"A Laudable Pride in the Whole of Us":
City Halls and Civic Materialism

MARY P. RYAN

The object of civic pride referred to in the title of this essay is a classic municipal building that still stands and serves a public purpose in the city of New Orleans. First opened in 1853 (and now called Gallier Hall, in recognition of its architect), it was designed as the place of government for the city's second municipal district, better known as the "American Quarter." Upon its inauguration, the Municipal Hall won accolades for serving such diverse public purposes as "affording employment to large numbers of citizens, the bone and sinew of society," and displaying "the progress of taste in our midst. . . increasing prosperity and of course. . . a laudable pride in the whole of us." This single and rather modest building proved to be a capacious civic symbol, expansive enough to satisfy both artistic standards and commercial values, to meet the needs of workers as well as merchants, and to inspire allegiance from those who claimed the United States as either their "native or adopted land."1	1
Like thousands of similar structures that dotted the American landscape in the nineteenth century, the Municipal Hall of the Second District of New Orleans also harbors rich evidence about civic life in the past; but, like all historical documents, its meaning remains complex and ambiguous. Even as the inhabitants of the American Quarter of New Orleans boasted of their new public accommodations, the city's sizable and equally proud minority, those of French descent, snubbed the new building and gathered downriver in their own public places in the French Quarter. Public attitudes toward civic buildings were fickle as well as diverse. Midway through the nineteenth century, residents of American cities tended to share New Orleans' pride in their public architecture. New Yorkers were so attached to their City Hall, for example, that when it was ravished by fire it provoked "universal grief" and poignant pleas to rebuild it for the sake of "the jostled, jammed and unsheltered public."2 Under a democracy, however, the official occupants of civic residences were only tenants, never owners, and consequently the public reputation of city hall could change as quickly as an annual election. In the last half of the nineteenth century, city halls across America came under a cloud of suspicion and became emblems more of "the shame of the cities" than the "pride of the whole of us." This essay will not resolve the longstanding dispute about the pride or shame of either cities or civic architecture but seeks to demonstrate that the protean passions public buildings inspired merit more attention from historians. Objects that provoked such intense public reaction, be it pride or scorn, are of interest both in their own right and as factors that contribute to the formation of civic culture and the course of historical events.	2
Although civic architecture is a tangible, obdurate, indeed monumental, form of evidence about the past, it is too seldom studied outside the field of art history. Yet scattered investigations of Italian Renaissance squares, imperial government houses, English town halls, and Beaux Arts courthouses offer convincing proof that architecture and the built environment are invested with historical significance of a very high order. We are told that public buildings in particular have "the power . . . to shape and structure experience," to "represent . . . power, authority, and legitimacy within the community." One scholar has shown that the public spaces of Paris played "a major role in defining the history of the city" and "in the creation and representation of the centralized state." Others have read English town halls as "statements in brick and mortar of urban consciousness and of pride and confidence in their towns," as "exponents of the life and soul of the city."3 Taken in the aggregate, case studies such as these point to public architecture as a prime example of the interpretive promise of the "cultural landscape" as defined by Dell Upton: "The fusion of the physical with the imaginative structures that all inhabitants of the landscape use in constructing and construing it."4	3
This essay adapts these principles of architectural and landscape analysis as strategies for solving some quite conventional problems in urban and political history. It exploits the potential of the built environment not just to represent the cultural assumptions of its builders and architects but also to provide a three-dimensional form of evidence about history more generally. More than just a textual or visual imprint from the past, the built environment constituted the actual physical space in which people made history. Accordingly, the buildings constructed and used by a public body could be pivotal to historical developments. In the prudent formulation of architect and historian Peter Rowe, they can "without anthropomorphizing too much become actors, or at least significant stage sets for actors in a much broader play of sociopolitical forces." Rowe has demonstrated this power of public places through the exegesis of something he calls "civic realism." He postulates that "publicly accessible spaces can have and should have a civic orientation that is direct, palpable, and there for the purposes of reminding us both of who we are and who we might become." While Rowe's words echo the sentiments of the editor of the New Orleans Picayune in 1853, the examples he offers, the Piazza Del Campo in Sienna, the New York City Plan of 1803, and François Mitterand's grands projets for Paris, are drawn from the pantheon of Western architecture.5 This case study considers more vernacular material sources—American city halls—and will interrogate them for evidence about modern democracies rather than ancient republics or West European monarchies.	4
Before returning to these comparative architectural questions, this investigation will address a more specific and prosaic issue in the history of American urban politics. The history of the nineteenth-century American city has long been encased in a kind of reverse Whig interpretation, which charts a steep decline from republican civic virtue to the corruption of city machines, which provoked a warfare between bosses and reformers that has been waging in the history books and newspapers ever since.6 Analysis of the architectural form of the American city hall injects a kind of civic materialism, if not realism, into this debate. What Americans colloquially imagine as "city hall" is a unique focal point of the everyday, ordinary experience of citizenship, a lay person's political practice that is seldom articulated in a formal or literary way. The term itself was conjured up in the public imagination in the nineteenth century when it anchored the idea of government in a social space and shaped political expectations around a public meeting place, a hall. This essay will examine these public buildings and their immediate surroundings for evidence of a vernacular political culture that complicates that all-too-familiar descending plotline of American urban history.7	5
This material and vernacular evidence requires its own ad hoc methodology. What follows is, first of all, an exercise in institutional political history. It examines the decision-making process that led nineteenth-century American cities to invest, at times extravagantly, in public buildings. The city hall was the product of nitty-gritty political struggle: its planning and construction required decisive collective action, severely tested the public will, and taxed the pocketbooks of notoriously niggardly citizens. Once constructed, the city hall yields a second and especially resonant kind of material evidence for historians. The floor plans and spatial arrangement of the city hall literally set the path of citizens through their government. The way a municipal building was situated within the larger urban plan offers material answers to such vexing questions as, Where do public and private meet? How does civil society relate to the state? The third research strategy is a straightforward analysis of text and rituals, as well as stylistic and decorative features of buildings, in order to decipher the symbolic meanings ordinary citizens might have attached to their government. All told, vernacular architecture bespeaks more than the aesthetic intentions of architects: it testifies about a whole sequence of civic actions that involved politicians, bureaucrats, builders, voters, and anonymous citizens. Many fingerprints, in other words, can be found upon the marble and bronze of America's city halls.	6
The sites chosen for deploying these tools of civic materialism represent a range of cities, located in the North, South, and West of the United States. Over the course of the critical period of American political development roughly bounded by the nineteenth century, three locations—New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco—produced five exemplary public buildings.8 The first research site is the seat of Spanish colonial administration in New Orleans, built between 1795 and 1799 and called the Cabildo. This structure, which occupies the very center of the French Quarter, served as the house of government until 1852, when the city offices were relocated to the Municipal Hall of the American Quarter, the second research location. The story of public architecture in New Orleans will be followed by tales of two buildings located in lower Manhattan. The first has borne the proper name City Hall since construction began in 1803. The second, its intended extension, soon took the name of County Courthouse, and its cornerstone was laid in 1862. The final location for this study, San Francisco, not only extends the regional scope of this story but also provides a chronological counterpoint. For decades, San Franciscans made their civic home in the secondhand quarters of the Jenny Lind Theater. They did not lay the cornerstone for a proper city hall until 1872, and the project was not completed until 1892. San Franciscans made up for their tardiness with an ornate and massive construction project: it would fill four acres of public space. The historical meaning of these city halls did not terminate when construction ended. The buildings themselves framed the subsequent thought and behavior of leaders and citizens, sometimes for well more than a century.	7
The first examples of municipal building in the New World serve to remind political historians that North American cities hosted a great variety of governmental systems. This catalog of civic architecture begins in the city of New Orleans with a building that testifies to both the multiple national heritages and the imperial ancestry of the American political tradition. The first house of government in Louisiana goes by the generic Spanish title Cabildo, dates from 1769 in the reign of Charles IV, and was erected on a French town plan designed in 1721 for Louis XIV. The dual pillars of the ancien régime, military power and religious uniformity, were built into the urban plan for New Orleans, which placed the hall of government in the central square, beside St. Louis Cathedral and facing a military parade grounds, the Place d'Armes. The central square was decorated with such symbols of state power as a pillory, arsenal, and jail. To this day, the alliance of church and state is symbolically central in the city of New Orleans, where the symmetrical triad of St. Louis Cathedral, the Presbytère, and the Cabildo stand sentinel over the tourists and street musicians of Jackson Square.9 (See Figure 1.)	8
Figure 1: The Place d'Armes in 1803 by J. S. Boqueto de Woiserie. Shown are the Cabildo, the St. Louis Cathedral, the unfinished Presbytère and Almonaster's buildings, which then flanked the square. Courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, Museum/Research Center, New Orleans.
