Long Hall

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #105

Every week in my “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” series, I feature a building with an interesting history or previous life. Today’s building is in Springfield, Ohio, and I saw it in this tweet. But don’t click on that yet.

It resembles a church, but the number of windows (and the “City Building” in stone above the central doorway) say it’s an old civic building.

Currently a museum, the building was originally, as you might expect, City Hall—plus a few other less expected uses!

The Heritage Center was originally Springfield’s City Hall and Marketplace, a municipal building constructed in 1890 and held city offices, a council chamber, an opera house, and a farmers’ market.

A little more:

The Heritage Center houses an extraordinary museum that faithfully recounts the history of America’s Heartland, and the historic National Road. Known by architectural aficionados for its stunning Richardsonian Romanesque design, the Heritage Center hosts approximately 30,000 visitors each year.

Now you might think I’m featuring this building simply because it combined a city hall with a market and opera house. And that would have been enough to feature it. But this is really why:

It’s enormous! What looks from the front like the entire building is really just a façade and small interior portion. According to the museum’s website, “The 56,000 square foot building stands 50 wide by 462 feet deep.”

Now you can click on the Twitter link. But I’ll tell you, basically, what else is in there. First, a Google Maps 3D image:

Here’s a more unfortunate zoomed-out one, showing how much of the old city has been demolished for parking lots over the decades. It looks like less than half of this old downtown is still standing.

Visually swap those parking lots for craters or charred shells, and you’d have no trouble thinking you were looking at a warzone.

But this grand building did survive, fully intact.

In a reply to the original tweet, someone else noted another similar building in Frederick, Maryland, which partially survived:

The left image is the Knoxville building, which extends back much further than the preview image, and the top right is the surviving portion of the Frederick building.

Apparently these sorts of long, multi-use civic/commercial buildings were staples of a vanished age of American urbanism. I’m glad we at least have a few left.

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Related Reading:

Something To See

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What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #24

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