Buffalo, New York

The cornerstone for one of America’s most massive and costliest municipal buildings was laid on May 14, 1930. It was completed, almost seven million dollars later, in time to commemorate the city’s Centennial on July 1, 1932. Architect John J. Wade provided the plans for the 28-story Art Deco masterwork that stood as Buffalo’s tallest building for almost four decades. Wade infused every corner of the City Hall colossus with a reminder of Buffalo from the central sandstone entrance frieze with pioneers and Iroquois Indian motifs to historic murals to statues of iconic figures. The brightly colored tiles at the top of the tower suggest a flame-like crown that represent the energetic sun burst in the flag of the City. The building was designed with large vents on the exterior to catch winds of Lake Erie to cool the interior without electricity.

Norwich, Connecticut

In the nearly 140 years since City Hall opened the exuberant Second Empire building is largely unaltered. Local architect Evan Burdick provided the dramatic design with red bricks on a cut granite base; he was also the designer of the Broadway Congregational Church, the Wauregan Hotel and several other town structures. The final price tag for City Hall, completed after three years of construction in 1873, was $250,000. The four-sided clock tower was added in 1909. In the basement are dreary dungeon-like cells, harkening back to the days when the police department was located there.

New London, Connecticut

The city government has operated here for over 150 years. The original building was an Italianate-style brownstone that fit in nicely with the residential nature of State Street in 1856. By the early 1900s the City thought it desirable to establish a more monumental presence as the neighborhood commercialized. In 1912 James Sweeney was called in to deliver a Renaissance Revival exterior to the Municipal Building which he accomplished with a rusticated base, a quartet of Corinthian columns, some pediments over the windows and a matching classical balustrade and low surrounding wall.

Brooklyn, New York

Born as City Hall for then decade-old Brooklyn in 1845, Borough Hall was designed by Gamaliel King who did architecture in his spare time. By trade he was a grocer and carpenter. King had actually been the runner-up in the 1835 competition to design City Hall to Calvin Pollard, a busy and prominent New York architect. A national Depression in 1837 scuttled building plans and by the time work resumed Pollard was elsewhere. King retained much of Pollard's Greek Revival design although today the original architect is completely forgotten - by ill luck not one of his New York buildings survives. The center cupola was added in 1898, the year Brooklyn was consolidated into New York City.

Annapolis, Maryland

The Anne Arundel County Courthouse is the third oldest courthouse still in use in Maryland.
Begun in 1821 and completed in 1824, the earliest portion of the courthouse was built to provide
a safe repository for County records and meeting rooms for the County Court and its officials,
a use that has continued to this day. Several expansions followed. Architecturally, the 1892-95
alterations and additions to the courthouse still define its overall character. Designed by Jackson C.
Gott, an important Baltimore architect, the alterations dramatically transformed the appearance of
the restrained, almost flat Federal Style building into a more graceful, three-dimensional Georgian
Revival structure, featuring the prominent entrance tower, corner pavilions and the second floor
courtroom.

Conway, South Carolina

In 1906 Col. D.A. Spivey introduced in the General Assembly the Act authorizing the construction of the Horry County Courthouse. The building committee was composed of C.P. Quattlebaum, John C. Spivey and John P. Durham. The formal opening was held in 1908, with Governor Martin F. Ansel as speaker. The building, crowned with an octagonal cupola topped by a finial with eagle weathervane, underwent renovation in 1937 and 1964. A portrait of Revolutionary War Colonel Peter Horry, for whom the county was named, hangs in the front hall, given by the local DAR chapter.

Windsor, Connecticut

The Georgian Revival Town Hall displays many of the hallmarks of the style - symmetry, corner quoins, balustrades and a center hall plan. It opened in 1966.

Mount Holly, New Jersey

With over 200 years of continuous use, the Burlington County Courthouse is one of only a handful of courthouses in America that can trace its roots back into the 1700s. Burlington City was the capital of the Province of West Jersey and the county seat until 1796 when the site of the County Court House moved to Mount Holly. Samuel Lewis of Philadelphia was selected to design the new building and he delivered a near replica of his Congress Hall and Old City Hall, the buildings flanking Independence Hall in Philadelphia. This splendid example of Colonial architecture is beautifully preserved with painted brick. Flanking the court house are a pair of single-story office buildings that were constructed in 1807. The courthouse bell, cast in England in 1755, was removed and installed from an earlier courthouse. It is said to have rung to signal the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

This is the third courthouse located on this site. The first built sometime after 1843 was destroyed in the 1849 fire. The second was an imposing Greek revival structure demolished to make way for the current sandstone structure, designed by L. S. Jacoby of Allentown. On the building’s centennial in 1983, it was refurbished, leaving original Victorian courtroom preserved.

Hoboken, New Jersey

This square block was donated to the City by Colonel John Stevens who saw it as the home of a public marketplace. Instead it became home to City Hall. The original building was executed in 1883 by Francis George Himpler, who also drew plans for Our Lady of Grace Church, St. Mary’s Hospital and the Sacred Heart Academy. Himpler’s Second Empire design was classically modified in 1911 when City Hall picked up two projecting bays out front, an enlargement to the third floor and a jail to the rear.