The first modest Cabildo burned down in 1788, clearing the way for the landmark public building that still stands in Jackson Square. The creation of a new house of government was not the simple fiat of the Spanish throne but rather an act of local administration, which augured a new regime in pubic architecture. The Cabildo was the initiative of Don Andrés Almonester y Roxas, who had made his fortune by converting land grants from the crown into lucrative real estate in the trading post on the Gulf of Mexico. Almonester parlayed colonial success into a knighthood, a place on the colonial council, and the authority to plan public space. According to the minutes of the colonial council, it was agreed in 1785 "to let this gentleman proceed to reconstruct [the Cabildo] under the terms he had proposed, giving him sufficient authority to carry it out." Almonester's noblesse oblige bore a certain taint of self-interest. His contract called for reimbursement from the government coffers with the sole proviso that the sums expended would never be so large as to deplete the treasury. Nor was the financing of this early American civic building without the petty rancor that would mark the history of American public spending. The philanthropist's widow would be bickering with the city fathers about the bill for the Cabildo as late as 1803, four years after its completion.10	9
The hybrid process of constructing the Cabildo, equal parts colonial decree and New World mercantile enterprise, was reflected in the completed building, as designed by a French engineer named Gilberto Guillemard, who was under the hire of the Spanish military. The Cabildo provided a fitting stage for the top-down administration of colonial power. The majority of the space was set aside for the corps de garde, and its signature architectural feature, a five-gabled arcade fronting the square, was adapted from the design of an earlier military structure. The entire two-story rectangular edifice was encased in thick brick and stucco walls and trimmed with Roman embellishments, which lent a sense of enclosing authority to the whole building. The floor above this military fortification was laid out for the more polite aspects of colonial administration. The offices of local administrators were fronted by reception rooms and a handsome arcaded gallery. The largest room on the second story, the Sala Capitular, was the only space in the architecture of authority whose arrangement suggested public deliberation and the interplay of citizens and officials. The beamed ceiling, the fireplace, and comfortable furnishings created an environment conducive to polite conversation about public concerns. The Governor's Council ordered twelve seats, which were probably grouped around a small table like that found in later restorations of the room. A nest of plain benches was placed a few paces away, at a distance that suggests the patience of colonial supplicants who awaited the adjudication of disputes by the crown's agents in New Orleans.	10
The Cabildo's interior space carefully contained any more active and widespread political participation. The entrance to the house of colonial government was through a vaguely marked arch roughly in the center of the arcade. It did not lead to a clear civic destination within. Doorways to both the left and right of the entryway led to the rooms assigned to the corps de garde. Beyond the former was a rugged stone stairway providing access to a second-floor gallery fronting the Place d'Armes and affording a narrow space for courtly reception. At the center of the second story was a block of undistinguished rooms, among them a council chamber set rather recessively toward the side of the building. As if to interrupt this broken, halting access to the Sala Capitular yet again, the architect provided an alternative, more direct but more secretive, access to the office of the executive authority, a small stair at the rear of the first floor room, which was assigned to the lamplighter. In sum, the internal space of this early American governmental building paid some respect to grand neo-classical spaces found in eighteenth-century royal houses (the arcade and the gallery) and resembled the halls of state in Renaissance republics with a council chamber on the second story. Still, the Cabildo offered ordinary citizens limited access and failed to provide anyone a very direct or inviting path to some center of civic assembly or deliberation. (See Figure 2.)	11
Figure 2: Second-floor plan of the Cabildo. Drawn for the Historic American Building Survey. Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress.
The decorative features of the Cabildo also denoted a government insulated from the general population. The walls were graced with the portraits of Charles IV and his family; the tympanum of the pediment presented the Spanish coat of arms to the rustic population that lounged in the Place d'Armes. Just below that symbol was a second-floor balcony lined with intricate iron railings. This final architectural characteristic of the ancien régime in the Americas, the balcony, provided an elevated space from which colonial authorities might issue proclamations and enact the proper protocol of absolutism. Rather than inviting the people into the public house, this architectural feature was designed for dispensing edicts from the citadel of authority.11	12
The political ideology implicit in the architecture of the Cabildo was also displayed in the ceremonies performed around it and in the impressions it made on contemporaries. The galleries of the Cabildo and the space of Place d'Armes became the stage on which to mimic the pomp of European courts. Events in the history of the royal family or military victories were commemorated in an almost feudal manner, with a proclamation in the Cabildo, a Mass in St. Louis Cathedral, and a procession of officials through the Place d'Armes. Almonester's knighthood, for example, occasioned a reenactment of Old World pretensions. "He was enveloped in the great mantle of the Order and his train was carried by three lackeys in red. An immense crowd followed him as he went in state from the Cathedral to his dwelling. He placed himself in his mantle, at the door of his drawing room, where he affectionately kissed on both cheeks all who approached to greet him, to the number of more than three hundred." This procession passed by the Cabildo, which was then under construction at the behest of the new knight. It would stand for some time to come as a symbol of the brief and shabby reign of feudal absolutism in North America. A visitor in 1813 was still moved by the symmetry of the north side of the Place d'Armes: "quite an imposing aggregate of law, religion and punishment." A few years later, another visitor from the North was shocked when the deliberations in the Sala Capitular were interrupted by shrieks from the corps de garde below, emitted by slaves being whipped at their masters' behest for a fee of 25 cents. The ground outside the Cabildo maintained a pillory for slaves until 1847, twenty years after it had been abolished for free white criminals. Nothing in the manner of erection, the spatial organization, or the vernacular uses of the Cabildo gave any suggestion of incipient democracy in North America.12	13
A visit to the Cabildo at the midpoint of the nineteenth century would find it only slightly updated, despite some major political changes in the Crescent City, by 1850 a booming commercial town in the jurisdiction of the United States of America. A city hall handed down from a colonial oligarchy still served as the mayor's office until 1852. Although the Spanish coat of arms was removed from the pediment in 1804, soon after the Louisiana Territory was purchased by the United States, it was not replaced with an American eagle until 1819. The Sala Capitular was converted to a city council chamber and refurbished in 1825 to serve as the quarters of visiting dignitary General Lafayette. Only with the reorganization of the city into three municipalities in 1836, a time when city elections had become more contested and partisan, was this chamber enlarged to accommodate the popularly elected legislature. By then, the reinvigoration of commerce as well as politics was apparent in the grounds around the Cabildo. The daughter of the Cabildo's original benefactor, Micaela, Baroness de Pontalba, contributed the major improvement of the Place d'Armes, the elegant brick structures laced with iron balconies that frame the two sides of the square perpendicular to the cathedral block. The First Municipality rewarded Pontalba by exempting her from taxes for twenty years and went on to finance additional improvements in the square. The Place d'Armes was fenced and landscaped, and the Cabildo was crowned with a third story and a mansard roof. The last piece of remodeling, which dates from the 1840s, completed the symmetry of the square by complementing the roof of the Presbytère and the Pontalba Apartments. A renovated entryway beckoned citizens into the public gallery, which spanned the entire third floor. The democratization of civic space extended to the plaza outside the Cabildo, which would soon be renamed and presided over by an equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson.	14
These alterations in the Cabildo were relatively minor, however, both structurally and in civic consequence. As of 1850, Jackson Square played host primarily to residents of the First Municipality, most of them of French ancestry and language. The ethnic division of urban politics was especially brazen in New Orleans, where the government itself was divided into separate units anchored by separate "French" and "American" city halls. In fact, the architectural improvements in the French Quarter were in large part an attempt to compete with the more dramatic innovation in public architecture then under way in the Second, "American," Municipality.13 The American district quickly proceeded to mirror itself in a public building. The district council resolved to appropriate $120,000 for a new city hall in 1845, and when the cost climbed to over $340,000 a few years later, there was no great public outcry. The boosters of the Second Municipality stipulated: "It is distinctly understood no defective marble is permitted."14 They spared no expense in choosing the location of this civic project: the high-priced residential area of Lafayette Square. The exceptions to the private façades around the square were the Oddfellows Hall, a school, and a Presbyterian church, all sites and symbols of Yankee culture and the enterprising voluntary spirit that suffused the commercial economy and civic life in general.	15
Commercial associations pervaded the new public architecture. The City Council employed the trusted local architect James Gallier, who had already designed many of the spaces they frequented, including the Merchant Exchange and the St. Charles Hotel. Coincidentally, Gallier had accumulated a real estate fortune of his own. The architect, who seems to have been given a free hand in the design of the new city hall, chose to enshrine the commercial republic in Greek Revival casings, modeling some aspects of his design on the Erectheum atop the Acropolis, perhaps not incidentally the citadel of another slave republic.15 In keeping with Greek Revival style and in deference to the public importance of his project, Gallier designed a lofty exterior with a sixty-foot portico and towering Doric columns. The elevation of the narrow stairs and depth of the portico placed the inner sanctum of public life at a greater distance from the bustle of the street than was the case in Gallier's commercial buildings. Yet a naïve observer of the New Orleans skyline would easily mistake nearby places of business for the city hall. The St. Charles Hotel and the Merchant Exchange, but not Municipal Hall, were crowned with domed rotundas in the style of the United States Capitol.16 (See Figure 3.)	16
Figure 3: Municipal Hall in Lafayette Square. Courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, Museum/Research Center.
