Cambridge, Massachusetts City Hall

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Cambridge, Massachusetts City Hall. CambridgeMACityHall2.jpg
Cambridge, Massachusetts City Hall.
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Elevation and floor plans.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts City Hall is the city hall for Cambridge, Massachusetts, located at 795 Massachusetts Avenue, and built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. [1] The building additionally serves as a centerpiece of the surrounding City Hall Historic District and adjacent Central Square Historic District.

Cambridge, Massachusetts City in Massachusetts, United States

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and part of the Boston metropolitan area.

Richardsonian Romanesque Romanesque Revival architectural style, named for Henry Hobson Richardson

Richardsonian Romanesque is a style of Romanesque Revival architecture named after architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886), whose masterpiece is Trinity Church, Boston (1872–1877), designated a National Historic Landmark. Richardson first used elements of the style in his Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane in Buffalo, New York, designed in 1870.

City Hall Historic District (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

The City Hall Historic District is a historic district encompassing buildings important in the early growth of the Central Square area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The focal point of the district is the monumental Richardsonian Romanesque Cambridge City Hall building on the north side of Massachusetts Avenue, two block west of the heart of the square. It also includes four buildings in the block just east of city hall, which is bounded by Bigelow and Temple Streets, Inman and Richard Allen Drives. City Hall was built in 1888 to a design by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow. Other buildings in the district include the Syrian Orthodox Catholic Church, built in 1822 and moved to 8 Inman Street from Lafayette Square in 1888, the 1888 Cambridge Mutual Fire Insurance Building at 763 Mass. Avenue, the 1912 Cambridge Electric Light Company Building at 719 Mass. Avenue, and the 1910 Cambridge YWCA at 7 Temple Street.

Contents

History

The hall was built between 1888–1889, and was largely funded through a donation from Frederick Hastings Rindge. The architects were Longfellow, Alden & Harlow (Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Jr., 1854–1934; Frank E. Alden, 1859–1908; and Alfred B. Harlow, 1857–1927). The building is three stories tall, with a bell tower that rises to 158 feet. Load-bearing stone walls are of Milford granite trimmed with Longmeadow brownstone.

Longfellow, Alden & Harlow

Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, of Boston, Massachusetts, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the architectural firm of Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Jr. (1854–1934), Frank Ellis Alden (1859–1908), and Alfred Branch Harlow (1857–1927). The firm, successors to H. H. Richardson, continued to provide structures in the Romanesque revival style established by Richardson that is often referred to as Richardsonian Romanesque.

Cambridge City Hall houses offices for the city council, the city manager and several municipal departments. In addition to the main building, the city of Cambridge also houses several other departments a couple of city blocks away in the City Hall Annex, located at Broadway and Inman Street.

On May 17, 2004, shortly after midnight, the first legal applications in the United States for marriage licenses for same-sex couples were issued at Cambridge City Hall. At 9:15 a.m. that day, the Cambridge City Clerk began solemnizing same-sex marriages. [2] See same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.

Same-sex marriage has been legally recognized in the U.S state of Massachusetts since May 17, 2004, as a result of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that it was unconstitutional under the Massachusetts Constitution to allow only opposite-sex couples to marry. Massachusetts became the sixth jurisdiction in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. It was the first U.S. state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

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Coordinates: 42°22′02″N71°06′20″W / 42.36712°N 71.10563°W / 42.36712; -71.10563

Geographic coordinate system Coordinate system

A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position and two or three of the numbers represent a horizontal position; alternatively, a geographic position may be expressed in a combined three-dimensional Cartesian vector. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation. To specify a location on a plane requires a map projection.