Architecture
Although Mangin and McComb designed the building, which was constructed between 1810 and 1812, it has been altered numerous times over the years, with the alteration often designed by noted architects:
- 1860 - Leopold Eidlitz
- 1898 - John H. Duncan
- 1903 - William Martin Aiken
- 1907, 1912, 1915, 1917 - Grosvenor Atterbury
- 1956 - Shreve, Lamb & Harmon
- 1998 - Cabrera Barricklo
The architectural style of City Hall combines two noted historical movements, French Renaissance, which can be seen in the design of the exterior, and American-Georgian in the interior design. The building consists of a central pavilion with two projecting wings. The design of City Hall influenced at least two later civic structures, the Tweed Courthouse and the Surrogate's Courthouse. The entrance, reached by a long flight of steps, has figured prominently in civic events for over a century and a half. There is a columned entrance portico capped by a balustrade, and another balustrade at the roof. The domed tower in the center was rebuilt in 1917 after the last of two major fires. The original deteriorated Massachusetts marble facade, quarried from Alford, Massachusetts, with brownstone on the rear, was completely reclad with Alabama limestone above a Missouri granite base in 1954-6.
On the inside, the rotunda is a soaring space with a grand marble stairway rising up to the second floor, where ten fluted Corinthian columns support the coffered dome, which was added in a 1912 restoration by Grosvenor Atterbury. The rotunda has been the site of municipal as well as national events. Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant lay in state here, attracting enormous crowds to pay their respects. City Hall is a designated New York City landmark. It is also listed on the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places.
Read more about this topic: New York City Hall
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“Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.”
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“It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)