The interior space of Municipal Hall is also a curious mixture of commercial and civic elements. The portico opens into a long, wide central hall that is lined with spacious, square chambers and an even larger reception room. Stairways midway down the hall rise to the second story, which is divided into large quadrants that served as the mayor's reception room, a dining room, ballroom, and city council chamber. (See Figure 4.) On the third floor, Gallier opened up the most dramatic space, a grand hall with a ceiling that arched a full eighty-five feet and was set with a stage and galleries. This space was called a lyceum and, like the assembly room atop the Cabildo, seems designed to gather citizens together and promote public intercourse. The lyceum of Municipal Hall was a somewhat poorer cousin to the grand public space of the St. Charles Hotel, which clustered generous public spaces all around its wide rotunda.17 Gallier crowned the classic face of the municipal hall with the insignia of public architecture that had become standard in Washington, D.C., as well as locally: a pediment on which was sculpted the figure of "Liberty supporting justice and commerce." By adding Commerce to the more familiar republican deities, Gallier introduced a fitting contemporary element into the architecture of the public. But its precise meaning is as opaque as the plaster of which it was cast. Should we read this grouping as money-changers entering the house of Liberty? As civil society merging with the state? Had commercial prosperity replaced the mixed constitution as the safeguard of republican virtue?18	17
Figure 4: Plan of the first floor, Municipal Hall, New Orleans. Courtesy of the Sylvester Labrot Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Tulane University Library.
One can conclude at least that the New Orleans Municipal Hall presents a contrast with its predecessor in the French Quarter that is suggestive of a transfiguration of the blueprint for urban politics. First, while the circulatory spaces are more open than the Cabildo, they still project a rather daunting monumentality, a pompousness that might well discourage faint-hearted or low-status citizens from entering. The scale of the portico and the narrow, recessed stairways announce the importance of this public space more boldly than they welcome pedestrians within. The ten columns raised sixteen steps above the entryway form a gauntlet of shadows as they obscure and darken the doorway. Those citizens who did enter, however, would find quite an array of commodious spaces. Most of them were called reception (not meeting) rooms, indicating their function was to foster genteel sociability rather than to facilitate the deliberative aspects of an elected legislature. These kinds of spaces were a familiar habitat for merchants accustomed to gathering in hotels and clubrooms of the American Quarter. By setting aside a capacious space in which select citizens could socialize, or study in the lyceum, the municipal government opened its house to polite civil society, and seems to have made the city hall more analogous with other buildings in the neighborhood, like the St. Charles Hotel and the Oddfellows Hall. The Second District of New Orleans at mid-century resembled a spatial model for the bourgeois public sphere as formulated by Jürgen Habermas. It suggests a place where public opinion might be shaped by rational discourse, but it also put severe, if seldom spoken, limits on who might participate in such august proceedings.	18
The public ceremonies and literary texts that inaugurated Municipal Hall delivered a similar message about changes in the practice of urban politics. Although there appears to have been no formal ceremony laying its cornerstone, the organ of communication for the literate public of the American district, the New Orleans Picayune, swelled with pride on the day the council room opened for business in 1853. "The worthy fathers of the second municipality met last evening in solemn enclave for the first time in the new council room. The place is beautiful indeed and in every way worthy of the purpose for which it is to be used." The press praised spaces like the mayor's room as a tribute to the "taste and good judgment of those in charge" and proclaimed Municipal Hall an architectural wonder. The Picayune boasted: "The citizens of the second municipality may well be proud of owning the handsomest municipal hall in the United States. The stranger will find in few cities on this continent more to command his admiration or invite his scrutiny than the public and private edifices of New Orleans."19	19
Even a superficial look at the public architecture of this one southern city re-veals decisive changes in the fundamental principles of government. A spirit of enterprise, civic engagement, voluntary energy, and urban ambition suffused the vaulted spaces of Municipal Hall. The apertures were widened just far enough to permit a thriving middle class to enter its opulent reception rooms and grand lyceum, under whose high ceilings merchants who were habituated to socializing in the Merchant Exchange and St. Charles Hotel were most likely to feel at home. The council room, that space where elected representatives deliberated about the "common good," was hard to distinguish from all the other rooms and buildings that displayed the robust commercial enterprise of the American Quarter. In antebellum New Orleans, political participation was skewed by ethnicity and race as well as class. The rather narrow and recessed entry to the haughty Municipal Hall was particularly restrictive for those who lived downriver in either the French Quarter or the immigrant sector further to the east. Slaves and free men and women of color were certainly not invited across the classic portico of Municipal Hall. Nonetheless, when the government of New Orleans was consolidated in 1852, the Municipal Hall of the American Quarter became its only "city hall." It would remain so until 1957, at which late date its daunting classic façade and off-center location still presented an apt metaphor for the obstacles to equal citizenship in a segregated city.	20
North of the Mason-Dixon Line, America's civic materialism tells quite another story. While the architectural heritage of New Orleans bore traces of the European monarchies that adapted easily to American slave society, the citizens of New York City erected their city hall on a freestanding republican foundation. Even during the colonial period, New York's public buildings had more in common with an English borough than a bastion of empire. The Corporation of the City of New York made its eighteenth-century headquarters first in a tavern and later in a building just north of Wall Street, the far outskirts of the city at the date it was built, 1698. The latter structure featured a tall façade, cupola, and central balcony that presented a rather haughty face to the citizen-pedestrian. Entry to a modest public chamber was through a narrow and secluded passage hidden behind an arcade that ran the front of the building. This colonial construction served briefly as the national capitol during George Washington's presidency, and the structure was remodeled in 1789 by Pierre Charles L'Enfant. The entryway to the building, rechristened Federal Hall, was still relatively constricted, but those citizens who found their way within enjoyed a commodious public space, whose republican improvements included vaulted chambers for both the Senate and the House of Representatives and lavishly appointed galleries that rose two full stories.20	21
When the federal government was transplanted to Washington in 1800, the environs of Federal Hall reclaimed a local, but still proudly republican, civic identity. The area bounded roughly by Chambers Street, Broadway, and Park Row was landscaped and renamed City Hall Park.21 A few years later, the park was raked clean of the symbols of Old World authority like the jail, armory, almshouse, and the old government house. The almshouse had been converted to the New York Institute, a city-owned building made available to philanthropic and educational societies. The less coercive and more voluntaristic inscription on New York's public space befit a city government that was now entrusted to a single, popularly elected deliberative body, the Common Council. With an appointed mayor, nominal property restrictions on the franchise, and ingrained habits of deference, however, the city corporation was far from a pure democracy. Rather, citizens of some property and their chosen representatives ran the city corporation as a rather plebeian facsimile of a classic republic. Soon, they set about redesigning public space in their own image. In 1802, at a time when two public buildings, the old "State House" as well as "Federal Hall," were vacant, the ordinarily parsimonious Common Council voted to construct a civic building all their own. This proud new edifice would become the archetypal "City Hall."	22
The aldermen of New York City took upon themselves the responsibility of overseeing the entire process of designing and constructing their new workplace. The "City Hall Building Committee," like other specialized city commissions, was composed of members of the Common Council, that is, directly elected, not appointed, officials. The Common Council empowered the committee to select an architect but specified that they "take the opinion or advice of such mechanics, artisans or other persons as shall be deemed useful and make suitable compensation." An open competition elicited proposals from a range of Manhattanites, including a doctor, a painter, carpenters and builders, as well as professional architects. The committee reviewed the plans, made a recommendation to the council, secured a majority vote ratifying their choice, and proceeded to put the winning plan on public view at a nearby confectioner's shop. The republican procedure had a rather democratic outcome. The chosen architects, John McComb, Jr., and François Joseph Mangin, were relatively humble practitioners of their art, each with only a few modest buildings to their credit. In their choice, the councilmen rebuffed a more renowned and pretentious architect, Benjamin Latrobe, who became contemptuous of such competitive public commissions. Latrobe railed against the humiliation of being "preferred to the workman who may enter the lists against me" and dismissed McComb and Mangin as a "New York bricklayer and a St. Domingo Frenchman," each of meager formal education. The public officials of New York seemed to subscribe to more vernacular architectural principles. McComb's local connections, including his familiarity to the Common Council as a one-time city surveyor, won out over Latrobe's pedigree and the patronage of Aaron Burr. The new city hall was built on a sturdy foundation of small-town familiarity, civic pride, and the simple processes of representation and consultation. Such chaste republican practices augured some innovations in the civic landscape.22	23
This project proceeded at a lackadaisical pace, taking eight years to complete. While McComb was commissioned to oversee the actual construction of the plan he co-authored, he was only the agent of the Building Commissioners and obliged to confer regularly with the Common Council and consult with elected officials about such minutiae as the selection of marble, the hiring of stonemasons, and the laying of bricks. By 1808, McComb reported that the walls had advanced up to the windowsills of the second story and had nearly exhausted the quarter-million dollars of the original appropriation. The council demanded and received a close and frugal accounting from McComb, who kept the final expenditure down to an acceptable $500,000. The tone of this cumbersome but civil process was set in the first official exchange between the republican government and the builder-architect, dated March 21, 1803: "The committee feel impressed with the magnitude of this undertaking, and they assure the Board that in all their determinations, they have endeavored to combine durability, convenience and elegance with as much economy as the importance of the object will possibly admit."23	24
