by Sam Roberts
4
CITY HALL
City Hall, the palatial seat of municipal government, as seen in 1907. (New York Times)
The adage “You can’t fight City Hall” originated even before the elegant Federal-style seat of municipal government was completed. In fact, David E. Launy, a watchmaker who lived on Warren Street across Broadway, disproved it. He fought City Hall and won. Launy filed suit against the city immediately after the cornerstone to the new City Hall was laid, on May 26, 1803, at a site formerly occupied by an almshouse and gallows. He was claiming damages and seeking restitution to replace his store windows, which he claimed had been shattered when seventeen cannons boomed to inaugurate the start of construction. Launy was later indemnified for his loss by the city comptroller, and while he was neither the first nor last citizen to successfully fight City Hall, the caricature of the frustrated everyman versus wily politicians and unbudgeable bureaucrats persists to this day.
New York’s first City Hall, appropriately enough, was housed in the City Tavern, on Pearl Street at Coenties Slip. Except for the bell tower, topped by a copper weather vane in the form of a rooster, on the typical Dutch gabled roof, it wasn’t much to crow about. By 1641, the tavern was converted into the Stadt Huys under Willem Kieft, the director-general of New Amsterdam, because he had wearied of entertaining visitors in his own home. Kieft, whom Washington Irving later lampooned as “William the Testy,” was best known for his futile ban on pipe smoking, which Kieft considered immoral and a waste of time and money. Irving argued that Kieft had been naïvely cavalier, however, because the pipe was “the great organ of reflection and deliberation of the New Netherlander.” Kieft finally relented, but only after “a vast multitude, armed with pipes and tobacco-boxes, and an immense supply of ammunition,” as Irving described it, “sat themselves down before the governor’s house, and fell to smoking with tremendous violence.”
After forty years of formative Dutch tradition, New Amsterdamers resiliently accommodated themselves to British colonialism, which began in 1664. By 1699, the British builders had razed the earthen and wooden stockade, built earlier in the seventeenth century to ward off attacks by Indians and English adventurers from New England, and salvaged some of the wood to build a proper City Hall at what was then the northern border of New York—on the corner of Nassau Street and the newly named Wall Street.
After the British belatedly evacuated New York, in 1783, the proud city fathers bequeathed the building to the new federal government, which remodeled it into Federal Hall just in time for Congress to convene in March 1789. (During the renovations, the city fathers repaired to John Simmons Tavern at Wall and Nassau Streets, then apparently shared the remodeled building with Congress.) It served as the nation’s first capitol for 531 days before the government decamped temporarily for Philadelphia, despite that city’s record of pestilence, mutinous federal troops, and antislavery Quakers. A correspondent for the New York Daily Advertiser complained that the congressmen were being most ungrateful after the Common Council had generously subsidized what it was led to believe would be the federal government’s permanent venue. “While the citizens are paying taxes to defray this enormous expense, Congress propose to leave them without assigning any cause of displeasure,” the correspondent wrote in June 1790. “The city is now erecting a noble mansion for the President of the United States. The cornerstone was scarcely laid, when this fresh proof of their respect for the government was repaid with a motion of adjournment to Philadelphia.”
Federal Hall was falling apart anyway, and ten years later, in 1800, the Common Council named a committee that decided to replace the old seat of government. Why it did so might have been as much a matter of salving wounded civic pride as practical expediency. In 1897, the state legislature also had decamped—permanently, in this case—for Albany, so Government House, where the state lawmakers convened and which had been leased as a hotel since then, was theoretically available as a City Hall. But the snubbed city fathers were in no mind-set to settle for a hand-me-down. New York demanded a structure that would suggest the city’s future trajectory and be dignified, democratic, practical, and imposing—and unrivaled. By 1800, as Evan Cornog noted in 1988, in the journal New York History, Philadelphia “was continually held up as the standard that New York must compete against.” New York led in foreign trade and population, but Philadelphia still claimed the title of the emergent nation’s cultural capital and could boast of more majestic architecture, including Independence Hall and Benjamin Latrobe’s Classical Revival Bank of Pennsylvania. All this suggested that New York’s Common Council was concerned with more than just physical space when it considered whether, where, and what to build to replace Federal Hall. “The building that was built, and the way it was built,” Cornog wrote, “suggests that the decision had less to do with practicality than with the desire of the city to have a grand building that would stake New York’s claim to be the preeminent city in the nation.”
