Pottsville City Hall

Pottsville City Hall, at 401 North Centre Street, is the three-story Indiana-sandstone municipal building the Public Works Administration built for Pottsville between April 1936 and March 1937 — an $82,636 federal grant toward a $205,060 total cost. The city government moved in on April 15, 1937, and it is there today: the building remains the seat of city government, and the city’s police have been headquartered on its first floor from the first day. The plans were in the charge of the architect D. H. Grootenboer, of the Grootenboer-Knoblock firm, by the contemporary account of the Pottsville Republican.

The old hall on Goforth Avenue

The building Pottsville left behind in 1937 had backed into city service sideways. The borough’s first public hall proper — the Town Hall of 1841, which stood on the 300 block of Centre Street and hosted everything from Masonic lodges to a Mexican War company’s headquarters — burned on March 19, 1876, taking a lodge’s regalia with it, “no insurance.” What replaced it as the seat of local government was not a purpose-built hall but the fire companies’ quarters on a little lane between Second and Third Streets just below Market: a brick hall at what became 12 North Third Street, dated 1871 by the historic district’s 1982 survey and described there as “originally fire hall” — the quarters of the lineage that ran from the Pottsville Fire Co. of 1833 to the Humane Hose Co.

The June 1885 Sanborn map draws the row along the lane — then labelled Division Street — with two engine houses and the borough lock-up on its south side and a frame police station across the way. By the 1889–90 directory the lane has its lasting name, Goforth Avenue, and the police station is listed on it; by 1895 Boyd’s lists “Pottsville Borough Hall, 3d c Goforth al”; and the April 1896 Sanborn sheet letters the building “CITY HALL,” forty-foot tower and all. It carried the city through four decades more — the Republican reckoned in 1937 that it “had been used for city and borough purposes for considerably more than a half century” — while its fire-hall bones showed to the end: the engine house shared the row the whole time, and the fire company’s successors kept their quarters in the building until the city itself moved out.

A PWA project

Relief from the old hall came from the New Deal. The Public Works Administration carried Pottsville’s new city hall as docket PA W1280, and the project ran on federal terms from the start. When the construction bids ran past the estimates in March 1936, City Engineer George H. Steidel and Architect D. H. Grootenboer — “of the Grootenboer-Knoblock architectural firm in charge of the plans of the municipal building,” as the Republican put it — went before PWA officials at Harrisburg carrying a council resolution that asked the agency to approve the contract for the lowest bidders as submitted. Construction began that April on the west side of North Centre Street at Laurel Boulevard, a block up from the Centre Street Grammar School.

The cornerstone was laid on Friday afternoon, October 16, 1936, in a ceremony a shower could not dampen. The steel skeleton was up, the concrete laid, and the lower story held its first assembly — clergy, officials past and present, three former mayors among them — made happier, the paper noted, by a PWA check representing “more than half the federal cash allocation,” received just hours before, that guaranteed uninterrupted progress. Finished, furnished, and equipped, the Republican wrote, the building would represent an investment of more than $200,000.

Moving in, April 1937

Council’s acceptance came at its last session in the old Third Street building: on the night of April 13, 1937, it formally accepted the new city hall as completed “except for some minor matters” — and voted to borrow up to $10,000 toward the contractors’ final payment, since the PWA would not release the last of its grant while a cent of debt stood against the building.

Two days later, on Thursday, April 15, 1937, the city moved. “New City Hall Now Occupied,” the Republican reported the next evening: Mayor Claude A. Lord personally conducted friends and citizens through a building “of three stories and 120 feet square, constructed of Indiana sandstone,” trimmed in Tennessee marble and aluminum, with a terrazzo-floored vestibule off Centre Street and a lobby whose marble walls were banded in aluminum. The first floor held the mayor’s suite, the treasurer, the assessor, and the police department; the council chamber and the city’s boards had their quarters on this floor and the second; the basement was the police department’s — of which more below. Mrs. Helen Bartsch, the new switchboard operator, spent the day acquainting herself with the modus operandi before her official duties began on Friday.

Council held its first stated session in the new municipal chamber on May 11 — opened with prayer, a first in the city’s municipal history — and put on record its thanks to the businessmen who had furnished the building: L. Hummel’s Sons furnished the mayor’s private room and reception room gratis, with Pomeroy’s, Liner’s, Sears Roebuck, Benesch’s, and the Capitol Furniture Co. among the other donors, so that the only furnishing cost to taxpayers was the council chamber itself. The Garden Club of Pottsville was thanked for the evergreens placed at either side of the entrance.

”$200,000 City Hall Dedicated”

The formal dedication came on Thursday, May 27, 1937 — a noonday luncheon of the three service clubs, then a street parade to the new municipal building, then the exercises themselves. The federal government sent the orator of the day: Colonel Horatio B. Hackett, Assistant Administrator of the PWA, who told the crowd he knew this section well. City Clerk G. A. Berner read a sketch of nearly two centuries of local history into the record, and the Republican’s front page that evening carried the banner “POTTSVILLE’S $200,000 CITY HALL DEDICATED” over a photograph of the main lobby.

The police floor

The police floor was Mayor Lord’s particular project. Writing in the reissued Police Historical Book, Lord — who had taken office in 1934 and found a department of “fourteen men enrolled and two substitutes” — described the quarters built into the new hall: nearly half the first floor given to the chief’s offices, a teletype room, the sergeant’s office, and the police court, with a gymnasium, locker rooms, an ordnance room, and “a revolver and rifle range the entire length of the building” in the basement, serving a rejuvenated force of thirty-five men. The department’s whole story — from the borough’s high constable of 1828 to today’s bureau — runs through this building’s first floor.

Seat of city government

The building’s tenants have changed with the city’s needs, but its role has not. The department it houses took its modern legal form on May 21, 1966, when Ordinance No. 72-66 created the Bureau of Police as Article 131 of the newly codified city ordinances; the bureau still answers to the mayor from the same first floor. City council still meets in the chamber the businessmen of 1937 furnished. The old hall on Goforth Avenue passed, fittingly, to the keeping of history itself: in May 1937 council voted the Schuylkill County Historical Society immediate possession of its basement and first floor on a nominal lease, with the Third Brigade Band upstairs, and the society kept its museum there into the early 2000s.

One thing the new City Hall never joined is the historic district that begins directly south of it, across Laurel Boulevard. The Pottsville Downtown Historic District’s 1982 National Register boundary runs along the southern curb line of Laurel Boulevard; its authors described the area north of the line — where City Hall and the county’s civic buildings stand — as outside the downtown core they were listing. The building on the Tichnor postcard above, lettered POTTSVILLE CITY HALL across its sandstone entrance bay, thus stands where it always has: just past the edge of the old downtown, at the head of Centre Street’s civic blocks, doing the job it was built for.