In this decorous manner, New Yorkers crafted a modest building that, in the regard of ordinary citizens and architectural critics alike, is a landmark in public architecture. The sight of it evokes a pervasive and palpable sense of welcome into civic space. A newspaperman ambling through City Hall Park in 1834 captured the everyday civic lessons that the municipal improvements of the young republic would convey. He greeted his place of government as a "sight that rejoices our eyes."24 Late in the next century, writer Phillip Lopate echoed these sentiments when he recalled entering City Hall for the first time at the age of twelve: "I looked up at the graceful relic and my heart swelled with pride."25 Just how this relatively humble building acquired its timeless civic power remains an architectural puzzle and political marvel. The Common Council set out only the first vague parameters of republican civic materialism. They gave the project, first of all, a prescient name, calling it not a government house but a "city hall." Next, they specified a central location, in the public commons, with its wings aligned with nearby public buildings. From the earliest sketches and engravings, City Hall stands as the beckoning focal point of a public landscape, situated not on the edge of a martial parade grounds but right in the middle of a place of casual social mingling.26 This welcoming ambiance was carried into the building itself by the stunning sequence of architectural features that create an unobstructed public processional: broad, gradually ascending steps proceed through an open line of graceful arches and glide effortlessly upward along a circular stair to the chambers of representative government. (See Figure 5.)	25
Figure 5: New York's City Hall, 1826. Drawn by William Guy Wall, engraved by John Hill. Prints Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, New York Public Library.
This masterful blueprint for public space bears no simple architectural signature. No clear precedent is found in either L'Enfant's Federal Hall, the English mansion-house, the French hôtel de ville, or the oeuvre of McComb or Mangin. The best approximation of its pedigree is the vernacular process whereby a hands-on, homegrown citizen-architect sifted through the ideas of his French partner, his English pattern books, the directives of the city council, and his own experience in the urban polity.27 Out of this process emerged the unique architectural features that beckon citizens inside New York's republican sphere. The wide, gently elevated exterior stairs that rose to a single-story portico were probably designed by Mangin, selected by the Building Commission, ratified by the Common Council, altered and engineered by McComb, executed by artisan citizens, and subjected to revision at every turn. The finished building created a remarkable civic effect: it converted virtually the whole front of the central wing of City Hall into a commodious, readily accessible public space. Between 1803 and 1812 (when the project was finally finished), the builders of New York's City Hall systematically rejected the architectural elements of previous civic projects: they eschewed the narrow internal passages of the Cabildo, the daunting portico of Gallier Hall, and the insulation of L'Enfant's remodeling of Federal Hall. A similarly unspoken but decisive process of selection carved out generous public pathways inside New York's City Hall: a wide rotunda, open stairway, and easy passages to public rooms on the second floor. This almost magic combination of openness and elevation suited the virtuous citizens of a republic better than Gallier's commercial style or Latrobe's rejected plan, whose narrower vestibule and squat form were modeled after his design for the Bank of Pennsylvania.28 In building their hall, the representatives of the citizens of New York happened upon an architecture all their own. The commodious circulatory features of New York's City Hall—the stairs, entrances, and hallways—were the earmarks of a vernacular republican style. It proved in retrospect to be the standard by which all the previous municipal buildings seemed narrow, constricted, and exclusive.29 (See Figure 6.)	26
Figure 6: Interior stairway, New York City Hall, Historic American Building Survey. Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress.
The same unspoken political and architectural standards informed the allocation of space within City Hall. The instructions to architects authored by the Common Council specified only the most basic requirements, each associated with different governmental functions: eight courtrooms, six juror rooms, and "one for the common Council." Architects and builders translated the blueprints into elegant but comfortable accommodations for the people and their representatives. The rotunda and stairway pointed to destinations on the second floor, where, above the office and courtrooms, stood three major public spaces for which the council would determine the exact use. The central space just opposite the top of the stair became the Governor's Room and was flanked by two large chambers, approximately thirty-six by forty feet, one of which was reserved for sessions of the municipal legislature. When, for a brief period in the 1830s, the city charter divided the municipal legislature into two chambers, one of these assembly rooms housed the Board of Aldermen, the other the Board of Assistants. It was the southwestern chamber, however, that became enduringly associated with the legislative process central to a small republic. (See Figure 7.)30	27
Figure 7: Floor plan, New York City Hall. Drawn by John McComb, 1802. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
The interior decoration of the Common Council chamber suggests further idealized architectural conditions for governing a republic. The furnishings conferred considerable importance and high definition on the central figurehead, usually a mayor, who presided over the legislature. His accoutrements included an ornate podium, a throne-like seat, a canopy, and a place at the front of the room. At the other end of the spectrum, visiting citizens shared simple benches, placed in an elevated gallery space and separated by a railing approximately four feet in height. In between the people and the presidency stood a simple circle of desks and seats for the legislators. This arrangement compelled both the mayor and the citizens to respectfully observe the central political drama, the deliberations of popularly elected councilmen.31	28
If the interior decorations are to be believed, civic virtue was a republican but hardly a spartan matter. The Common Council invested in antique furnishings valued at over $1,400, commissioned scores of official portraits of political leaders and military heroes, and stockpiled no less than thirteen works by John Trumbull, the Revolutionary War painter, in the Governor's Room. They also agreed to paint the ceiling of the city hall chamber with a view called "New York Receiving the Tribute of the Nation." John McComb lovingly adorned the public rooms with fine woodcraft. At the highest elevation of City Hall perched a simpler but equally classic symbol, a statue of Justice. The icon the city fathers placed atop the cupola was a crude figure, executed in wood, lacking a blindfold, and holding a steelyard. Subsequent councilmen were embarrassed by Justice's rustic appearance and voted to add a blindfold and a more elegant scale to her accessories. The figurehead of justice was the object of considerable public attention, even identification. New Yorkers penned poems to this "Emblem of dignity and durability" and recoiled in pain when she was "wrapped like a martyr" in the fire of 1858. Justice was part of a hodgepodge of political symbols that graced New York's City Hall, from personified power in the mayor's throne to specialized spaces for legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government.32	29
This physical evidence establishes a number of broad political principles that underpinned the design of City Hall and then structured the political life that transpired within the building. The first principle comes from that recurrent motif of invitation and openness that proclaims that city government is a public project. A simple contrast with Federal Hall or New Orleans's Cabildo, constructed less than a decade earlier, should suffice to establish this point. The second principle, that of a mixed constitution, seems equally transparent, clearly visible in the allocation of space for the judiciary, the legislature, and the executives (both the mayor and the governor). The official assignment of space in City Hall was the subject of considerable discussion by the Common Council in the first two decades in the building's life. The mayor's power was restrained architecturally by his distance from both the circle of legislators and the lobby of citizens. Local practice, as prescribed by state and municipal constitutions and inscribed on the floor plan of City Hall, also disdained pure democracy. Deference to the judgment of social betters was inscribed in elevated and decorous architectural features and enacted in politics. An electorate of propertied, overwhelmingly white men sent their social betters to fill the ornate seats of the Common Council chamber, while the vast majority of the citizenry remained respectfully in the lobby.	30
Although this classic balance of a mixed constitution was maintained until at least 1830, both architecture and its usage gave a privileged position to the representative branch of city government. The chamber of the Common Council was both the busiest public space and the focus of public attention. As one city directory put it in 1817: "It is fitted up in an elegant and commodious manner for the meetings of the corporation which are open at all times to the citizens."33 A sketch attributed to C. Burton and dated 1830 focused the eyes of his contemporaries on this same civic space and directly toward the circle of councilmen. Burton etched images of electors in the gallery and posed them leaning over the railing that bordered the legislative space, straining, it would seem, to share in the deliberative process. This artist even found a place for women, or their bonnets at least, in the republican circle. These fashionable ladies were also stationed in the lobby but further to the rear and at a safer distance from the center of the republican drama. (See Figure 8.) Architects, councilmen, and observers seemed to concur in representing politics as a functionally differentiated process that modulated both executive power and democratic participation. Yet the governmental decisions were worked out in a house of government whose public spaces had become conspicuously more open and inviting than its classic republican antecedents.	31
Figure 8: Council Chamber, City Hall, New York, 1830–1831. Drawn by C. Burton, engraved by H. Fossette. Prints Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, New York Public Library.