When the first town hall was dedicated on May 2, 1825 the price tag for the two-story building was $9,017.90. When this Italian Renaissance city hall was opened to great fanfare on April 28, 1898 the final cost was $625,000. Worcester had come a long way through the 19th century. Distinguished artist and architect Richard Morris Hunt was engaged to oversee the project but he died and his son Richard Howland Hunt shepherded the building to completion. Faced with grey Milford granite, the magnificent Florentine capanile tower is 205 feet high, modeled on the Palazzo Vecchio. A bronze star set in the sidewalk marks the spot where, on July 14, 1776, Isaiah Thomas read the Declaration of Independence for the first time to a New England audience from the steps of the Old South Meeting House.

Port Deposit, Maryland

This building was constructed for use as a gymnasium by the Jacob Tome Institute in 1905. A gift to the town from Wiley Manufacturing Company, it included the first indoor swimming pool in Cecil County, a basketball court, locker rooms and showers. This stone building has typical Georgian Revival details including the dentiled and modillioned cornice, keystone lintels, and a Palladian window arrangement on the center gable. After interior renovations, completed in 1983, it serves as the municipal offices, library and public meeting room of the town.

Uniontown, Pennsylvania

Built in 1847, Fayette County purchased the property where the courthouse stands from Uniontown’s founder Henry Beeson for six pence which is the equivalent of about six cents today. The Richardson Romanesque structure was built out of local materials and features a clock tower along with a statue of the county’s namesake Marquis de Lafayette in its lobby. The eight-foot wooden statue was carved in 1847 by David Blythe, who became one of the outstanding native-scenes artists of his century. Larger than life, the polar planks are pinned together and his high hat is fashioned from tin. The statue periodically goes traveling to museums and art exhibits.

Willimantic, Connecticut

It took 1.25 million bricks to construct the Romanesque-inspired Town Hall in 1896. The Victorian confection rests on a foundation of ashlar brownstone and is capped by a copper clock tower with cupola. Warren Richard Briggs was the architect.

Chestertown, Maryland

One of the most important acts in establishing a port of Chestertown in 1706 was the provision for a court house. The earliest known plat of the town shows the 18th-century, apsidal-ended court house in the center of a large area of public ground with Emmanuel Church in one corner and the cemetery or church yard using much of the rest. A small jail stood behind the court house, the latter being of about the same size as the church in the late eighteenth century. The front section of the present Kent County court house was built in 1860, using a T-shaped plan whose main axis faces High Street. This, the oldest surviving part, is in essentially Italianate style, solidly built of hard, dark brick, with typically low roof, wide eaves, and elongated brackets along the cornice and on the doorframe. With the cemetery gone and the need for interior space pressing, a Colonial Revival addition was attached to the rear, with access from Cross Street, in 1969.

Newark, New Jersey

Architects Mowbray, Uffinger and Ely dispensed with function to create one of America’s grandest Beaux Arts-style public buildings. Completed in 1908, the final price tag for the five story limestone building was more than $2.6 million. The enormous interior space under a heavily ornamented dome boasts carved marble and fine paneling, a grand central staircase, stained-glass skylights, and decorative plaster and wrought-iron works. The central dome inside is made of copper and is flanked by atria with glass ceilings. Developer Harry Grant paid to have the dome covered in 24 karat gold in 1986.

The previous home for the City’s administrative offices was a block to the north. In 1870 Broad Street in front of City Hall was paved with asphalt courtesy of Edmund J. DeSmedt, a Belgian chemist. It was the first recorded use of asphalt on an American street. Six years later asphalt was used to pave Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in anticipation of the nation’s Centennial in 1876. But today’s ubiquitous sticky black petroleum distillate was slow to catch on - as late as 1904 there were only 141 miles of paved asphalt roads in the entire United States.

Old Saybrook, Connecticut

Old Saybrook’s most famous resident was Katharine Hepburn, born in Hartford to an heiress to the Corning Glass fortune and a urologist father. In 1911 Dr. Thomas Hepburn bought a summer home in Fenwick, Old Saybrook in 1911. In 1997, after retiring from the most honored career in AMerican movie history, Katharine Hepburn moved from her New York City home to live in the family retreat full time. She died here in 2003 at the age of 96.

Old Town Hall was constructed in 1908 in the Colonial Revival style as a performance house for the old Saybrook Musical and Dramatic Club. The Town Hall also screened the first movies in Old Saybrook as the center of the town’s entertainment for more than 40 years. In the 1950s the Town of Old Saybrook brought the theater to an end, dividing the audience chamber into town offices and turning the stage into a conference room. In 2003, with the town offices removed into more expansive quarters, the building was restored to its original use as a theater. Two years later, the Hepburn family approved the naming of the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center.  

Carbondale, Pennsylvania

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, this Romanesque Revival red-brick municipal building was designed by Truman I. Lacey around the original two-story structure to the rear by changing the roof, adding the three-story wing and incorporating the signature clock tower. The home for city government offices opened in 1894.

Brockton, Massachusetts

After a nomadic existence since the incorporation of Brockton as a city in 1821, the first permanent home of the city government was constructed between 1892 and 1894. It was built on the site of the Centre School that had started in 1797. Wesley Lyng Minor, a Louisiana-born architect who settled in Brockton and designed many homes in the City, drew up the designs in Romanesque style. Construction materials included yellow brick, granite foundations and terra cotta and brownstone trim. City Hall was also intended as a Civil War monument in the interior halls and as home to the city library.