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Why is the top of Philadelphia’s City Hall tower a different color than the rest of the building?

Was it an oversight during a renovation project or is there a technical reason?

Philadelphia City Hall, photographed in November, 2018. The two-toned tower? There's a reason for it.
Philadelphia City Hall, photographed in November, 2018. The two-toned tower? There's a reason for it.Read moreMichael Bryant / File Photograph

It had taken six years and $26.5 million to refurbish Philadelphia’s City Hall tower.

And for most of those years, between 1984 to 1990, Philly being Philly, people complained and complained about the ugly scaffolding that enshrouded the tower during reconstruction.

It was an insult to the city’s dignity, they said, that the statue of founder William Penn should appear imprisoned upon his perch above the city’s seat of power.

Once the scaffolding came down in 1990, a new debate arose:

What’s the deal with the two-tone tower?

A question submitted recently via Curious Philly, a forum where readers can tell our journalists what they’re wondering about, asked anew why the top of City Hall “is a completely different shade of white than the rest of the building? Was it an oversight during a renovation project or is there a technical reason?”

Actually, the answer to both questions is yes, according to reporting by Thomas Hine, then the Inquirer’s architecture critic.

Renovation required a change in materials used for the City Hall tower’s skin, Hine wrote in an article published Aug. 23, 1990.

“It is suddenly apparent that City Hall Tower is two towers: a 200-foot metal structure atop a 347-foot stone edifice,” Hine wrote. “This is true, but the designers of City Hall never meant the fact to be quite so noticeable.”

Greta Greenberger, the director of City Hall tours for 25 years until her recent retirement, said in an interview this week that work on the tower had been long overdue.

“From the clock level up to the observation deck was covered with cast iron, and pieces were deteriorating,” she said. “Bolts were coming loose."

“They thought they would replace some of the [nearly] 4,000 iron plates, but instead they decided to replace almost all of them with a new skin of steel.”

Most of the 3,900 iron plates were replaced with about 2,000 copper-and-zinc-coated plates, Hine wrote.

The redesign with fewer plates was intentional; there would be fewer niches and spaces where rainwater could accumulate and cause corrosion.

The plates were electroplated and were to be covered with a state-of-the-art paint that would last 50 years or more, the kind of hardy, nearly indestructible paint used for bridges, ships, and airplanes.

The thing is, the company that developed the paint made it in just three colors: white, dark gray, and light gray.

Officials of the city’s Art Commission chose the light-gray hue and thought about “warming up the color" to match the stone of the main building, Hine wrote.

But they could not find a way to do it. So the light-gray paint went on the copper plates before being topped on the refurbished tower.

Less than a month later, Hine published a second article, praising the efficiency of the project’s engineering but lamenting the careless aesthetics.

“What was intended to appear as a single tower now appears as two,” Hine wrote on Sept. 16, 1990. “The job that appeared miraculous from the scaffold looks like a mistake from the street.

“... [T]hose involved did not work with the manufacturer to produce a color that would preserve the artistic integrity of the structure. ...”

And while then-Mayor Wilson Goode talked of the two tones representing the old and new of Philadelphia, others like Hine were not so impressed:

“For some the two-toned tower says that Philadelphia will never quite get anything right and shouldn’t bother to try.”