The interior of New York's City Hall ushers the public into spaces designed expressly for the interaction of citizens with one another. The magnetic circle of the Common Council chamber with its surrounding galleries was the most obvious and official arena for mutual engagement and deliberation. Ordinary citizens were invited to participate in direct public discourse elsewhere as well. They could meet with one another in the Governor's Room, whose elegant spaces were opened to the general public for a mayor's reception every New Year's Day. They could break bread and imbibe alcoholic beverages on the public ground of City Hall Park each July 4th. City Hall also accommodated some more sober and lofty public projects. The Common Council granted space in City Hall for meetings of the Medical Arts and Bible societies, and gave permission for Sunday School students to parade on the grounds. In New York in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the city actually invested a considerable amount of financial resources and enthusiasm in providing space for this open and interactive public assembly, this material and architectural base of the widening, petit-bourgeois public sphere.34	32
While such architectural evidence about political culture is indirect, inferential, and tentative, contemporaries clearly subscribed to one incontrovertible assessment of City Hall. This building was cause for hearty public pride. Even an epidemic could not cancel the festivities planned to inaugurate the building project. The laying of the cornerstone of City Hall was preceded by a long civic procession that included representatives of New York's well-organized public sphere like the Mechanics' Society as well as the Common Council and other city officials. Much of the citizenry was enrolled in the ceremony as the procession filed along Broadway and through the park to the honored site, where a military salute was fired and the crowd regaled with "a supply of wine from the corporation." Once completed, City Hall became New York's major landmark, eclipsing the church spires and Wall Street businesses nearby. Blunt's visitors' guide proclaimed in 1817, "The City Hall is the most prominent and most important building in New York. It is the handsomest structure in the United States: perhaps of its size, in the world."35	33
Still, it is prudent to recall that these lofty civic sentiments were conjured up in a small city, perched at the outer reaches of European civilization, whose governmental tasks remained very prosaic. The Common Council sat amid those antique furnishings and ruled on such mundane aspects of public civility as the subject of this resolution dated August 15, 1814: "A presentment of the Grand Jury against the indecent practice of persons making water against the walls of the City Hall was read and referred to the City Inspector." We learn a few days later that the civic good was decisively served by the erection of a shed "to present the evil complained of."36 Through the first half of the nineteenth century, such small gestures brought politics and place together in the everyday maintenance of republicanism.	34
This familiar quality of urban politics would not last for long. As the population of the city of New York passed half a million at mid-century and reached seven digits by 1875, city government outgrew its old quarters, and big city politics burst out of its republican constraints. Property restrictions on voting were abolished for white men by 1842, and the first populist mayor, Fernando Wood, was elected in 1850, making New York City government an aggressively partisan democratic project. Not coincidentally, Mayor Wood proposed that municipal government vacate the City Hall of the early republic and build new quarters uptown nearer the demographic center of the city. When the State Legislature finally approved the project in 1857, clouds of suspicion were beginning to gather over City Hall. Precipitated by charges that Mayor Wood pandered to constituents, especially the foreign-born, this cynicism was given an architectural grounding in the "tea room" on the first floor of old City Hall. In the 1850s, this space was used for the refreshment of the Board of Aldermen, which ran up bills as high as $9,000 annually. The New York Tribune reported in 1852 that the city fathers would soon be returning from recess to "the broad steps of the City Hall and the sacred porches of the Tea Room" and then added sardonically that, until then, there was "no bribery, no bullying, no vote-buying, no juggling of contracts, no fun whatsoever to enliven the sultry hours." A new political climate, the first winds carrying germs of municipal shame, had begun to erode the foundation of public architecture.37	35
A new political culture required a new architecture. By the time ground was broken for the new city hall in 1862, the project had been reconstituted as a county courthouse. This alteration in the civic building program was more than a simple administrative expedient. It was symptomatic of a restructuring of governmental practice in the late nineteenth century. Increasing suspicion of big city governments and their diverse and intensely partisan electors brought close surveillance from the state level. A series of institutional reforms, often introduced into the state legislatures by middle-class business and rural interests, hamstrung the city council—the local domain, that is, of representative democracy. In New York, that meant that the legislature in Albany transferred major public power from City Hall to the County Board of Supervisors, the governing body that was to be accommodated with a new public building.38 The municipal reforms of the period also complicated the financing of any major civic project. Construction could not commence until the State Assembly and Senate had authorized the Supervisors to sell stock in a public or "sinking" fund in the initial amount of 1 million dollars. By going into debt and embracing the methods of finance capitalism, New York's public officials would eventually secure as much as 11 million dollars for their county courthouse. The process of paying out these astronomical sums proved even more cumbersome than its appropriation. While making contracts for materials and construction was entrusted to the three members of the Building Commission, their actions were constantly scrutinized by the Board of Supervisors, the State Legislature, and the court of public opinion as convened by the press. At the very least, thirty different companies would contract for everything from iron to awnings before the new courthouse was completed. This intricate and expensive process has left a trail of financial documents that still bewilders historians. We may never know the true cost of New York's County Courthouse, yet we can be assured that its construction inched forward ensnarled in a skein of red tape and public suspicion.39	36
The byzantine process began with the selection of an architect. The commissioners' original choice was John Kellum, who came recommended for his previous work on such local landmarks as Stewart's Department Store. Kellum defined the basic spaces of the new building and oversaw the construction of the interior over halfway to its conclusion, when he was replaced by Leopold Eidlitz, whose previous credits included a number of churches and banks as well as parts of the State Capitol building. Kellum and Eidlitz bore little resemblance to McComb and Mangin, the builder-designers of old City Hall. The second generation of civic builders put themselves before the public as professional architects with well-established reputations, thriving offices in New York City, and considerable professional and aesthetic pretensions. Eidlitz's practice in particular was a far cry from the artisan mode of building design. An author of architectural treatises and a central figure in the Gothic Revival, Eidlitz was acutely conscious of the artistic merit of buildings and relatively indifferent to the taste or needs of the general public.40	37
The people's representatives gave these architects carte blanche in designing the courthouse. The major contribution of the Common Council was to specify the site, just to the north of City Hall on Chambers Street. This decision was based on the administrative convenience of being close to the other courts and official functions clustered around City Hall Park, which by the 1860s had become a more specialized governmental space. Indeed, this municipal building project was conceived more as a service to public employees who required expanded office space than as a site of civic interaction. By the 1850s, the business of public building had become perfunctory to say the least, calculated in terms of square footage and cost estimates. The New York Times was contemptuous of pleas to save the trees in City Hall Park and invoked the "Manifest Destiny" of expanding office space.41 Given this scant attention to architectural (as opposed to financial) details on the part of city officials, Kellum and Eidlitz went quite freely about their work. The public space that they composed seemed, in some respects, to carry forward the commitment to openness and accessibility begun by Mangin and McComb. Kellum's original plan invited the people into public space by way of broad steps leading up to a classic portico. (See Figure 9.) In fact, his design called for two such staircases, only one of which was ultimately built. The flow of public space continued well inside the building, where two stairways radiated up a full three-and-a-half stories through a grand rotunda topped with a tinted glass skylight. Combined with contiguous lobbies, the stairs and rotunda created a very generous public space. They accounted for nearly a quarter of the courthouse's total footage and greeted New Yorkers with a first impression of democratic possibilities. (See Figure 10.)42	38
Figure 9: Northern façade of Tweed Courthouse with its stairway removed. Historic American Building Survey. Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress.     Figure 10: View of the rotunda, Tweed Courthouse. Historic American Building Survey. Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress.
