It is obvious that Mr. Spilove loves Philadelphia. Wayne is not only a long time resident of Philadelphia, he has has been an active civic leader in the City of Philadelphia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for more than thirty-five years.
Under ‘s leadership, an extensive $100 million restoration project of Philadelphia’s City Hall was initiated, and continues still, through both public and private support.
Throughout its history this huge granite structure, built in 1871-1901 in the French Second-Empire architectural style, had weathered many challenges, including lack of funds for maintenance and periods of neglect and vandalism.
That is finally changing. A restoration of the building’s lavish statuary and exteriors, perhaps the nation’s largest-ever art conservation effort, is slowly transforming its dingy main floors into bright granite and marble. Ironwork that was once rusty is now a crisp white. Viewed from the northwest, the renewed facades are a shining panorama its builders could only imagine.
With about 27 acres of floor space, this is bigger than every other municipal seat in the nation, all 50 state capitols and the national Capitol. The American Institute of Architects called it “perhaps the greatest single effort of late-19th-century American architecture.”
Floodlighted at night, the building’s silhouette once again squares with the impressions of the poet Walt Whitman, who lived across the river in Camden, N.J. Observing its construction, he wrote that City Hall was “a majestic and lovely show there in the moonlight,” “silent, weird, beautiful.”
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