Tag Archives: architecture

L’Enfant’s “Characteristically American” Federal Hall

30 Jul 2025 By in History, The Social Life of Politics Tags: , , , , , ,
Architectural drawing of Federal Hall, showcasing the front elevation and detailing from the 18th century. Features include the central dome, columns, and inscriptions about Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant.

Artist William Hindley made this interesting architectural rendering of Federal Hall in the 1930s, over a century after the building was demolished in 1812 to make way for the US Custom House of the Port of New York.

Further research on Hindley might clarify whether he was in business for himself or worked for a government entity such as the National Park Service (NPS) or Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed scores of writers, artists, and photographers to document the physical environment and condition of the country at that time. Whatever the case, Hindley made a handful of drawings aimed at preserving the characteristics of this significant building, which was the sole seat of the federal government during its first year.

It’s prudent to approach such retrospective documents warily. The specifics they present as historical may be spurious and anachronistic, sheer invention making up for a shortage of factual detail. Good artists were scarce in the early national period; the visual record of important people, places, and events then, correspondingly thin.

Here, though, Hindley generally dispels our skepticism. In the lower left legend, he states that his work was extrapolated from the scale of the old city hall, combined with “Hill’s engraving and descriptions,” and Robertson’s drawing. (The latter is a street view of Federal Hall that Archibald Robertson sketched when the building was still extant, around 1798.) In addition, later scholarly analyses of Federal Hall offer other documentary evidence corroborating Hindley.

Hindley’s drawing effectively communicates the subjective significance of L’Enfant’s smooth, symmetrical facade. Highlighted are the columns, pediment, and entablature, a fancy cupola topping off the now three-story building. The focal point of all is the new nation’s seal. The upper right-hand legend tells us that, as reward and payment for his work, the 33-year-old L’Enfant was offered “10 acres of land at Proovost [sic] Lane between E60 and E49 street with a small payment of money but declined it.”

Overstating the case a bit, Hindley avers that L’Enfant was the first architect to solve the problem of how to make a building “characteristically American,” establishing a pattern that other famous public architects of the early national period, such as Bullfinch, Thornton, Hooker, Hadley, Thompson, and Latrobe, merely followed. What can be said with authority, however, is that the stylistic elements L’Enfant combined in Federal Hall were indeed used in government buildings in the US countless times.

Image: from the National Park Service
collection of artifacts pertaining to Federal Hall,
accessed on 12 December 2012.

Click here to view two other imaginative renderings
of Federal Hall that Hindley made.

Federal Hall, The Seat of Congress

26 Jul 2025 By in History, Politics, The Social Life of Politics Tags: , , , , , , ,
An illustration of Federal Hall, depicting its front facade with large columns, decorative elements, and a clock tower. The image includes historical text mentioning it as the seat of Congress.

The afore-mentioned renovation of Federal Hall was complete by the time the First Congress met to certify the results of the first presidential election. This 1790 copperplate engraving depicts George Washington’s swearing in on a crowded balcony, members of Congress looking on. His term began April 30, 1789.

Though the facade was new, the site was familiar to all participants, as the failed Confederation Congress had been meeting in this building, which was New York’s old city hall, for several years. New York City continued as the temporary capital for one more year, until the government moved to Philadelphia, where it would remain for the next decade.

The old city hall is nearly unrecognizable, its scale and structure a canvas for Peter L’Enfant’s showy neoclassical style.

This item is in the collection of the National Park Service,
a reminder of that agency’s enormous role
in preserving precious artifacts
critical to our understanding of the early United States.

New York: The Old City Hall

23 Jul 2025 By in History, The Social Life of Politics Tags: , , , , ,
Watercolor illustration of the Old City Hall on Wall Street, built in 1699, showing its classical architecture and surrounding trees.

New York’s old city hall, pictured above, was remodeled at the time of the Founding and renamed Federal Hall. By then, the building was 90 years old, having been built in 1699. It was the administrative center of old New York, housing not only the mayor’s office but the city firehouse and a debtor’s prison, as well as the municipal court.

After the Revolution, this building became the seat of the Confederation Congress of the United States. The Congress, then the nation’s sole governing body, met here from 1785 until the Constitution was ratified and put into operation (04 Mar 1789), two days after the Confederation was formally dissolved. The First Congress convened here. New York remained the temporary capital of the US for one year.

As the new government formed, leading New Yorkers began maneuvering to have their city chosen as the permanent capital that the Constitution required. They raised funds to transform the Old City Hall into a more imposing structure imbued with Federal style. They employed a French-born artist, Pierre (“Peter”) L’Enfant, an officer of the Army Corps of Engineers and veteran of the Revolution, to furnish the plans. Occasionally during 1788, the Confederation Congress met at Fraunces Tavern, as workmen renovated the old city hall.

RELATED:
Fortenbaugh, Robert, The Nine Capitals of the United States (Internet Archive)
Historic Battlefield Trust, Early Capitals of the United States
US House of Representatives, Meeting Places for the Continental Congresses and the Confederation Congress, 1774–1789


Image: from this source.

An Early Aerial View of the University of Chicago

31 Mar 2015 By in Reading old photographs Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Aerial panoramic view of the Quads taken from west of Ellis Avenue.
George R Lawrence was a pioneer whose specialty was panoramic aerial photography.  A native of northern Illinois, he invented the means to take high-quality “bird’s eye” views using a camera hoisted aloft with balloons or kites.  His most famous photographs are of a ruined San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, but he also photographed Chicago, its waterfront and factories, and various towns nearby. Continue reading →

Where Prentice Stood

27 Feb 2015 By in Chicago Tags: , , , 5 Comments

The former site of the Prentice Women's Hospital building by Bertrand Goldberg, demolished in 2014.
The upper floors of the new Arkes Pavilion give a clear view of 333 East Superior, where the old Prentice Women’s Hospital building stood.  Completed in 1975, the building was part of Northwestern Hospital, which demolished it in 2013-14, despite long and intense opposition.  The building’s architect was Bertrand Goldberg.

Prentice, which housed not only Northwestern’s maternity hospital but its psychiatric ward, was unforgettable on account of its peculiar rounded tower, a cylindrical cluster in the shape of a clover-leaf or quatrefoil, which seemed to float or balloon over a squat dark building that formed its base.  The tower, made mainly of poured concrete, had disproportionately small oval windows whose placement accentuated the tower’s strange shape.

The building was an example of the brutalist style (of which Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago is an instance, too).  It was assertively drab; impractical, too.  Ironic, then, that it should live on in one’s mind: provocative and futuristic, one-of-a-kind.