Old City Hall (Tacoma, Washington)

Old City Hall
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
File:Old City Hall - Tacoma.jpg
Old City Hall in Tacoma, Washington
Location	7th Ave. between Commerce and Pacific Ave., Tacoma, Washington
Coordinates
Area	less than one acre
Built	1893 (1893)
Architectural style	Italian Villa
NRHP Reference #	74001973
Added to NRHP	May 17, 1974

The Old City Hall is a five-story building in Tacoma, Washington that served as the city hall in the early 20th century. The building features a ten-story clocktower on the southeast corner, facing the intersection of Pacific Avenue and S 7th Street.

The building uses masonry bearing walls combined with numerous windows. The windows on the second and third floors are of equal size. The fourth story windows are arched at the top. The fifth story windows are smaller and narrower.

The foundation is a local Wilkeson stone, which is light gray. The walls are eight feet thick at the base and taper to six feet at street level. They have are covered with a façade of red brick faced with yellow Roman brick. These bricks are believed to have been ballast from China or Belgium or to have been imported from Italy. The tower is a freestanding masonry with a clock on each face.

The building is a trapezoid in plan and reflects the Italian Villa style. Small round windows appear below the corner line; three large round windows occur below the corner on the tower.

The tower’s base has heavy brackets above the corner of the main structure and narrow rectangular windows on the tower body. A group of three arched windows are at the top on each side. A row of small round windows circles the tower between the arched windows and the eave line. Terra cotta decorations embellish the tower and areas of the entablature. The tower has a clock and a set of four bells. The clock and the bells were cast by the McShane Bell Foundry in Baltimore, the same company that cast the Liberty Bell. The bells is 8,000 pounds (3,600 kg) of silver bell metal. Hugh Wallace of Tacoma, ambassador to France during World War I, gave the bells and chimes in memory of his daughter on Christmas Day, 1904. The pendulum of the clock, 12 feet (3.7 m) in length, is suspended on a single wire, 40 feet (12 m) in length. The mechanism is gravity run and the motors are wound electrically.

History

Tacoma was a railroad town, acting as the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Attracted by the potential of financial success, businessmen from the Midwest came to the city. They brought with them a culture and the Old City Hall is an example of those tastes. The building was designed by the San Francisco firm, Hatherton and Mclntosh. Hatherton was the official architect for San Francisco and had designed that municipality's city hall. The old Tacoma City Hall was completed April 23, 1893 at a cost of $257,965 and was used by the city until 1957. The structure is representative of the ebullience of spirit that characterized the city of Tacoma in the late 19th century; it ‘’"...seems to combine a romantic feeling for the spirit of fifteenth century Florence with the mercantile spirit of nineteenth century America’’."

See also

• Rialto Theater
• Old City Hall
• Pantages Theatre/Jones Building
• Old City Hall Historic District

Bibliography

• Tacoma Daily Ledger, October 26,
• Hunt, Herbert, Tacoma, Its History L891, April 1, 1931. f and Its Builders. Chicago, 1916. Volume 2, pp. 167–170.
• Tacoma Weekly News, May 25, 1917.
• Folk's City Directory, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, 1895
• Sias, Patricia, An Examination of Influences on Selected Tacoma Architecture 1890-1914, M.A. Thes:
• Tacoma News Tribune, January 25, Ls, University of Puget Sound, 1971. L967.