$6.5 million project should be completed by Christmas 2006

By Matthew French
Staff Writer

If all goes according to schedule, Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. and the citizens of the city may have a shiny new Christmas present next year with the re-opening of the historic  City Hall. The building, located at Market and Broad streets, has been closed since the middle of last year for more than just a simple facelift.

The $6.5 million City Hall restoration project is drawing on the knowledge of architects, construction companies and skilled building artisans from around the region and across the country.

The removal of some interior walls and plaster has led to some interesting discoveries, including impact points from Civil War-era cannonballs and earthquake damage that had not been seen in generations.

The structure, which dates back nearly 200 years, saw damage far more extensive than even experts had predicted. Now that the original brick walls have been exposed, massive cracks from the 1886 earthquake show just how deep the structural problems run.

“The building was built in the early 1800s as a bank, and when it later became City Hall, it underwent major restoration in 1882,” Riley says. “So not 20 years after the end of the Civil War, (Charleston) invested substantial money in the restoration, and four years later came the earthquake. After that, the city did the best it could, but couldn’t afford major investments, and structural defects were never repaired.”

Joe Schmidt, an architect and partner with Evans and Schmidt Architects, the firm overseeing the project, says careful consideration is being paid to the history of the building, but the function of the building will not be sacrificed to achieve 100% historic authenticity.

“This is not designed to be a museum,” Schmidt says. “We don’t want it to be slavishly 1882.”

To find a happy medium, the project also involves the input of the State Historic Preservation Office, the American College of the Building Arts, the Historic Charleston Foundation and the National Trust. Much of the city council chamber’s ceiling had originally been plaster. Plaster is heavy, though, and during the 1884 earthquake, it fell and damaged pictures and wall-hangings. Now, rather than go through the expense and work of replacing the plaster, wood and tin will replace it.

Since certain parts of the building are still in the process of settling, contractors are using special 2-foot-long spiral rods to anchor the building to a concrete slap that will support vaults on the lower levels. Jim Neil, the project’s lead engineer, says about 20,000 rods will be used by the time the job is finished.

“We just found so much unexpected damage in the east wall and the northeast corner,” Neil says. “And the damage done during the earthquake was either poorly repaired or not done at all.”

Had such damage occurred to an old building elsewhere in the country, it is entirely likely the building would have been torn down and replaced by something more modern.

But Charleston’s reputation as one of the foremost cities in the country in the field of historical preservation likely prevented that from happening.

“This is a city of adaptive re-use,” Riley says. “There are dozens of similar examples throughout the city.”

Later this year, the city plans to transfer $1.5 million from its general fund for the project and borrow about $3 million through a bond issue, according to the budget that council approved in August.

Neil says the renovation has relied heavily on firsthand accounts from such local icons as Robert Mills, a native Charlestonian and early American architect, and the photography of Matthew Brady, whose Civil War photos he calls “invaluable.”

The minds behind City Hall’s reconstruction efforts are paying meticulous attention to detail, going so far as to order marble for the building’s foyer from the same region in Vermont where the original marble was quarried. The marble from Danby, Vt., is also extensively used in buildings in Washington, D.C.

Students from the American College of the Building Arts are also getting a hands-on education with the ongoing repair work on the surrounding grounds.

“We aren’t involved directly in the work going on inside the City Hall, but we are very much involved in restoring the wall surrounding Washington Park immediately behind City Hall,” says David AvRutick, president of the college. “The city needed artisans who were familiar with work in marble, masonry and ironwork. Someone else could come in and fix it with cement, but it would just need more repair down the road.”

Using students and instructors from the college does have its price, however, in that repair work is not done as rapidly as it might be were a professional to be hired.

“Everything we do has to be done in an educational context,” AvRutick says. “We aren’t just going to send people out to fix someone’s wall. We have a wonderful partnership with the city and we will work to return the wall to the state it should be.”

Matthew French covers architecture, construction and engineering for the Business Journal. E-mail him at mfrench@crbj.com.

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