Cleveland City Hall

by David Bearden

Title

Cleveland City Hall

Artist

David Bearden

Medium

Photograph - Hdr

Description

The Columbian Exposition of 1893, the starting point of Beaux-Arts influence in American architecture and design, provided the models for Cleveland's and Cuyahoga County's needs. Then the Group Plan of 1903 put bricks and mortar to the ideal of the community with a plan to develop a central city mall surrounded by elegant, functional, and highly developed public buildings
Second building in the Cleveland Group Plan (whose other completed elements include the Federal Court House and Cleveland Public Library, the Cleveland City Hall and Board of Education Building, and the Cleveland Public Auditorium), the fifth Cuyahoga County Court House was begun in 1906 and substantially completed by 1912.
The structure cost about five million dollars (including architectural fees) and the land for it slightly less than one million dollars. A Beaux-Arts building in the Girard style of late eighteenth- century French architecture, the Court House has four full floors and a partial fifth floor which houses the Law Library. The model for the building is the mid-eighteenth century Hotel de Cite of Nancy, France, the old capitol of Lorraine. The Court House is built along the lines of the golden mean, the ratio of the length to the sides being one to two. The building is approximately four hundred feet long and two hundred feet deep.
The architects for the Court House were Lehman and Schmitt (specifically Charles Morris of that firm's staff, a Beaux-Arts trained architect) and Charles F. Schweinfurth for most of the interior spaces, although Morris prepared some of them as well.
The Court House is faced in Milford (Vermont) granite; the columns on the east side are detached from the building to add to the impression of grandness coming from the proposed but never built train terminal which was to have been between the Court House and the Cleveland City Hall to the east. (The City Hall's west columns are also detached, for the same reason.) The interior is done in marble (Tennessee and Georgia for the floors and Colorado for the columns and wainscoting) and English oak, chestnut, and other woods for the courtrooms.
A group of sculptors performed these statues. The ten cornice statues are all in Tennessee marble. The sculptor Herman executed the statues of Moses and Pope Gregory IX; Isidore Konti did Justinian and Alfred the Great; Herbert Adams did Archbishop Langston and Simon de Montfort; Daniel Chester French did King Edward I am Hampden, and Karl Bitter the Lords Somers and Mansfield. The four bronze works are by Herbert Adams (Marshall and Ranney) and Karl Bitter (Jefferson and Hamilton).
The Latin inscription above the Great Hall reads, "No free man may in any manner be destroyed except by legal verdict of his equals or by the law of the land."

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July 25th, 2011

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