But where to construct this grand building? New York would inevitably bulge uptown, but how far? The council decided on the Common, fully a mile north of Manhattan’s southern tip, but still less than a third the distance between the Battery and North Street, which defined the city’s border on the East Side (and which would later be incorporated into Houston Street). The Common was a sodden plateau that ended in a ravine at what today is Chambers Street. As its name suggests, the Common had a history of public engagement. It was where slave-owning families let their captives celebrate the Dutch holiday of Pinkster; where the Sons of Liberty clashed with British troops; and where African Americans and the poor were buried. It was already a civic center of sorts, with the requisite almshouse and jail, as well as a gallows and whipping post (both were transplanted elsewhere before the new City Hall was completed). Beyond the ravine at Chambers Street, the land sloped to a pond called the Collect, drained by streams that flowed in both directions, to the East and Hudson Rivers.
The council decided on an architectural competition, and twenty-six hopefuls submitted plans (only three of which survive). Two men won the commission jointly: John McComb Jr., the city’s first native-born and leading post-revolutionary architect, who had designed Hamilton Grange; and Joseph François Mangin, a French-born surveyor who had arrived in the city by way of Saint-Domingue and designed the state prison in Greenwich Village and the Gothic Revival St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mulberry Street. The leading sore loser was Benjamin Latrobe of Philadelphia, who had suggested a Classical Revival colonnaded entrance portico and central dome (he later designed the U.S. Capitol in Washington). He dismissed the winning architects as a “New York bricklayer and a St. Domingo Frenchman” and their finished masterpiece as a “vile heterogeneous composition.”
Mangin envisioned a hybrid French Renaissance facade that resembled a Louis XIV–era petit palais. It would be distinguished by a long flight of steps, a columned entrance portico, and an American Georgian clock tower capped by a cupola. A soaring domed marble rotunda that evoked the Roman Pantheon would be encircled by twin cantilevered staircases dominating the American Georgian interior. McComb was largely credited with the construction, Mangin for the original design, so Mangin’s role diminished once work began. By 1815, Mangin was said to have become so destitute that he applied for a loan to the council’s Committee on Charity, which reported that he was “very poor, and unless he receives some small assistance will be compelled to take refuge in the Alms House.”
As complicated as it was, dodging the dueling egos during the competition over the plans for City Hall turned out to be far simpler than transforming the designs into a conspicuously distinguished edifice. Construction, in fits and starts, took fully eight years, given the architects’ fussy specifications, the council’s guilty bouts of frugality versus its rivalry with Philadelphia for aesthetic elegance, and the delays triggered by yellow fever epidemics, stonemasons’ strikes, and diversions of labor and material to gird for the possibility of a devastating atta
ck, like the British assault on Washington during the War of 1812 that would level the White House.
The builder of record was Ezra Weeks, whose younger brother, Levi, a carpenter, had been accused in the killing of a young woman whose body was found in a Manhattan well in 1799. The legal dream team of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr defended him—successfully. (Levi was ostracized, though, and fled to Mississippi, where he became a prominent architect.)
