Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania

When it appeared on the Wilkes Barre streetscape in 1893, City Hall presented a dramatic blend of architectural styles: a redstone Romanesque base; Victorian banded brick and terra cotta upper floors with gargoyles and balconies; and Queen Anne towers and gables at the roofline. William W. Neuer and Benjamin Davey, Jr designed Wilkes-Barre’s first municipal building. The towers and gables are gone and the only High Victorian souvenir remaining from that time is a stained glass window of the city seal over the front door. The honeybees illustrated in the seal are emblematic of the city’s nineteenth-century boast that it was “busy as a beehive.”