Philadelphia City Hall

Philadelphia City Hall Tour 2008

Philadelphia City Hall - The Exterior

City Hall

          The following is paraphrased from the brochure that is given to visitors at the City Hall:
          The City Hall of Philadelphia is the largest and most elaborate seat of municipal government in the nation. It is the finest American example of the French Second-Empire style. City Hall has the most comprehensive sculptural decoration of any American building created in the Renaissance tradition. Alexander Calder designed over 250 sculptures.
          Construction began in 1871 and continued for 30 years. It was erected on Penn's Square, a site of one of five parks planned by William Penn. It was planned to be the tallest building in the world at 548 feet, but the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. were completed first -- and they were taller. However, it was the tallest occupied structure in the U.S. until 1909. The City Hall is still the world's highest masonry load-bearing structure, being made of 88 million bricks and thousands of tons of stone.
          Until 1987 no building in Philadelphia could legally exceed the top of "Billy Penn" on City Hall. It is now a National Historic Monument. It contains one of the three courtrooms used by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. (The other courtrooms are in Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.) The building contains tons of marble, granite, hand-carved woodwork, inlaid woodwork, wrought and cast-iron, tiled wainscoting and painted ceilings.
          The City Hall has seven floors, each of which has approximately 100 rooms. We were told that the original cost of $25 million -- which in today's dollars would be about $6 billion. A structure like this could never again be built by a municipality.

City Hall

There is a center courtyard in the City Hall. The following pictures are of the views within that courtyard.

City Hall

City Hall
Part of the structure on one of the roofs.

City Hall-William Penn statue

The statue of William Penn. The City Hall Tower does not use a steel frame for support. It supported by brick walls that are 27 feet thick at their base. Marble facing covers the first 338 feet of the exterior. In 1990, a $24.5 million restoration was completed on the cast-iron skin that protects the top 210 feet of the tower. The statue of William Penn, designed by Alexander M. Calder, was cast in 47 pieces. It is 37 feet tall and 27 tons. It is the tallest and heaviest sculpture to decorate the top of any building in the world. One of the guides told us that William Penn's hand points out toward a park where there is the statue of a Lenape chieftain who is pointing at City Hall. It was at the park where William Penn signed a treaty with the Lenape tribe of Native Americans. And each of the four clock faces are larger than the clock face in the Big Ben tower in London.