Philadelphia City Hall
Philadelphia’s first city hall stood at Second Street, attached to the market stalls that ran down the middle of Market Street, and its second occupied an annex to Independence Hall erected in 1790. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the government of the rapidly growing industrial city, which had absorbed the county of Philadelphia in 1854, required more space, and competitions were held in 1860 and 1869 to choose an architect and a design. John McArthur won both contests, but opinions divided sharply over whether the new building should be erected close to its earlier addresses or in Center Square, as William Penn had proposed in his 1684 plan for the city. A public referendum in 1870 favored Center Square, although it was then on the western edge of the expanding downtown, and McArthur’s design began to rise there in 1871. He adopted the highly fashionable, mansard-roofed “Second Empire” style, epitomized by the expanded Louvre in Paris, which Emperor Napoleon III built while overseeing the creation of the city’s iconic boulevards.
Embodying Philadelphia’s industrial might, the upper stories of the 548-foot tower were of iron, and it was the tallest building in the world until 1908. Although ambitious and up-to-date at its commencement, the slow-moving project reflected the inefficiency and corruption of Philadelphia’s notorious machine politicians. It was not declared complete until 1901, by which time its style seemed old-fashioned.
The Scottish-born Alexander Milne Calder oversaw the creation of the more than 250 works of sculpture that ornament the building, which tell by representation and allegory the history of the city, its place in the world of commerce, industry, and art, and the ideals and accomplishments of human beings more generally. Installed in 1894 at the top of the tower, Calder’s 36-foot bronze statue of William Penn faces northeast, toward the site on the Delaware River where he signed his legendary treaty with the Lenni Lenape.
