Old City Hall, an imposing Greek Revival building designed by George Hadfield and built between 1820 and 1850, was Washington’s first city hall. It housed the city court and an elected mayor and city council until 1871, standing on a prominent site overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and bordering Judiciary Square, a center of community life. The building also witnessed the end of slavery in the District of Columbia, where President Lincoln authorized up to $1 million to compensate loyal Washington slaveholders for their human property. A slave sale commission working there faced the impossible task of assigning a monetary value to human life in Lincoln’s experiment with compensated emancipation, carried out only in Washington, D.C. At the entrance stands the first public monument in the United States to the assassinated 16th president, paid for almost entirely by District residents shocked that he had been killed in their city. Designed by sculptor Lee Flannery, who had known Lincoln, it was dedicated in 1868 and originally placed atop a 35 foot tall column. Today the building is vacant, awaiting a new use by the city government.