The building’s protracted construction was later immortalized in a verse in the folk song “The Irish Rover” (although there is no indication that bricks were imported from Ireland for the project, the song might be historically accurate since the lyrics also say that the ship that was supposedly carrying them sank before it reached its destination):
In the year of our Lord, eighteen hundred and six,
We set sail from the Coal Quay of Cork
We were sailing away with a cargo of bricks
For the grand City Hall in New York
Foreshadowing much of what would happen inside the seat of municipal government for the next two hundred years, the builders and the fussbudgets differed most not so much about the basic design of the City Hall but about the window dressing. Reversing the Economy Committee, the Building Committee finally embraced McComb’s compelling case against penny-pinching and in favor of sheathing the front and side facades in specially quarried marble. Prodded by McComb, the committee concluded:
It should be remembered that this building is intended to endure for ages, that it is to be narrowly inspected not only by the scrutinizing eyes of our own citizens, but of every scientific stranger, and in an architectural point of view it in fact is to give a character to our city, the additional expense of marble will be fully counterbalanced when we recollect that from the elegance and situation of this building, the public property on the Broadway and Collect will much increase in value, and that the same influence will be extended to property far beyond these limits and that in the course of a very few years it is destined to be in the center of the wealth and population of this city, a building so constructed will do honor to its founders and be commensurate with our flourishing situation.
By 1808, the full council agreed to split the difference: marble on the front and sides, Newark brownstone in the back (in part, because visitors were more likely to enter from the front, the back faced the almshouse, and, while the street grid was being mapped as far north as 155th Street, Manhattan north of City Hall was still a long way from becoming populated). Boats and oxcarts delivered more than thirty-five thousand cubic feet of marble from West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, obligating the city to pay turnpike overseers extra to reinforce bridges along the route to accommodate the load. (As it turned out, though, by the early 1950s, pollution and pigeon droppings had taken their toll on the marble, and the entire building had to be re-clad in a more durable Alabama limestone atop a base of Missouri granite.) In August 1811, with the roof unfinished (the copper sheathing was still on its way from Europe), the councilmen convened at City Hall for the first time.
On July 4, 1812, Mayor DeWitt Clinton officially inaugurated City Hall with considerably less fanfare (and, presumably, less glass-shattering reverberations from cannon fire) than when the cornerstone was laid eleven years earlier. In the council’s formal minutes, the announcement that the building was now officially New York’s City Hall appeared, more or less routinely, between the appointment of a fire warden and a resolution requiring the city to share any revenue from fines against individuals for unlawful removal of manure on public thoroughfares with the private contractors who had been hired to remove it. “Perhaps the looming war with England dampened enthusiasm,” Evan Cornog wrote. “Perhaps the citizens, like McComb and the Common Council, saw the completion of the building as a cause more for relief than for joy.”
But the critical acclaim was immediate and virtually unanimous. Thomas Stanford, in his 1814 Concise Description of the City of New York, described City Hall as “the most magnificent structure in the United States.” Blunt’s visitors’ guide declared: “The City Hall is the most prominent and most important building in New York,” adding, “It is the handsomest structure in the United States: perhaps of its size, in the world.” A visitor from London in 1829 compared it to the statehouse in Amsterdam, but added that in terms of the interior, “no corporation in Europe is, indeed, so splendidly accommodated as that of New York.” In his New Cosmopolis (1915), the idiosyncratic cultural critic James Huneker wrote that “City Hall is the priceless gem in our architectural tiara. Buried as it is by the patronizing bulk and height of its neighbors, it more than holds its own in dignity, simplicity, and pure linear beauty—qualities conspicuous by their absence in the adjacent vacant structures.”
More recently, in her essay in City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (2014), Mary P. Ryan offered a more muted but no less glowing assessment of what she described as Mangin and McComb’s “architectural puzzle and political marvel”—the hybrid, collaborative design “that beckons citizens inside New York’s republican sphere” with a spacious and welcoming gateway to their seat of government and a sense, once inside the broad passageways and unobstructed rotunda, of accessibility. “New Yorkers crafted a modest building that, in the regard of ordinary citizens and architectural critics alike, is a landmark in public architecture,” Ryan wrote. “The sight of it evokes a pervasive and palpable sense of welcome into civic space.”
