Philadelphia City Hall
by Dawn Gari
Title
Philadelphia City Hall
Artist
Dawn Gari
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
William Penn statue and the Philadelphia City Hall clock tower.
T City Hall is the largest municipal building in the United States. and iss topped by an 37 ft, 27-ton bronze statue of city founder William Penn, one of 250 sculptures created by Alexander Milne Calder that adorn the building inside and out. The statue is the tallest atop any building in the world.
The statue actually faces northeast, towards Penn Treaty Park in the Fishtown section of the city, which commemorates the site where William Penn signed a treaty with the local Native American tribe. During the 1990s, whenever one of Philadelphia's four major sports teams was close to winning a championship, the statue was decorated with the jersey of that team. The tower features clocks 26 ft in diameter on all four sides of the metal portion of the tower. The city's only observation deck is located directly below the base of the statue, about 152 m above street level. The ornamentation of the tower has been simplified; the huge garlands that festooned the top panels of the tower were removed.
Penn's statue is hollow, and a narrow access tunnel through it leads to a small 22-inch-diameter hatch atop the hat.
In the 1950s, the city fathers 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.
For many years, City Hall remained the tallest building in Philadelphia by the terms of a gentlemen's agreement that forbade any structure from rising above the William Penn statue. In 1987, it lost this distinction when One Liberty Place was completed.
City Hall is a National Historic Landmark. During 2006, it was named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Uploaded
January 18th, 2015
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