City Hall, Louisville

Louisville City Hall is a historic building whose construction lasted from 1870 and 1873. Originally it was designed as the seat of the local city government; since the merger of the former City of Louisville with Jefferson County, Kentucky, it now primarily houses the offices and chambers of the Louisville Metro Council.

The building's architecture is a striking blend of Italianate and Second Empire, both styles popular at the time in civic buildings, as well as Beaux Arts and Romanesque Revival. Designs on the building represented the city's outlook in the post-Civil War era, which was very optimistic. The pediment over the main entrance features a relief of the city seal and a train steaming forward past Southern flora with the inscription, "Progress, 1871." Other engravings, over the tympana of the side windows, depict livestock heads, representing the importance of agriculture in Louisville's early history.

The building has three full stories with a raised basement. While the exterior of the structure remained almost unchanged throughout its history, the interior was exposed to a number of grand restoration works. In 1909 an attachment was linked to the main building. The annex was designed in Greco-Roman style by Cornelius Curtin. The most prominent feature of the City Hall is the 195-foot four-faced clock tower with mansard roof, not completed until 1876 after an earlier one burned in 1875. The tower included a three-ton bell which rang until 1964, when the clock broke. It was repaired in 1968 but then broke again in the 1970s. It was finally fixed in 1991.

In 1976 the City Hall building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.