Old Fort Pierce City Hall

Old Fort Pierce City Hall is the 1925 Mediterranean Revival building at 315 Avenue A that its National Register form calls the headquarters of city government in Fort Pierce for 46 years.

The left column is the National Park Service NRIS record 01001338 and the right column is the August 2001 registration form, prepared by the Bureau of Historic Preservation of the Florida Department of State. The two disagree on one point: the record lists two periods of significance, 1925-1949 and 1950-1974, while the form gives a single period of 1925-1951. Both are printed here as each source shows them. The form lists the property as public-local, owned by the City of Fort Pierce, and names the site number 8SL00289 along with the other names Old City Hall, City Hall Annex and Historic City Hall.

The setting section places the building facing north at the southeast corner of U.S. 1 and Avenue A, on a block bounded by Orange Avenue to the south and the Florida East Coast Railroad tracks to the east, and gives its footprint as roughly 60 feet by 105 feet on the corner of that block. When the form was written in 2001, the newer Fort Pierce City Hall stood next to the old one on the western half of the block, and the eastern half was parking that replaced the old fire station.

Mayor Clarence Cahow, a builder who served from 1923 to 1927, brought architect William Hatcher to Fort Pierce, and the city built its new City Hall in 1925 at the height of the land boom.

The registration form says that before 1925 the town kept its records, by oral tradition, in a one-room wooden shack at the corner of Depot Drive and Avenue A, just west of the railroad tracks (Old City Hall registration form, historical significance). In 1906 the Town Council sold that building for $75 and voted to build a new Engine House and Council Hall, 40 by 20 feet, which the first Sanborn map of Fort Pierce, for 1915, shows next door to the later City Hall site. The form adds that Volume II of the council minutes, covering the town's second decade, disappeared, and that the minutes pick up again in 1922.

Cahow had managed the millwork factory for East Coast Lumber before starting his own contracting business, and the form says his company built the Sunrise Theater in 1923, the year he was elected mayor. The Sunrise Theatre nomination tells the same story from its side, calling the contractor a visionary city developer who became mayor of Fort Pierce during the course of the theater's construction (Sunrise Theatre registration form). According to the Old City Hall form, the councilmen waited until the peak of the boom to build a proper city hall, and in 1925, when the population peaked at 8,500, Fort Pierce built its Mediterranean style City Hall along with a new fire station and a jail.

Old City Hall is a two-story, reinforced concrete building finished in warm gray stucco, its hip roof covered in red clay barrel tile, with Italian Renaissance details concentrated on its north entrance on Avenue A.

The exterior description of Old City Hall in the registration form notes 6/6 double hung sash windows on the upper floor and transomed eight-light casement windows below, quoined corners, and an entry bay finished in stucco scored to look like stone block. Double wood and glass doors sit in a vestibule behind a massive ornamental iron gate, flanked by double pilasters. A parapet over the entry bay is crowned by a cast stone emblem in the motif of a sun rising over waves, a panel over the door is inscribed CITY HALL, and the cornerstone sits at the west end of the north facade.

Inside, a hallway runs from the front vestibule to the rear entrance, with offices at the east and west ends and four structural columns finished in plaster molding in the central hall. A double staircase climbs to a broad landing that overlooks the rear courtyard, and the northern two-thirds of the second floor is a single meeting hall, the former Council Chamber, entered through two pairs of double doors. The form records hardwood floors except in the tiled hallways, plaster walls with wood molding, and tall ceilings with exposed beams molded in white-painted plaster in the former Council Chamber and lobby of Old City Hall.

Old City Hall grew with rear additions in 1950 and 1958, was partly emptied in 1971, retired in 1991, and restored in 1995 to approximate its original 1920s form.

