Albany City Hall is the seat of government of the city of Albany, New York. It houses the office of the mayor, the Common Council chamber, the city and traffic courts, as well as other city services. The current building was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson in his particular Romanesque style and opened in 1883 at 24 Eagle Street between Corning Place (then Maiden Lane) and Pine Street. It is a rectangular, three-and-a-half-story building with a 202-foot (62 m) tall tower at its southwest corner. The tower contains one of the only municipal carillons in the country.
Albany's first city hall was the Stadt Huys, built by the Dutch at the intersection of Broadway and Hudson Avenue probably in the 1660s, though possibly earlier. It was probably replaced around 1740 with a larger building, which continued to be known as the Stadt Huys. In 1754, the Stadt Huys was the location of the Albany Congress, where Benjamin Franklin presented the Albany Plan of Union, the first proposal to unite the British American colonies. In 1797 Albany was declared the state capital of New York and the New York Legislature made its home in Albany's city hall. In 1809 the Legislature opened the first New York State Capitol and Albany's government moved in with the Legislature. After purchasing a plot of land at the eastern terminus of Washington Avenue, across Eagle Street from the capitol, the city government moved in to a new city hall designed by Philip Hooker in 1832.
In 1880, Hooker's city hall was destroyed by fire and a new design was commissioned by Henry Richardson; the building opened in 1883. The new city hall still stands and is a fine example of Richardson's unique Romanesque style. Architectural critics consider the building to have been designed around the high point of Richardson's career. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 4, 1972.
Read more about Albany City Hall: Former City Halls, Current City Hall
Famous quotes containing the words city and/or hall:
“Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.”
—Martin Oppenheimer (b. 1930)
“Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too—unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child’s trouble.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)