Yet that impressive pair of stairways and rotunda did not lead to a central civic destination. The floor plans failed to mark off a path to some focal public place (like the Common Council chamber of the old City Hall). Neither did the building plans reserve a large space in which the public might assemble (such of the lyceum in Gallier Hall). When Eidlitz replaced Kellum as architect in 1876, he blocked the civic passageways further by separating the rotunda from the office wings with massive brick walls. The space beyond the stairs and lobbies was carved up into a monotonous honeycomb of rooms layered up six floors (counting the basement and mezzanines). Within this warren of offices and courtrooms, it is hard to locate the representative element of county government, the chamber of the Board of Supervisors. A sketch dated 1868 does reveal, however, a chamber fitted with some of the old architectural props of representative government, including the familiar circle of desks and chairs, a podium for the presiding officer, and an elevated lobby.43	39
The decoration of this and other interior spaces of the County Courthouse suggests further alterations in the use and meaning of public space. The legislative chamber, much like the courtrooms, was invested with relatively opulent architectural detail: intricate moldings, frescos, pediment windows, and ornate chandeliers. Beyond these more public rooms lay a labyrinth of relatively unadorned halls and offices. By contrast, both Kellum and Eidlitz expended an immense amount of artistry and public funds decorating the circulatory spaces under the rotunda. Kellum favored detailed iron and marble, Eidlitz polychromatic brickwork; together, they created a gallery of visual stimulation. This formal and abstract aesthetic was bereft of more explicit political representations (like the icons of civic virtue and portraits of civic leaders found in City Hall). Reviews of the new building were mixed: while some praised the awesome spectacle of the stairway and rotunda, others dismissed the interior of the County Courthouse as "the darkest hallways in New York."44 The interior design, like the spatial composition, of the New York courthouse is subject to various interpretations. Some features seem to beckon the people inside and to flatter them with opulent display. Other spaces seem politically hollow, without civic intention, public meaning, or invitation to stop and socialize, much less debate with fellow citizens. New York's new courthouse sent an ambiguous message to the citizenry; its spaces suggested an uneasy cohabitation between democratization and atomization.	40
What looks like ambiguity in the architecture reads like cynicism in the accounts of the public commemoration of the new municipal structure. The cornerstone ceremonies for New York's new courthouse were at best perfunctory. The indifference cannot be explained entirely by the date, 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, for after all, New Yorkers had braved an epidemic to celebrate the old City Hall fifty years earlier. The press notices of the event of 1862 were uncommonly laconic in their prose. Most of the dailies devoted a short paragraph to describing the truncated procession of officials across from City Hall to the foundation of the courthouse, where they were met by what was variously described as "a large assembly of citizens," "several hundred persons," or "a number of spectators." The oratory was lethargic, if not downright gloomy. It featured a tedious account of the difficulties of winning legislative approval for this undertaking and judicial complaints about the ventilation in the old quarters. The usually flamboyant Mayor Wood damned the whole project with this faint and backward-looking praise: "it gives an importance to the building and thus to some extent imparts a dignity to the purpose for which it is intended." In conclusion, Wood allowed, "I cannot forebear the hope that the historical associations of the new building may be no less auspicious than those which belong to its predecessor." Wood's modest expectations were mocked by the disgruntled editorial in the New York Times. Of all the speakers at the cornerstone ceremony, the editor noted, "We do not see in any one of them a very satisfactory explanation of their reasons for throwing on the city the burden of this enormous additional expenditure just at this present time, or any estimate of the rate of taxation to submit to within the next few years according to present appearances." The editorial closed with this taunt: "unless we are greatly mistaken we shall soon see a movement for effective financial reform in our city affairs."45 Still, by 1865, the New York Times was susceptible to the charms of public architecture, as it boasted that the noble marble pillars of the County Courthouse façade resembled St. Paul's Cathedral.46	41
Only two years later, the Times had changed its critical position back again. The headline bellowed, "The County Court House—Extravagance and Plunder." Within five years, the Times would paint those same marble pillars as tawdry symbols of financial mismanagement and municipal graft. The façade became a mantle of political shame covering a public building renamed the Tweed Courthouse. Its namesake, William M. "Boss" Tweed, was intermittently a member of both the Board of Supervisors and the Building Commission during the period when the courthouse was constructed. Although hardly the sole catalyst of the campaign against political machines, the Tweed Courthouse was more than just a convenient symbol of corruption. It served as the ledger in which journalists recorded how Tammany Hall misspent the taxes paid by the frugal middle class. The Democratic municipal government was driven from office by a barrage of audit sheets published in the daily press. The charges included such inflated expenditures as $100,000 for furniture, carpets, and painting and the veiled bigotry of gratuitous comments about hastily naturalized laborers who took six weeks to complete one day's work.47 The most legible political symbolism of the courthouse was not carved on its pediment or mounted on its cupola but etched in Harper's Weekly. This sketch of a fountain outside the courthouse showed a demure Liberty being presented with the bill of expenses for the construction. At her feet lay an open moneybag spilling filthy lucre into the coffers of Boss Tweed. (See Figure 11.) This masterful political iconography articulated a new vernacular civics lesson, that politics is a dirty business operated by venal men. The cynical attitude toward politics at least brought some cognitive order to the confusing state of municipal government in the Gilded Age. It did not, however, encourage further investment in public architecture.	42
Figure 11: "Design for a Proposed Monumental Fountain in the City Hall Park." Cartoon by C. G. Parker. Harper's Weekly, October 7, 1871, p. 932.
