a young man before setting off to Europe in the 1890s to work and study. He returned to Sacramento in 1901 when he was 31 and opened his practice where he became known as a versatile designer. For City Hall in 1911 Herold taped the showy Beaux Arts style and based much of his terra-cotta ornamentation on the region’s fruit and vegetable farms. The curving five-story modern extension of the city government came along in 2005.

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Newark, New Jersey

Architects Mowbray, Uffinger and Ely dispensed with function to create one of America’s grandest Beaux Arts-style public buildings. Completed in 1908, the final price tag for the five story limestone building was more than $2.6 million. The enormous interior space under a heavily ornamented dome boasts carved marble and fine paneling, a grand central staircase, stained-glass skylights, and decorative plaster and wrought-iron works. The central dome inside is made of copper and is flanked by atria with glass ceilings. Developer Harry Grant paid to have the dome covered in 24 karat gold in 1986.

The previous home for the City’s administrative offices was a block to the north. In 1870 Broad Street in front of City Hall was paved with asphalt courtesy of Edmund J. DeSmedt, a Belgian chemist. It was the first recorded use of asphalt on an American street. Six years later asphalt was used to pave Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in anticipation of the nation’s Centennial in 1876. But today’s ubiquitous sticky black petroleum distillate was slow to catch on - as late as 1904 there were only 141 miles of paved asphalt roads in the entire United States. 

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Mount Holly, New Jersey

With over 200 years of continuous use, this is one of only a handful of courthouses in America that can trace its roots back into the 1700s. Burlington City was the capital of the Province of West Jersey and the county seat until 1796 when the site of the County Court House moved to Mount Holly. Samuel Lewis of Philadelphia was selected to design the new building and he delivered a near replica of his Congress Hall and Old City Hall, the buildings flanking Independence Hall in Philadelphia. This splendid example of Colonial architecture is beautifully preserved with painted brick. Flanking the court house are a pair of single-story office buildings that were constructed in 1807. The courthouse bell, cast in England in 1755, was removed and installed from an earlier courthouse. It is said to have rung to signal the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

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Mobile, Alabama

The genesis of Old City Hall in 1854 was as the Southern Market where folks could buy and sell vegetables, meat and fish. As construction was progressing the existing city hall, sited at Jackson and Conti streets, went up in flames. When the Italianate building designed by Thomas Simmons James opened in 1858 it contained the marketplace, space for the local militia to assemble and offices for the municipal government. Alterations through the years have resulted in a complex of four rectangular sections linked by three arcaded passageways. You could still buy a basket of vegetables here as late as 1942; since 1997 the building has housed the Museum of Mobile. Mobile’s City Council continues to convene in this building a few times a year in order to carry on the tradition of having met in this location continuously since its opening in 1858.

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