File:Minneapolis City Hall, 5th Street and S 4th Avenue, Minneapolis, MN - 51752518960.jpg

English: Built between 1888 and 1909, this Richardsonian Romanesque Revival-style rose granite building was designed by Long and Kees, and stands on the site of the former Washington School, the first public school building built on the west side of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. The building originally housed the governments of Minneapolis and Hennepin County, as well as the Hennepin County Courts. The building replaced an earlier City Hall, which stood from 1873 until 1912, and an earlier Hennepin County Courthouse and Jail. The building was originally intended to have a granite base and brick upper portion, but changes to the design led to the entire exterior being clad in stone, leading to cost and time overruns. The building features several windows with Roman arches, a tall clocktower along 4th Street with a four-sided clock, which remained the tallest structure in Minnesota from 1895 until the Plummer Building of the Mayo Clinic was completed in Rochester in 1926, with the Foshay Tower becoming the tallest building in Minneapolis and in Minnesota in 1929. The building features a bright green metal roof, Chateauesque dormers, a shorter tower along 5th Street, lots of pilasters, circular towers at the corners of the building, and a central light court. The interior features a large rotunda behind the clock tower on the 4th Street side, and features several spaces restored following the construction of new office buildings nearby for the county and city, which allowed spaces formerly altered and divided up to be returned to their original configurations. However, there is an annex within the central light court that was constructed to house additional office space for Hennepin County, which remains as the only major exterior alteration to the building since its period of significance. Today, the building’s interior has about sixty percent of its space occupied by the City of Minneapolis, with the other forty percent being occupied by Hennepin County. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.