Coral Gables City Hall heads rapidly toward restoration

Coral Gables officials were presented Tuesday with what they were told is needed to bring City Hall back fully restored and operational.

A detailed rundown of damages and recommended repairs for City Hall was explained by Richard Heisenbottle, founding president of R.J. Heisenbottle Architects, who is head of the historic building’s repair assessment and design services.

Mr. Heisenbottle cited three categories that need the most work: the garden courtyard, the building’s exterior, and the stone columns.

In the courtyard, a mid-century addition to the auxiliary building and an abandoned septic tank would have to be removed to restore bilateral symmetry and open space, he said.

City Hall was constructed from Florida Keys limestone, cast stone, and stucco. Mr. Heisenbottle said he noticed and documented cracking, spalling, and deterioration above cornices due to missing flashing, as well as corroded reinforcement and deteriorating balusters.

Recommended solutions would be removal of incompatible limestone patches and repairing them with mortar or stone, and replacing severely damaged limestone with matching new stone, he said, as well as repairing stucco to match original color, texture, and finish.

The most prominent character-defining feature of the building is the columns, Mr. Heisenbottle added, where he found cracks and spalling from embedded steel hardware, some of which required scaffolding due to serious failure. He also discovered that the columns are made of solid limestone, not reinforced concrete as originally specified.

Each will require installation of steel columns inside the stone columns, he advised, which will be a complicated task.

“Our restoration goal here is to preserve and define the defining architectural features and prevent further water infiltration and material loss as we repair all of these,” Mr. Heisenbottle said.

The commission chambers will also be restored, he added: “We propose to remove everything that we see in the current configuration and reconfigure the space. In reconfiguring the space, we get additional seating, significant additional seating, good handicapped seating, and we reorient the room back to the way the room was originally oriented.”

Construction and repairs are being proposed to start as early as June of next year, said Peter Iglesias, the city manager. “We have dramatically accelerated the schedule, and we’re looking at starting next year, probably the third quarter of next year,” he said.

Coral Gables City Hall at 405 Biltmore Way is a historically designated site on the US National Register of Historic Places. P.J. Davis Construction built the building along with architects Phineas Paist and Harold Steward on an estimated $200,000 budget. The iconic structure has a premier location on the west end of Miracle Mile and has been the city’s seat of government since 1928.

The three-story building was constructed with local limestone and has a stucco exterior, a Corinthian Colonnade and a clock tower. It was planned by Coral Gables founder George Merrick as he worked to create a Spanish-Mediterranean city. The tower interior is highlighted by a mural painted by Denman Fink, Mr. Merrick’s uncle, who designed many buildings in the city.

City hall houses the offices of the mayor and commissioners, the city’s manager, attorney, clerk and Finance Department.

Last November, after safety concerns were raised about City Hall’s structure, the commission meeting was held in the city’s police and fire conference meeting room as then-manager Amos Rojas Jr. looked for a single place to move all the offices this year and evacuate city hall.

That move was never made.

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