America's oldest city hall still in use as a seat of local government is New York City Hall, right in front of you. New York City Hall was completed in 1811 in Federal and French Renaissance style, a handsome building of Massachusetts marble and brownstone that has looked over this park for more than two centuries. Its builders made one famously optimistic decision: they finished only the front and sides in marble, leaving the back in brownstone, because they assumed the city would never grow north of this point and no one would ever see the rear.
They were wrong. The building sat in the center of a city that grew a hundred times over in every direction. In its rotunda, Abraham Lincoln's body lay in state in April 1865, viewed by more than 100,000 mourners.
Robert Kennedy lay in state here in 1968. Picture the cupola's windows above you, behind which the city's government has met through wars, depressions, epidemics, and fires, always in this same small, elegant building on the same modest park.