To this day, this major architectural monument to public life in a democratic city is known as "the house that Tweed built"; its civic identity and architectural repute are still tainted by association with the corruption of big city politics. The Tweed Courthouse had hardly been completed when it was dubbed an architectural "monstrosity" and threatened with demolition. Its drapery of shame was not unique among American public buildings. The City Hall of Philadelphia set a particularly high standard of graft and gaudiness, and attempts to build a new City Hall in Chicago were thwarted by similar political cynicism. Across the country in San Francisco, municipal reformers compared another costly public building project to a cesspool and proposed that public funds would be better spent on a sewage system. Civic materialism would seem to have descended from the pristine symbolism of the classic rotunda to the architectural gutter. At this juncture in the story of city halls, the correspondence between public building and public confidence seems a chimera. How could the same marble pillars evoke civic pride in one instance and public shame but a few years later?	43
Before surrendering the history of public architecture to the cynicism of the Gilded Age, one more example of civic materialism merits consideration. A look westward to the upstart city of San Francisco indicates that the civic architecture of the late nineteenth century had some redeeming features. Although San Franciscans did not make a major investment in public architecture until 1870, at a time of growing disillusionment with urban politics elsewhere, their belated civic enterprise exuded something of the exhilaration as well as the tension of urban democracy. By this date, city government had democratized to an extent that complicated major public projects. The proposal for a new city hall was initiated by the Board of Supervisors of the County and City of San Francisco, a legislative body that had been elected directly by an active, partisan, and relatively broad citizenry. (It included white and African-American males but still excluded women and immigrants from Asia.) In 1870, however, in San Francisco, as in New Orleans and New York, urban government was held in ill repute at the state level, and the residents of big cities were losing control over their own affairs and finances. The tight-fisted taxpayers of California would not permit any deficit spending whatsoever and required the Board of Supervisors to resort to special revenue-generating activities, such as selling public lands or making special annual assessments. Hence it is understandable that it took twenty-two years to complete the city hall whose cornerstone was laid in 1870. Nonetheless, San Francisco would ultimately commit at least 4 million dollars to this public project, testimony to considerable civic largesse as well as fortitude.48 In 1873, Mayor William Alvord explained the tenacious commitment to public architecture in the city of San Francisco: "It is difficult to estimate the full influence on public taste, and the full value as a source of pleasure, of a handsome architectural pile elegantly exposed and surrounded. It is cheap and mean to deny ourselves and our posterity an advantage of this kind which we can secure so easily."49	44
This extravagant civic enterprise was undertaken with popular enthusiasm and press approval. The San Francisco Chronicle riveted public attention on the plans for building a new city hall and reported regularly on a nationally advertised design competition. At their editorial suggestion, the San Francisco Commissioners carried the democratic aspects of city planning a step further: they put the entries on public display. The Chronicle was pleased to report that "the Art Gallery of the Mechanics Pavilion is now being prepared for the display of the plans in such a way that all those who are interested may examine them at their leisure, make suggestions and propose changes and improvements." The commissioners selected the plan that the Chronicle had judged "the most beautiful," the design of Augustus Laver, whose credits included a cathedral in Montreal and the Albany statehouse. Public surveillance did not end with the selection of a trusted architect: the Commission and the Board of Supervisors retained the right to oversee the process of construction and insisted on reviewing all contracts. The volatile political climate of the city also penetrated the construction site and in one instance replaced Laver with an apparent charlatan who was well connected with Denis Kearney, popular leader of the Workingmen's Party. Despite all the vicissitudes of urban politics and the inefficiencies of the democratic process, San Francisco's City Hall Commissioners finally completed their task in 1892 and bequeathed to the city the public building first visualized in Laver's plan but subject to copious vernacular remodeling thereafter.50	45
That plan is unfortunately lost, taking with it almost all physical traces of the ill-fated public building, which was destroyed during the earthquake and fire of 1906. Only a few sketches and incomplete published records of "old city hall" remain extant to suggest the outlines of what was an indubitably distinctive example of public architecture. We do know that the planners were determined to make their city hall central to everyday public life. It was located neither on cheap land at the outskirts of the city nor in the old civic center of Portsmouth Plaza but up Market Street near such hubs of the expanding commercial city as the Hibernian Bank and Mechanics Institute. Unlike the similarly situated New Orleans structure, however, San Francisco's City Hall was not designed to blend in with commercial architecture. A grand domed tower, far higher than any surrounding buildings, boasted the importance of the public sphere. City boosters fought repeatedly to retain funding for this arrogant civic symbol, this "grand and imposing structure" whose size was variously estimated as 57 to 90 feet in diameter and as high as 453 feet. At the same time, the elevation of San Francisco's City Hall was not set at so high an angle that it was aloof from the everyday comings and goings of the people. Both the Commissioners and Board of Supervisors took precautions to make this towering new city hall accessible to citizens. They specified "the erection of a Corinthian portico in the center of the Larkin street front and of two entrance porches on each side of the porticos," added a set of stairs for the use of neighbors, and rejected a location on less expensive land in a more remote part of the city. Engravings and photographs from the turn of the century show a permeable structure, with multiple points of entry for a stream of pedestrians, carriages, bicycles, and trolleys. The entry to the hall of records fronted along a wide landscaped boulevard that afforded a particularly gracious invitation to the citizens who regularly promenaded down Market Street. One bird's-eye sketch of the finished building indicates that the people of San Francisco could access their city hall from a variety of locations, not just one grand stair or portico but multiple portals, on each of the many sides of a building described as an inverted "f." Flush with the street in some places, irregularly broken with indentations at others, the City Hall seemed like a porous maze that, while open, required some ingenuity to navigate. Moreover, citizens could find ample space for navigation within as well as outside, in serpentine hallways and a grand interior piazza. It was as if the usual city hall was turned inside out, replicating the streets and squares in the intricate and fluid pattern of interior space.51 (See Figure 12.)	46
Figure 12: Bird's-eye view of the San Francisco City Hall. Harper's Weekly, March 30, 1872. Courtesy of Bert Hansen.
The original instructions to architects specified some of the intended uses to which these interior spaces would be put: "the different Courts and Boards of City and County, Hall of Records and also offices for the various officers of the said City and County." A directory of the completed building confirmed this rather bureaucratic cast of public space, which was cut up into scores of offices ranging from the 4,000 square feet allotted the tax collector to the 200 square feet reserved for witnesses, segregated into chambers for males and females. The plan as finally approved granted the largest and most central space of the whole building, some 7,200 square feet directly under the dome, to a "hall of records," shelter, that is, for the sacred objects of an expanding city bureaucracy. Spaces for the citizens themselves and their representatives, while dwarfed by the hall of records and greatly outnumbered by administrative offices, were still prominent in the floor plan. San Franciscans, like New Orleanians before them, were invited to assemble within City Hall, in a space of 6,000 square feet called variously the Public Assembly Hall or Grand Hall. A chamber of 1,800 square feet accommodated the Board of Supervisors in greater comfort than earlier legislative bodies, and was placed, as customary, on the second or main floor with easy access to the stairs. A sketch of this chamber in the published reports reveals a familiar picture of a central semi-circle of desks, the elevated lobby to the rear and along two sides, podium to the front, all overlaid with classic details. The major difference from the chamber of New York's Common Council, furnished more than half a century earlier, was the provision of separate desks and chairs for each legislator, a reflection perhaps of the replacement of corporate virtue by partisan conflict among the people's representatives.52	47
A paucity of documentation also leaves such questions as specification of the furnishings and decoration of San Francisco's City Hall to speculation. There is little comment in the public records about any central representative symbols, impersonations of Liberty, Justice, or Commerce on the face of this city hall, which is nonetheless a riot of decorations. (A statue erected just in front of City Hall in the 1880s was piled high with civic symbols, featuring robust forty-niners and winsome goddesses, but this was a monument to the private enterprise of industrialist James Lick.) The jagged façades and splayed wings of the public building were planted with Corinthian forests, five turrets, and that haughty hybrid, a towered dome, each blossoming with pediments, balconies, and statuary. In the dim light of this limited historical record, the premier city hall within the Golden Gate seems like a civic fantasyland. (See Figure 13.)	48
Figure 13: "New City Hall, San Francisco," circa 1896. Copyright B. C. Turnbull, courtesy of the California Historical Society, FN–18773.
