Or at least you will if you read this cool NYT story about Philadelphia's City Hall. But you won't know how they got that statue of Penn up there.
When I first saw City Hall, it caught me by surprise. I remember driving with my husband, trying to get out of the city, when I looked up and saw this gigantic, dirty castle crammed in the middle of a modern city. I've never been inside, although after reading the story in the NYT, I really want to get in there:
City Hall has always been an impressive sight. It remains the loftiest masonry load-bearing building in the world, supported not by a steel skeleton but by stone and brick stacked upon more stone and brick. Its 548-foot tower — surpassing all the cathedrals of Europe — is topped by the largest statue on any building, anywhere: a 37-foot-high William Penn, the city’s founder, standing as tall as a town house. It is said to have the largest clocks on any building; it would loom over Big Ben.
With about 27 acres of floor space, this behemoth is bigger than every other municipal seat in the nation, all 50 state capitols and the national Capitol. The American Institute of Architects called it “perhaps the greatest single effort of late-19th-century American architecture.”
Perhaps?
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