Houston City Hall
| Houston City Hall | |
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| General information | |
| Type | City hall |
| Architectural style | Art Deco |
| Address | 901 Bagby Street Houston, Texas 77002 |
| Coordinates | 29°45′37″N 95°22′10″W / 29.7602°N 95.3694°WCoordinates: 29°45′37″N 95°22′10″W / 29.7602°N 95.3694°W |
| Construction started | March 7, 1938 |
| Completed | July 1939 |
| Cost | $1.67 million USD |
| Technical details | |
| Floor count | 17 |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect | Joseph Finger |
| References | |
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Houston City Hall
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| Location | 901 Bagby St., Houston, Texas |
| Coordinates | 29°45′36″N 95°22′9″W / 29.76000°N 95.36917°W |
| Area | 3.1 acres (1.3 ha) |
| Architectural style | Art Deco, Other, Modernistic |
| NRHP Reference # | 90001471 |
| Added to NRHP | September 18, 1990 |
The Houston City Hall building is the headquarters of the city of Houston's government. It was constructed in 1938-1939, and is located in Downtown Houston. It is surrounded by skyscrapers and very similar to dozens of other city halls built in the southwest United States during the same time period. It is flanked by Tranquility Park and the Houston Public Library. The simply designed structure featured many construction details that have helped to make this building an architectural classic.
From 1841 to 1939, Houston's municipal government was headquartered at Old Market Square. It was destroyed by fire in the 1870s, and also in 1901, and rebuilt each time. In those days, City Hall was part of the lively commercial atmosphere of the Square. However, by the 1920s, the city leaders decided the site was no longer appropriate for their needs.
In 1929, the city's planning commission urged the establishment of a civic center around a downtown park, Herman Square. However, the Great Depression sidetracked the plans for the new center. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted the Works Progress Administration program, the city applied for a WPA grant to help finance the construction of a new City Hall. The grant was approved, and construction began in March 1938, continuing for 20 months.
Joseph Finger had designed the city hall building in a stripped classical style. He wanted to place on the front terrace statues of John Kirby Allen and Augustus Chapman Allen, but the City of Houston lacked the funds needed to add the statues. The statues would have cost $8,000 and the city was still suffering from the Great Depression. The Texas Star Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) discovered this fact from reading a November 1939 article of the Scripps Howard Houston Press and publicized it in 2010. The statue project was dropped by the DRT chapter and the Oran M. Roberts Chapter 440, UDC, stepped in and raised the funds to have the Allen Brothers statues commissioned and cast in bronze.
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