Gergory Freeman: Brochure To Give City Hall Its Moment In The Sun Among Landmarks. PD 9/8/1990

Headline: BROCHURE TO GIVE CITY HALL ITS MOMENT IN THE SUN AMONG LANDMARKS
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Sat., Sept. 8, 1990
Section: WAR PAGE, Page: 1B, Edition: FIVE STAR

THERE ARE a lot of people who think that if the walls of St. Louis City Hall could talk, they would spew plenty of hot air.

But Gail Compton, a public information officer for city government, has found a great deal of history at City Hall worth telling. The nearly 100-year-old structure, on Tucker Boulevard, has witnessed a variety of changes and near-changes over the years. But until very recently, the city has had no real documentation of the massive structure's history.
Thanks to Compton, that's changing. She became aware earlier this year that hundreds of visitors enter the building daily, and many of them had questions about it, such as its age, how it came about and why it looks as it does.
So Compton, a former City Hall reporter for the Journal newspapers, decided to find out about the building's history.

After gathering the information, Compton faced another challenge: how to get it printed in a city that's strapped for cash.
In passing, Compton mentioned her problem to Gregory F.X. Daly, an administrative aide to aldermanic president Thomas A. Villa. Daly, who is also co-owner of Hi-Land Miniature Golf in south St. Louis, volunteered his company to pick up the cost.
The result: After Oct. 1, visitors to City Hall will be able to pick up a brochure on the history of the building.

''I learned a heck of a lot more than I had expected to find out, '' Compton said. She also shattered a few myths in the process.
     For instance, City Hall, she learned, is similar in style to the Paris Hotel de Ville. Contrary to popular belief - and to something that I was taught in school - the Hotel de Ville is not a hotel. It's the city hall of Paris.
     Unlike many of the projects that taxpayers today have to consider, no bond issue was passed to finance the construction of City Hall here. That probably explains why it took 14 years to build it, from 1890 to 1904. Every year or two, the Board of Aldermen would authorize an average of $110,000 to continue construction.
      In April 1898, the unfinished building was occupied when Mayor Henry Ziegenhein headed a ceremonial parade of city officials from a ''temporary'' city government building constructed in 1872 - dubbed ''the barn'' - to their offices in the new City Hall.

A lot of changes have taken place at City Hall since its 1904 completion.
     The original building had a lantern-like central tower, about 80 feet tall, above the Tucker Boulevard entrance and two smaller spires, about 19 feet in height, on either side of the central tower. The clock on the central tower had a striking mechanism that hit a gong every hour. The problem was that the clock tower shook furiously each time the clock struck, and the striking mechanism had to be removed. In 1936, the tower and the smaller spires were removed when the structural steel frame of the towers was found to be corroded.
    It wasn't until 1943 that the words ''City Hall'' were engraved in the stone above the doors on the Market, Tucker and Clark street entrances. That was done after the city Art Commission refused to allow Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann to put a blinking, neon ''City Hall'' sign in red, white and blue above the main door.
     The city's Art Commission intervened in another City Hall project earlier this century. The murals inside the Tucker and Market street entrances were painted in 1934 by Carl Bonfig, who was paid $1.37 an hour under a federal work program. He was commissioned to copy existing paintings to create six murals. Three were completed. When the Art Commission saw the three, its members decided that the murals did not live up to the artistic standards for a public building. The other three murals were never painted.
     The very walls of City Hall have been controversial over the years. The area's air pollution in the first two-thirds of this century was so bad that in 1934 the building had taken on a coal-like color. It was sandblasted that year to reveal the original pink and orange colors, astonishing St. Louisans and prompting one wag to say that ''perhaps nature really does tend to correct man's mistakes.'' The building had darkened once more by 1960 and again had to be sandblasted.
     Another controversy developed in 1960, when the city installed ''anti-pigeon strips'' along the building's roof and windows. The strips were supposed to give pigeons an electrical ''zap'' every time they landed. But the strips never worked, and they were removed in 1968.

Compton had not expected to learn so much about the building during her research.
''Everybody thinks of the Old Courthouse and Old Cathedral when they discuss the city's architectural history, '' she said. ''But maybe this will help people realize that City Hall is significant as well.''

Daniel Schesch - Webweaver

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