That’s New York’s City Hall and a portion of City Hall Park, as they appeared in 1900. At this point, it’s almost a cliché to point out that the seat of government in a city of high-rises is a small palazzo, but it is. The other low-rise building right behind City Hall is the New York County Courthouse (AKA the Tweed Courthouse); various early skyscrapers face the park along Broadway.
In 1900, City Hall was 89 years old, which is not so terribly old for a well-maintained building. But the timeline is interesting: I’m not sure that the people who built City Hall would have expected it to still be here in 2020.
The first city hall here was New Amsterdam’s Stadt Huys, built by the Dutch West India Company in 1642 as a tavern and converted to government use in 1653. It was across the street from our office, at Broad and Pearl Streets. When the colony changed hands in 1664, and New Amsterdam became New York, that building stayed in use as the city hall, but in 1679 it was abandoned as unsafe. That may be a comment on the standards that the DWIA used for buildings its employees believed would be temporary, a deplorable lack of maintenance, or extraordinary wear by boisterous colonials. A neighboring building was used as an intentionally-temporary city hall for the next twenty plus years.
The second city hall was completed in 1703 at the northeast corner of Nassau and Wall Streets, which meant its front facade faced Broad Street and was quite prominent. After the end of the Revolutionary War in 1785, it served as “Federal Hall,” where congress met during New York’s brief stint as the federal capital. The city’s government was there after 1790, when the federal government moved south; I’m not sure if both governments shared the building for five years, which must have been rather cramped. After the city government moved out to the third city hall, the building was demolished; the current temple-like building at that site, also known as Federal Hall, was built as New York’s customs house and opened in 1842 after a long period of construction.
The second building was inadequate, as plans for its replacement began in 1776 and were then delayed by the war and the British occupation of the city. The design of the third city hall was chosen by competition in 1802 – only twelve years after the feds left the second building – and was built between 1803 and 1811. Cost cutting (or, in the current euphemism, value engineering) led to the use of cheaper stone on the facade, which was replaced in a 1950s renovation. The only other major change to the building’s exterior was the replacement of the cupola after fireworks burned it in 1858.
City hall number one: 1653 to 1679, or 26 years. Number one and a half, 1679 to 1703, or 24 years. Number two, 1703 to 1811 or 108 years. Number three, 209 years and counting. There are no plans now to replace City Hall, although there have been. Around 1900, as City Hall Park was being reimagined by planners and architects during the City Beautiful movement, many of the proposals assumed that both City Hall and the Tweed Courthouse would be replaced by modern buildings. Obviously that did not happen, but the plan to replace them both with a skyscraper gradually turned into the Municpal Building, adjacent to the park. The most interesting part of the longevity of the current building is that it was functionally obsolete long ago but has been upgraded by the installation of modern mechanical systems and the gradual removal of the vast majority of offices it once held. It was more obsolete in 1900, at the beginning of an age of electric lights, telephones, and elevators, than its predecessors were when demolished.
