Welcome To City Hall!

Here are a few pictures of one of the buildings we told you about on "Bloomin' Tuesday".

Buffalo's City Hall is a building that is much overlooked and often ignored, but Buffalo would not be what it is today without this building. Constructing City Hall where it is, with the style it has, quite literally changed the way the city of Buffalo looks. The buildings eventually constructed nearby and throughout the downtown business district would certainly not have the same design nor even be in their present location if not for City Hall's placement and design.

City Hall was built by the John W. Cowper Company, which was the same firm that earlier had built the Statler hotel and The Buffalo Athletic Club. The total cost of the building of City Hall was $6,851,546.85, including architect fees, making it at the time one of the most costly city halls in the country.

Click on any picture to get a closer look at the detail.

The following are some interesting statistics about City Hall:
The ground area of the site on Niagara Square is 71,700 square feet and cost $698,930, also making it one of the largest city halls in the country. Ground was broken on September 16, 1929 and the corner stone was laid May 14, 1930. The building was completed for occupancy on November 10, 1931, even though parts of the building were occupied as early as September 1931. The building was dedicated in July 1932.

The building has 32 stories, 26 of which are usable office space, and is 398 feet high from the street to the tip of the tower.

The total floor area is 566,313 square feet of which 316,937 square feet is usable for office space.

There are 1,520 windows from the first to the twenty-fifth floor. An interesting design feature is that all of them open inward, making window washers obsolete in the new City Hall. It takes approximately ten days to clean them all.

There are eight elevators to the 13th floor and four to the 25th floor. Curtis Elevator Co., the oldest active Elevator Company in the country, furnished the elevators. Otis Elevator Co. now the largest Elevator Company in the world supplied additional elevators added later.

There are 5,000 electrical outlets, 5,400 electrical switches, and 21 motor driven ventilation fans. One hundred and ten miles of copper wire weighing 43 tons, 47 miles or 180 tons of conduit pipe can be found throughout the building, as well as 26 miles or 5 car loads of underfoot conduit.

There are either 138 0r 143 clocks (there is some dispute on here) regulated by a master clock in the basement and 37 fire alarm stations distributed throughout the building.

It originally had 375 telephones with a master switchboard and 369 flood lights with an average candlepower of 350 each illuminating the exterior of the building at night from dusk to midnight.