Philadelphia City Hall

Philadelphia City Hall occupies the center of Pennsylvania's largest city at the intersection of its two main downtown thoroughfares, built over roughly three decades and completed in 1901 to a design by the architect John McArthur Jr. in the ornate Second Empire style. At the time of its completion it was the tallest habitable building in the world, a distinction it briefly held before taller steel-framed skyscrapers surpassed it, and it remains the largest municipal building in the United States by floor area. Its masonry walls, built without a structural steel frame, are among the thickest ever constructed for a building of its height, reaching more than 20 feet at the base. The tower is crowned by a 37-foot bronze statue of the city's founder, William Penn, sculpted by Alexander Milne Calder, and for decades an informal local custom held that no building in the city should rise above the brim of Penn's hat.