Toronto's Old City Hall was home to its city council from 1899 to 1966 and remains one of the city's most prominent structures. The building is located at the corner of Queen and Bay Streets, across Bay Street from Nathan Phillips Square and the new City Hall in the centre of downtown Toronto. The heritage landmark has a distinctive clock tower which heads the length of Bay Street from Front Street to Queen Street as a terminating vista.The building took more than a decade to build and cost more than $2.5 million. Work on the building began in 1889 and ended in 1899.
Old City Hall was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1984.
Old City Hall can be described as a massive square quad with a courtyard in the middle. Situated at the front elevation, its clock tower was placed off centre to provide a terminating vista for Bay Street. In spite of this seeming asymmetry, the balance of the design is still existent throughout. Ultimately, even though the clock tower was off centre, balance was achieved through the repetition of the subtle details of measure and pattern. For example, to the right side of the main entrance a narrow circular tower rises 21.4 meters (792 ft) from grade. It is cut precisely in half by the roof line; it extends above the roof line by 10.7 meters (351 ft) and is also 10.7 meters (351 ft) from the roof line to the base of the main tower. Further on, the east and west pavilions, although quite different in their designs, are very similar in shape. The double-storied oriel of the east tower is exaggerated to counter the weight of the double tower of the west pavilion. The subtle balance is able to stand out at the main entrance of the building and prevent it from being overshadowed by the clock tower. The exterior rock-face wall was built in a series of courses, in variable sizes separated by carved bands. Grouped columns are repeatedly used to accent the windows.
Old City Hall was designed by architect E.J. Lennox in a variation of Romanesque Revival architecture known as Richardsonian Romanesque. Developed by Henry Hobson Richardson, this variation is considered more masculine, and it highlights bulk and massiveness as well as different sculptural features. The Romanesque style originated in Europe during the 11th and 12th centuries and had characteristics such as square towers, asymmetrical massing, stone carvings, round arches, and heavy stonework. During the mid-1800s, this style was revitalized in Western architecture. H.H. Richardson contributed dormers, circular towers with conical roofs, and the use of different coloured stone for the revival style that bears his name. Carvings of humans and animals were also part of the Richardsonian Romanesque style. Lennox was interested in and was influenced by Richardson’s work and travelled to the United States while he was planning his design for Toronto's third city hall in the late 19th century.
These influences can be seen at Old City Hall with many its many arches and towers. Also, the use of different coloured stone contributes towards the Romanesque style of design. The exterior and interiors of Old City Hall are crafted with great detail. On the clock tower, four stone gargoyles were placed near the top of the tower. Near the building’s entrance, there are several grotesque faces carved in stone. Lennox included his own resemblance next to the other carved faces which, tradition has it, represent city councillors. Lennox's own face is identified as one of the caricatures by his handlebar mustache.
The entire building has ornamentation derived from ancient Roman art. There are structural decorations used by the different colors of stone. The stone carvers did not complete work until a year after opening day, as there were many decorative pieces. The stonework on the entrance was restored in 1999.
Made primarily of sandstone, Old City Hall features a two-tone facade. One tone is made of light brown-grey sandstone from the former Beaumont Quarries (now known as Dorchester Sandstone Quarries located in Westmorland County, New Brunswick). This tone is accented with darker reddish-brown sandstone known as Sackville Sandstone (also located in the Westmorland County of New Brunswick). The transportation of the stone employed the use of over 1,360 rail-car loads, equivalent to a nine-mile long train, to bring the material to the site. In addition to the stone, 8,354 barrels of cement were used to hold everything together.
What is interesting about the sandstone is not just the variations in colour, but also the textural characteristics of the stone. Observation of the building’s profile shows it is cut stone with a rock-faced texture application. Despite the roughness of the sandstone, it is not perceived to be jagged, but rather heavily weathered. The raw state of the sandstone reinforces the natural state of the material and greatly heightens the overall sense of mass that the building exhibits. The scale of the stone pieces greatly contributes to the sense of mass as well, conveying the sense that the building was literally carved from the rock and placed where it currently resides.
Old City Hall features a large, 103.6 metre-tall (340 ft) clock tower that is a terminating vista for Bay Street south of Queen Street West and is also prominently visible from Queen Street and Nathan Phillips Square. The clock tower was the tallest structure in Canada for 18 years from 1899 until 1917. The clock room houses three bells, the largest of which weighs 5443 kilograms. Four garnished stone gargoyles sat at the upper corners of the clock tower; these ornaments were removed to the effects of the weather on the sandstone carvings in 1938, but bronze casts of the gargoyles were reinstalled in 2002. The clock's face measures 6 metres (20 ft) in diameter.
