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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.〔Schoor, Barett P., Old City Hall, 74001973; United States Department off the Interior, National Park Service; National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form; Washington D.C., May 17, 1974〕 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 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, in length, is suspended on a single wire, 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. The 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’’.〔" 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Old City Hall (Tacoma, Washington)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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