When it was finally finished, the little palatial structure with a 215-foot wingspan wasn’t billed as a forbidding government house but as a decidedly accessible space where New Yorkers could observe council meetings from a gallery, buttonhole their elected representatives in the lobby, and demonstrate their opposition or support for municipal policies right outside the mayor’s window. City Hall had deliberately been sited to accommodate constituents in what was then the city’s largest public park. Perhaps too public, as the council complained, and not for the last time, shortly after City Hall opened. Lawmakers soon introduced a resolution protesting “the indecent practice of persons making water against the walls,” a practice that literally (as far as public urination goes) appeared to have been dealt with satisfactorily, but that figuratively (in terms of being pissed off at the government) would be repeated indefinitely.
For more than two centuries, City Hall would remain the nexus of political power in the city and, no matter what the cause, the preferred venue for pomp and protest. It was where abolitionists protested the return of runaway slaves to southern plantation owners, where journeyman tailors demanded higher wages, where suffragists demanded that women be allowed to vote, and where the city celebrated its first reliable resource of potable water when the initial flow from Westchester erupted in a plume from the new Croton Fountain at the foot of City Hall Park. Lafayette was feted there. So was Charles Dickens. (So was the self-indulgent Common Council, presenting the taxpayers with a bill for four thousand cigars in one month and for the operation of a tearoom when the council was in session, prompting Horace Greeley of the Tribune to groan, “If they are worth having, they are worth paying; but paying them and feasting them too, is rather too much.”) Lincoln visited on his way to Washington in 1861 and returned to lie in state in 1865 en route home to Illinois. Dignitaries and foreign potentates making obligatory courtesy calls were greeted with symbolic keys to a city that long ago had razed its tangible wall and gates, as they wended their way through a blizzard of ticker tape (or what passed for it when ticker tape became obsolete) that episodically transformed lower Broadway into the Canyon of Heroes.
Perth Amboy, New Jersey, claims the oldest city hall in continuous use in the United States, but its assertion is tenuous at best. That structure was erected in 1870 around remnants of a courthouse built in 1713, rebuilt two times in the eighteenth century, and renovated twice more in the nineteenth. New York’s, on the other hand, is described as “the oldest city hall in the country that still hou
ses its original government functions.” New York retains that distinction only because city fathers demonstrated rare foresight in resisting repeated pressures to abandon their fetching home, even as the municipal government outgrew it and Manhattan’s center of gravity inevitably shifted toward midtown. By 1833, the courts had already decamped, and barely two decades after City Hall opened, municipal officials mulled an offer to sell the building to the federal government and transplant their operations to the up-and-coming neighborhood around Union Square, at Fourteenth Street. In the early 1850s, Mayor Fernando Wood suggested that the existing building was anachronistic, and in 1857, the Board of Aldermen authorized a replacement. (Wood was also in favor of distancing the city from the United States; for a time, he supported secession.) But by the time developers broke ground, the proposed successor to City Hall had already been repurposed as a county courthouse at the north end of the triangular park.
In the early 1890s, plans for a new City Hall had proceeded to the point of another architectural competition. “Tearing down the old city hall posed no problem (at least prior to 1900)—from the Tammany perspective, the building, a relic of old WASP hegemony, was clearly dispensable,” Michael H. Bogart wrote in 1999 in the Journal of Urban History. The Tilden Trust even suggested uprooting the building and transplanting it to Bryant Park (perhaps atop a ziggurat) as a museum. The New York Times advocated replacement of the existing building with an edifice “worthy of the metropolis.” But an essay by Andrew Haswell Green, today a largely forgotten civic paragon, galvanized a historic preservation campaign because, he wrote, “as has been well said, ‘it stands today unsurpassed by any structure of its kind in the country.’ ” Harper’s magazine concluded, “The majority of cultivated persons in New York would regard the demolition of City Hall not only as a municipal calamity, but as an act of vandalism.” In 1894, the state legislature, in denying New York City home rule even on so obviously local a matter as where to place its own seat of government, passed a law prohibiting City Hall’s demolition.
