“A Broad Street landsmark building designed by Gabriel Manigault.”
80 Broad Street
City Directories and History: CHARLESTON CITY HALL
Constructed 1800-04; repaired 1866, 1898, 1938 (80 Broad Street)
“Gabriel Manigault, attributed architect (1800-04); Charles Reichardt, architect (1839); Edward Magrath and Joseph Nicholson, carpenters; Andrew Gordon, mason; Colitt McK. Grant, renovation contractor, 1882 Formerly the location of the 1739 beef market destroyed in the fire of 1796, this important site at the intersection of Broad and Meeting Streets was conveyed by the city to the president and directors of the
Charleston branch of the first Bank of the United States in 1800. Gabriel Manigault (1758-1809) is often credited with its design, but the building itself was constructed under the guidance of the carpenters Edward Magrath and Joseph Nicholson and the mason Andrew Gordon. The building served as a state bank from 1811 to 1818, when it was designated as the city hall. The structure was denounced by the architect Robert Mills as “showy” and was dominated by a two-story hall across the front. The city engaged Prussian-born architect Charles Reichardt to perform the first renovations.
The building was extensively altered again in 1882 when a new metal roof was added, the brick exterior was stuccoed, and the interior was completely gutted and reordered with a large second-story council chamber across the central front. After the earthquake of 1886 the Victorian council chamber was further ornamented with varnished wood sheathing and a decorative ceiling. The council chamber remains the heart of the city’s government. This is the second-oldest city hall in continuous use in America and houses a notable collection of paintings, open free to the public, that includes portraits of presidents George Washington by John Trumbull, James Monroe by Samuel F. B. Morse, and Andrew Jackson by P. A. Healey. Virtually every dignitary to visit the city since the Marquis de Lafayette in 1824 has been welcomed in city hall.
The building today retains its extensive Adamesque marble detailing with arched window architraves and lintels, quoining, and
engaged columns successively of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders. The city’s seal, adopted in 1783, appears in a late-nineteenth-century low relief sculpture in the pediment and contains the following, in Latin, “The Body Politic, She Guards Her Buildings, Customs and Law.”
Information from: The Buildings of Charleston – J.H. Poston for the Historic Charleston Foundation, 1997
Other sources of interest: Charleston Tax Payers of Charleston, SC in 1860-61 and the Dwelling Houses of Charleston by Alice R.H. Smith – 1917
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