Jersey City Hall Council Chambers

Jersey City, NJ

Not much historic information is available about the history of Jersey City’s 1897 City Hall. The original building, by architect Louis Henry Broome, met with a lot of criticism primarily because its design was to overworked and lacked a cohesive vocabulary. Beginning in the mid 1970’s, the City Hall benefited from the interest in preservation to remedy this but in 1979 fire destroyed the stained glass dome of the rotunda, bronze frescoes, copper cornices and other ornamentation.

Subsequently, EverGreene provided a paint study, shop drawings and mockups, wood cleaning, plaster restoration, and decorative painting. Conservators cleaned and refinished the wood around the chamber dome as well as all of the wood benches and other furnishings. The primary objective of this restoration was to reinstate the City Hall’s original decorative colors and design as intended in the 1897 decorative scheme – restoring the original concept, harmonizing the entire space and bringing all elements up to the same level of artistic quality.