Each row comes from the alterations section of the Old City Hall registration form. By 1958, the form says, the tax department shared the whole ground floor with the utilities department, and the mayor, city manager, clerks and engineers moved upstairs, which meant partitioning the great hall. The 1995 restoration took out all of the 1950s structures, added a narrow rear addition for an elevator and new fire stairs on the east and west, and returned the Council Chamber to a great hall. The form puts the restoration cost at $500,000, says half consisted of grants from the Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources, and says much of the labor and material was volunteered or donated. The form adds that the original hardwood flooring was preserved on the second floor.

William Wesley Hatcher, born in Dothan, Alabama, in 1891 and licensed in Florida on January 12, 1924, designed Old City Hall, which the registration form says was always his favorite work.

The form says Hatcher trained as a carpenter, enrolled at the School of Architecture of what is now Auburn University at age 26, and was designing a school in Montgomery when Cahow persuaded him to come to Fort Pierce (Old City Hall registration form, William Wesley Hatcher). His first Fort Pierce design was the 1924 Raulerson Building, where he kept his office overlooking 2nd Street and Avenue A, two blocks east of the City Hall site, and he soon formed the firm of Hatcher and Funke. The partners completed a third phase of the Fort Pierce High School in 1926, with Cahow as builder, and the form notes that school is listed as St. Lucie High School (NR 1984).

The form credits Hatcher and Funke with the First United Methodist Church, which it says Cahow's company built in 1925, while the city's 2020 Fort Pierce Redevelopment Plan dates the same church to 1926; both dates are given here as printed. Other Hatcher and Funke landmarks named in the form include White City School and the Okeechobee City Hall, which it calls similar in concept to Fort Pierce's but smaller. Hatcher stayed in Fort Pierce through the bust and the scarce work of the thirties, practiced until shortly before his death on February 5, 1971, at age 80, and was a neighbor and friend of the painter Albert Ernest Backus, whose art studio received his library.

Thirty-three mayors served in Old City Hall, which the form says was the headquarters of Fort Pierce government for 46 years before the departments scattered in 1971 and reunited in a new city hall in 1991.

The registration form lists events those mayors governed through: the 1927 collapse of the Bank of Fort Pierce, the 1929 crash and the lean 1930s, the deepening of the inlet and opening of the Port of Fort Pierce in 1930, the New Deal post office of 1935, the Farmers Market in 1941, the war years, the last cattle drive with the closing of open range in 1949, the citrus boom after the freeze of 1950, and the end of passenger service on the FEC in 1963. Once outgrown, the building was renamed City Hall Annex and housed the code enforcement, zoning, building, planning and community development departments.

When the new city hall was designed, the form says, the out of town firm that won the contract built a modernist structure, and Old City Hall was slated for demolition. The prospect of losing it galvanized grass roots efforts to reclaim downtown Fort Pierce that dated to the mid 1980s, and the form calls the 1995 rescue the turning point for Main Street Fort Pierce. The city's About Fort Pierce page notes that the National Trust for Historic Preservation gave Main Street Fort Pierce, Inc. its Great American Main Street Award in 2011.

The 2001 registration form describes the Fort Pierce city-owned building with a great hall rented for meetings and parties and used for public functions, and first floor offices rented to a business.

Those use details date from the 2001 registration form, which says the building was owned by the City of Fort Pierce and leased by Main Street Fort Pierce at the time, so the tenant arrangement it describes is dated to that year. The city's 2020 Updated FPRA Plan shows the hall in public use: the community briefing and listening session for the Port and Fisherman's Wharf neighborhoods was held on July 11, 2019 at Old City Hall (315 Avenue A), and the session for the Downtown community on July 17, 2019, also at Old City Hall. The same plan names Old City Hall (1925) among the historic Mediterranean-style structures from the city's early growth that still stand today.

The working City Hall is now at 100 N U.S. Highway 1, the address on City of Fort Pierce pages, and the city FAQ says the City Commission meets there in the City Commission Chambers (City of Fort Pierce FAQ). The historic buildings guide sets Old City Hall beside the Old Post Office and the Sunrise Theatre, and the Fort Pierce history hub places it in the story of the 1920s boom.