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Philadelphia
City Hall serves
as the seat of the municipal government of the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
It houses the chambers of the Philadelphia
City Council and the offices of the Mayor of Philadelphia. It is also a
courthouse, serving as the seat of the First Judicial District of
Pennsylvania, and houses the Civil Trial and Orphans' Court Divisions of the
Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia.
Built
of brick, white marble, and limestone, Philadelphia City Hall is the world’s
largest free-standing masonry building. The weight of the building is borne by granite and
brick walls up to 22 feet thick. The building structure used over 88 million
bricks and thousands of tons of marble and granite.
The
building was constructed from 1871 to 1901. Designed to be the world’s
tallest building, it was surpassed during construction by the Washington
Monument and the Eiffel Tower. Upon completion of its tower in 1894, it
became the world’s tallest habitable building. It was also the first secular
building to have this distinction, as all previous world’s tallest buildings
were religious structures, including European cathedrals and – for the
previous 3,800 years – the Great Pyramid of Giza.
With
almost 700 rooms, City Hall is the largest municipal building in the United
States.
FUN
FACT: In the 1950s, the city council investigated tearing down City Hall for
a new building elsewhere. They found that the demolition would have bankrupted
the city due to the building’s masonry construction.
SEE
ALSO: William Penn Statue
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| NORTHSIDE OF PHILADELPHIA CITY HALL By Toniklemm - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81012838 |
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