The Municipal Building, bestride Chambers Street at Centre Street, is one of the most eye-catching tall buildings in the world, yet it seems never to get the due accorded other classic skyscrapers. An old canard holds that by the time it was built, skyscraper design had been “rationalized” by Louis Sullivan, and that the Beaux-Arts was somehow ill-suited to the form.

Thus, in 1939 the “New York City Guide” put out by the Federal Writers’ Project said: “It gains dignity through the bold treatment of the intermediate stories, despite the poorly related tower and the disturbing character of the Corinthian colonnade at the base.” By then, sophisticated opinion held that Corinthian colonnades were a kind of wasteful splurge unfitted to the putative solemnities of the new century.

The granite-sheathed Municipal Building rose between 1907 and 1914 to the designs of McKim, Mead & White. We credit the design to William Kendall, a partner in that firm. Stanford White had been killed in 1906, but his losing entry in the competition to design Grand Central Terminal informed Kendall’s conception for the new building, which like Grand Central was an enormously complex undertaking. City Hall had been built a century earlier, and had come close to being replaced by a larger building. The city instead decided to build a new administrative center on a site adjacent to City Hall Park, and to keep the mayor’s office and Council chamber in the old building.

The new building could not block the path of Chambers Street, which flowed through a vast arched and vaulted passageway in the base of the building. Conceived as a piece of design unto itself, this passage is a great triumphal arch. Later, the city chose to terminate Chambers Street at this arch, which now leads to Police Plaza.

The shaft rises above the arcaded and colonnaded base. Viewed from Chambers Street, this shaft is a great concave form that seems to extend its arms in genial embrace of the city. The richly ornamented top takes its form from the choragic monument of Lysicrates, whose form also appears in the 1790s steeple of nearby St. Paul’s Chapel, at Broadway and Vesey Street. This shows the wide adaptability of ancient forms to different building types from different centuries, and we should admire the resourcefulness of New York architects who figured out how to extend the classical grammar to the new skyscrapers. Indeed, that is one of New York’s signal contributions to Western architecture.

Adolph Weinman’s gilded statue of “Civic Fame” majestically surmounts the building. The stately woman wears a flowing classical gown, her bare feet gracefully balanced on a globe. She wears a laurel crown and holds a branch of laurel, the symbol of Apollonian self-discipline – the sine qua non of civic virtue, or civic fame, which here means something like honor, not celebrity. The beautifully erect, self-possessed figure conveys this message even to those who do not know the symbolism of the laurel. She stands with Junoesque mien surveying her metropolis.