A look at the ceremonies with which San Franciscans celebrated their new city hall does not dispel this phantasmagoric interpretation. On February 22, 1870, an estimated 20,000 people gathered to participate in the laying of the cornerstone. This moment in the city's civic history was marked by a procession of city officials and military regiments into the excavation site, where the parade passed through a white-washed arch of triumph, onto a stage set in an amphitheater of sand piles. The foundation of the domed tower was laid out as a banquet table spread with two barbecued oxen and gallons of beer and "native wine." In word and deed, this festival bespoke an exuberant public spirit that made earlier and eastern ceremonies seem morose by comparison. The official orators trumpeted civic pride into imperial hubris, all symbolized by the plan of the new city hall. One declared the project "worthy of San Francisco, and which will stand for ages, the symbol of the resources, the grandeur and taste of the metropolis of the Pacific." Another proclaimed, "here is the universal empire. It knows neither tropical nor political limits." The grand master mason who laid the cornerstone invested imperial pretensions in the local city hall: "within its walls as beneath its lofty dome, through ages let us trust shall be administered the vast and complicated interest of the queenly city where Orient and Occident under the inspiration of a nobler and more progressive civilization and reaching up to each other over continents and across seas clasp hands in fraternal grasp." These breathless civic boasts elicited cheers of assent from a vast assemblage of the population, from fair ladies to rugged working men.53	49
The applause in San Francisco echoed and amplified the earlier cornerstone ceremonies in New York and New Orleans and seemed to celebrate an unflappably popular and democratic architecture. San Francisco in many ways carried forward and expanded the political ideology implicit in New York's republican architecture. The orderly entryways of a single stair and portico had, with the triumph of partisan party politics, proliferated into multiple points of access to the civic center. This progression from staid and deferential republicanism toward popular, mass democracy was not, however, the only axis of change in the architecture of the city hall. By comparison with its predecessors, San Francisco's City Hall also gave a smaller ratio of space to the deliberative, face-to-face, interactive element of politics. Simultaneously, the space devoted to administrative government had grown disproportionately to places for the open discussion of political issues—bureaucracy was overtaking public debate.	50
The alterations of urban politics reflected in this sequence of city halls are too complex, however, to be contained in a pat narrative of bureaucracy and interest-group politics advancing fast on the heels of mass democracy (the basic narrative of such influential works as Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). Some of the complications in the basic meaning of politics were connoted by the novel political terminology that seeped into the oratory at the cornerstone ceremony. Leonidas Pratt, the grand master mason quoted above, boasted that San Francisco's City Hall would be the place where "political economy and the science of Government shall attain perfection." Even more portentous than his deference to government by experts and imperialists was Pratt's expectation that City Hall would be a place where "the vast and complicated interest" of the city of San Francisco would "be administrated." This intimation of what would be known as interest-group politics was more than fortuitous; it reflected the conflicts that inevitably emerge when major and costly public projects are opened up for democratic discussion.54	51
In fact, from the very outset, the construction of a new city hall for San Francisco was associated with palpable, specific, and contentious interests within the city. Soon after the cornerstone was laid in place, amid the prolonged depression of the 1870s, 2,000 workers had gathered at Yerba Buena Park to apply for construction jobs. The San Francisco Chronicle championed their needs, saying: "There is no harm in making the necessities of the laboring man known and at this time in particular to the representatives of the people assembled in Sacramento."55 Those who debated the City Hall Bill before the State Assembly concurred on one rationale for the project: "that a large number of citizens of San Francisco needed employment."56 This particular species of interest-group politics, a recourse to government to meet the basic economic needs of disadvantaged citizens, can be seen as a laudable harbinger of social democracy or as vulgar pleading for special treatment. The more unseemly side of interest-group politics was written into the City Hall appropriations in 1876 as something known colloquially as the "anti-Mongolian clauses," which prohibited the employment of anyone but white men on this public works project. If the interests of unemployed white workers were the most clearly expressed in the debate about City Hall, those of more affluent San Franciscans were not entirely invisible. This class of citizens, who most often represented themselves simply as taxpayers, had a penchant for dismissing such expensive civic improvements as "public waste."	52
But for the time being, in San Francisco at least, the various factions of the citizenry came together and agreed to build lavishly for a public purpose. Some good-hearted opposition to the city hall project surfaced in the press in the form of chagrin at the unruly behavior of the workers, who were ceremonially feasted after the cornerstone dedication. (Their table manners did leave something to be desired as they devoured the meat of two oxen and allegedly threw their tin plates at the women and children who ringed the crowd.) As late as the 1870s, in San Francisco at least, there was still material evidence to support a thriving if disheveled democracy. The language of ceremony, the architecture of public space, and the process of enacting public works projects all conspired to welcome a slowly widening range of different groups and interests into the public realm.57 As late as the 1890s, neither the cynicism of civic reformers nor the distaste of latter-day architectural critics had much currency in San Francisco. The ephemera collections of local archives are stocked full of engravings, postcards, and photographs that confer pride of place on City Hall. During public holidays, its dome and tower were illuminated or draped in laurels. Family portraits were snapped in front of City Hall, and the edifice remained a favorite civic backdrop for fine engravings complete with representations of fashionable men and women. (See Figure 14.)	53
Figure 14: San Francisco City Hall. Courtesy of the California Historical Society, FN–31674.
By the close of the nineteenth century, however, the civic stigma associated with the Tweed Courthouse would be affixed to San Francisco's City Hall and much of American political culture. When, in 1906, the once-proud structure collapsed under the strain of the great earthquake and fire, local historians and architectural critics alike saw some poetic justice in this aspect of the disaster. Few published commentaries mourned the passing of what they now regarded as a monument to bad taste and corrupt politics. The standard narrative of urban politics and public architecture is written from this perspective, and colludes in slandering city hall as a waste of the taxpayer's money. Public architecture would not be redeemed in San Francisco until 1917, when yet another City Hall would gain legitimacy through the sponsorship of Progressive reformers and their architect partners from the City Beautiful movement.58	54
Historians have good reason, both architectural and political, to question this chronicle of civic decline, which relies on the written testimony of the most articulate and over-represented historical informants: middle-class reformers, professional architects, and highly educated cultural critics. Public buildings themselves point to some ways of picturing the politics of the past that contradict this assessment. To begin with, this material evidence extends and complicates a history of urban politics that is too often foreshortened and flattened. The architectural record that extends from the podiums of imperial authority like the Cabildo, monuments to republican propriety like Gallier Hall and New York City Hall, and the rugged edges of the Tweed Courthouse and San Francisco City Hall has left landmarks of a finely differentiated political history. Taken together, they denote a halting, erratic development from imperial absolutism to republican polities to a tenuous and imperfect democracy. In their materiality and three-dimensionality, these public buildings served as both the schoolhouses and the theaters of political change. They opened up, and sometimes closed down, access to municipal government on a prosaic, everyday basis—in legislative chambers, administrative offices, and in the stairways, parks, and promenades outside.	55
As they evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, American city halls introduced some distinctive new elements into the catalog of civic architecture. Understandably, the young republic that had led the expansion of suffrage and invented a two-party system would quickly outgrow authoritarian spaces like the New Orleans Cabildo. The municipal architecture of the early republic was more homologous with the British town halls (described so alluringly by Asa Briggs). New York's City Hall and the Municipal Hall of New Orleans resembled the town halls in both their architectural elements and in their narrow political base, the suffrage limited to the propertied middle class. Still, the eclecticism of American civic architecture does not fit snugly within the West European architectural tradition, as seen for example in the acute and telescopic vision of Richard Sennett. While, on the one hand, Gallier Hall resembled the Victorian town hall, it was also like a throwback to the authoritarian floor plan of a Roman basilica, a style that is not entirely incongruous with the modern slave republic of the antebellum South. The homespun architects of New York City, on the other hand, practiced another form of pragmatic eclecticism: they blended French style with the functional and political exigencies of municipal representative institutions. The resulting structure served as an enduring material bridge between republican civic responsibility and the openness of a rapidly expanding plebian democracy. The civic landmarks of the Gilded Age, including such grandiose conceits as the domed tower that rose in San Francisco's civic center, gave exuberant expression to American popular democracy during years of fervid partisanship and high voter turnout. To find facsimiles of its mélange of porticos, colonnades, and assembly halls, one would have to look back to the Acropolis, whose complex of civic buildings provided multiple spaces for public debate but only for a tiny proportion of the population. When such debates engaged a mass electorate in the ethnically diverse and class-divided city of the nineteenth century, classic standards of public decorum were inevitably violated. No sooner had American citizens created a distinctive democratic architecture than their creation became an object of suspicion and then scorn.	56
These ambiguous meanings and ironic twists in the history of the American city hall can only be understood on native ground, in the particular political history of the nineteenth-century American city. From this second perspective, the evidence of civic materialism suggests some revisions in one prominent chapter in American urban and political history, the standard account of corrupt urban machines. The record of municipal architecture demonstrates that indictments of political graft are not a very sensitive historical barometer. The cost of public buildings like the house that Tweed built, or of San Francisco's City Hall, was shockingly high and inflated far above the original estimate. But so, too, were their august predecessors, like the stately New York City Hall, whose construction also created lucrative public contracts for friends of patrician council members. (Benjamin Latrobe, for example, had boasted of his friendship with Aaron Burr, whose "interest procured me all the votes of the corporation save one," only to lose his bid to a crony of the Federalist majority.) Without discounting the excesses of building projects like the Tweed Courthouse, one can concede that financing civic building has seldom exemplified tidy book-keeping. The new urban historians have calculated that the founding fathers and mugwump reformers also had difficulty balancing budgets, and, conversely, city bosses could be stingy with the taxpayer's money. Furthermore, the charges of corruption can actually be read as symptoms of democracy: neither the Spanish viceroy nor patrician benefactors were subject to such a contentious popular review of their building projects. What had changed over the course of the nineteenth century, however, was the degree to which literate and elite spokesmen trusted city officials and were willing to make these inevitably costly, long-term investments in public projects.59 Popular deference to the elite leaders in the small city of the early republic had given way to more plebeian, democratically elected officials and a more contentious electorate. All this is to suggest that, rather than prompting historians to ratify the rantings of reformers about the corruption of city bosses, the municipal buildings of the late nineteenth century should inspire some appreciation of the political determination to create costly public places even at a time of political conflict, economic hardship, and middle-class cynicism.	57
The architectural and spatial features of buildings like the Tweed Courthouse and San Francisco City Hall also speak up