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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Los Angeles, California

Englishman John B. Parkinson apprenticed for six years as a contractor/builder before coming to North America as a lark when he was 21 in 1883. He built fences in Winnipeg and learned stair-building in Minneapolis. He returned to England but was not encouraged about his prospects on the native island. He sailed back to America and came all the way to the Napa Valley in California where he again took up stair-buildings and picked up the odd architectural job every now and then. In 1889 he set out for Seattle to be a draftsman but could not get hired. Instead he opened his own architectural firm and began winning design competitions and commissions but the work dried up during the Panic of 1893. Faced with no projects, nor prospects for work in Seattle, Parkinson moved to Los Angeles in 1894 and hung out his shingle on Spring Street. In 1905 he teamed with G. Edwin Bergstrom to form what we be the City’s dominant architectural firm until its dissolution ten years later. Having come of age in the Victorian era, Parkinson was still at his drafting board in 1926 to design City Hall with John C. Austin. Albert C. Martin supplied the engineering expertise for the 454-foot tower that is the tallest base-isolated structure in the world. Sand from each of California’s 58 counties was mixed with water from each of its 21 historical missions to form the concrete.

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Honesdale, Pennsylvania

Built in 1893, this Romanesque Revival brick-and-stone building once sported brick and stone cupolas atop the building’s two towers but they were removed because of maintenance issues. 

Above the main entrance are a large arch and a balcony that runs between the two towers. Years ago local dignitaries used the balcony to make their public speeches. For many years the building was also the home to the Protection Engine No. 3 Fire Company.

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Elmira, New York

Busy architects Joseph H. Pierce and Hiram H. Bickford were most responsible for shaping the look of Elmira from their office on Lake Street between 1885 and 1925. They designed several hundred buildings around town. Here they brought the ornate Neo-Renaissance style to the streetscape in 1895. The pediments are terra cotta figures representing agriculture, science, and the arts. With decorations on nearly every inch of the building City Hall stands as an early representation of the style that was to dominate American municipal buildings in the years to come. It also represents the height of architectural achievement in Elmira at the peak of its prosperity. 

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Durham, North Carolina

Construction for this City Hall began in 1976 on plans drawn by local architects John D. Latimer and Associates. The design reflects the  architecture of the 1970s which rejected symmetry and put the value on interior functions. 

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