Alameda City Hall

About this property

Alameda City Hall is a historic city hall civic building in Alameda, California. The building has been continually used since it was first built in 1895. It has a historical marker erected in 1998 by the Native Sons of the Golden West; and is listed as one of the National Register of Historic Places since 1980. The Alameda City Hall was built in 1895, and remains from the city's initial period of economic prosperity that was created by the expansion of the railroad network on the end of the 19th century. It was constructed some twenty years after the city charter was established in 1872. The city of Alameda was the first in California, and the second in the nation to operate its own power plant which opened a few years prior in 1886. Alameda City Hall was designed with incandescent lighting in the late-19th century, which was considered a luxury at that time. The building is a three-story, masonry structure with a hipped roof. The Romanesque Revival style building was designed by George Percy of the firm of Percy and Hamilton. Thomas Day and Sons built the structure. The firm of Percy & Hamilton designed roughly 200 buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the notable Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and the Children's Playhouse or Children's Quarters (now known as the Koret Children's Playground) in Golden Gate Park. The Alameda City Hall is located across the street from the Alameda Free Library, another NHRP-listed site. The Alameda City Hall is a three-story, masonry structure with a hipped roof. The two upper stories rest on a ground floor with slightly battered walls and a concrete surface that is rusticated to simulate sandstone. The ground floor terminates in a water table. Square windows are set in deep reveals and generally divided into four lights. The Oak Street entrance has double-glazed doors with a transom set in a segmental-arched opening with a scored fan pattern above mimicking a masonry arch construction. A long flight of granite steps with a solid railing leads to the main entrance on Santa Clara Avenue. The structure is divided vertically into three blocks, the center block being recessed on both the front and rear elevations. On the principal Santa Clara Avenue facade, the recessed central portion has the entrance in the center of three monumental, round-headed brick arches embellished with continuous architrave molding. The arches spring from capped piers with engaged colonnettes. Behind this arcaded section an entrance porch precedes the round-arched entrance doors with fan transoms, Windows flank the entrance doors. Above the arcade is a plain cornice with the legend "City Hall" set in raised letters above the central arch. The rest of the second story has round-arched openings set in the brick-faced wall. The double-hung windows have transoms with a fan pattern divided into five sections.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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