Old Tampa City Hall and Hortense the Clock — Tampa, Florida

Old Tampa City Hall is the ten-story municipal building at 315 East Kennedy Boulevard, completed in 1915 and crowned by a clock that Tampa calls Hortense. Bay News 9 reported on its centennial that the building was completed on August 30, 1915 and was once the tallest building in downtown Tampa. It still does civic work: the Tampa City Council lists its office at 315 East Kennedy Blvd, City Hall, 3rd Floor, on a page updated September 30, 2026.

The building is protected at the federal level. The National Park Service record for Tampa City Hall (National Register number 74000639) is dated October 1, 1974, names 1915 as its significant year, and credits the design to Bonfoey and Elliott with McGucken and Hyer as builders. A 2012 record in the UNF Digital Commons adds that the Historic American Buildings Survey documented the Tampa building in 1981.

The architects were the Tampa firm of Bonfoey and Elliott. Bay News 9 names Elliott, a local architect, as the designer of the ornate structure, and Clio says City Hall is considered the firm's finest work. The same partners designed other downtown Tampa buildings, including the YMCA and the Masonic Temple, according to Clio.

The shape explains the Tampa landmark's nickname. Clio describes a building constructed in 1915, with an annex added in 1916, that rises ten stories through a central tower of seven stories set on a three-story base, a profile often likened to a layer cake. Its style mixes Renaissance Revival, Beaux-Arts and Commercial elements. Doric columns flank the entrance, and the poured concrete frame is covered by masonry, stone and terra cotta. The National Park Service record lists Beaux Arts and Renaissance among the styles and architecture as the area of significance.

The site had its own history. Clio reports that the Kennedy Boulevard lot once held a house built in 1842 for pioneer merchant Imboden Stalnaker. When the property was needed for City Hall, the house was moved rather than demolished, and Clio identifies it as the oldest home in Tampa.

The building belongs to a decade of public works. The City Clerk's biography of Mayor D.B. McKay, who served from 1910 to 1920, lists the completion of City Hall in 1915 among the projects of his administration, alongside paved streets, new sidewalks and sewers, the Lafayette Street bridge, brick fire stations and Tampa's first public library, which opened in 1917. Lafayette Street is today's Kennedy Boulevard, the same street City Hall faces.

Space was one reason and image was another. Rodney Kite-Powell, curator at the Tampa Bay History Center, told Bay News 9 in 2015 that the city needed the extra room but also used City Hall to make an architectural statement that Tampa was a growing city that had reached a level of status worthy of an attractive government building. Speaking to WUSF in 2012, city historic preservation manager Dennis Fernandez said the builders set out to give Tampa an iconic image meant to inspire residents for the next 100 years.

The clock was an afterthought paid for by a campaign. Clio states that the clock in the central tower was not part of the original design. WUSF reported in 2012 that Hortense Oppenheimer, a Tampa socialite, was upset the city had no clock tower; when the city said it had no money for one, she started a campaign called Ye Town Criers and raised a third of the cost. Clio adds that a local jewelry company donated the rest. WUSF put the original cost at $3,600.

FOX 13 described Hortense Oppenheimer in 2023 as the daughter of a prominent Tampa physician who was active in community projects, and noted that her most lasting fame may be the name long attached to the clock atop Old City Hall. The clock is known as Hortense the Beautiful, and Bay News 9 reported in 2015 that the clock tower is named after her.

Public clocks mattered more in 1915 Tampa than they do now. Kite-Powell told FOX 13 that before pocket watches and wristwatches were widespread, residents kept their daily lives and schedules by clock towers. The station added that in a town full of immigrant cigar workers, clock towers were critical parts of life, and it listed the 1914 clock at a Ybor City cigar factory among the other Tampa timepieces still running.

The clock tower got the most visible attention. WUSF reported on July 31, 2012 that the 1915 tower, standing ten stories above downtown Tampa, needed its leaky copper roof and dome replaced, cracked terracotta patched and new hands for the clock. Fernandez told the station that most work was on the outside, that many of the clock's working parts are original, and that any gear that breaks has to be fabricated because no one makes them anymore. WUSF put the cost of those renovations at more than half a million dollars, with completion expected within two weeks, in time for the RNC.

The City Clerk keeps a photo gallery of Old City Hall in 2012, the year of that work. By the building's centennial, more was planned. UNF's record says the Tampa City Council, which meets and is housed in the building, planned to spend about $16 million over several years on a major makeover. Bay News 9 reported in August 2015 that the building was undergoing renovations because of its age and that the mayor had asked for more money in the next year's budget for further repairs.

Yes, according to Bay News 9. During construction, city officials placed a time capsule, a copper box believed to hold century-old items, behind the 1915 cornerstone of the Tampa building. In 2015 Kite-Powell said he hoped the centennial would be the occasion to open it. The station reported that the mayor said it probably would not be opened that year because of the expense, and no later public reporting on an opening was found for this page.

The building also anchors Tampa's municipal archive. The Office of the City Clerk, whose pages hold the biographies of past mayors such as D.B. McKay and the photo galleries of City Hall and Old City Hall Today, lists 315 E. Kennedy Blvd. as its address, the same Kennedy Boulevard building where the Tampa City Council keeps its third floor office in 2026.