Federal Hall National Memorial

Around 1699, de Peyster donated part of his garden for the construction of a new city hall. That building was later renamed Federal Hall, which briefly served as the first capitol of the United States, and the site of the first inauguration of George Washington as president. It was replaced in 1842 with the Greek Renaissance structure that stands there today.

The building was renamed Federal Hall. Peter L'Enfant embarked on his first major professional project by enlarging and embellishing the seat of the city's government (from 92 by 52 feet to 95 by 145 feet) and grafting an anomalous two-story Doric portico and a pediment graced with an eagle, stars, and arrows onto what contemporary illustrations depict as a fairly unspectacular red-brick building that dated to 1699 (and supposedly incorporated wood recycled from the Dutch stockade). While Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that public architecture is "the bone and muscle of democracy," the historian David McCullough called the remodeled Federal Hall "the first building in America designed to exalt the national spirit, in what would come to be known as the Federal style."

Washington was inaugurated before a great crowd on April 30, 1789, and the city fathers proudly began building an executive mansion fit for a president. But barely a year after Washington was sworn in, Alexander Hamilton sold the city down the river (literally). He traded southern votes in Congress to assume state war debts for northern assent to transplant the capital to a swamp on the Potomac. The ungrateful federal elected officials and their fellow travelers left, first for Philadelphia and, ten years later, for Washington. Still, serving as the capital under the Continental Congress beginning in 1785 and as the first capital of the United States in 1789, however briefly, spurred the city's recovery after seven disastrous years of British occupation and the 1776 fire. (The city of New York fared far better than L'Enfant. After rejecting George Washington's initial offer of ten acres of land for his services, L'Enfant later petitioned the city for the land or for the equivalent remu-neration. The city offered $750; again, he declined. In 1820, when he desperately appealed for any compensation whatsoever, the city refused to even consider his request. He died penniless.) If historic preservationists registered any outcry at the time, it was not loud enough to save the original Federal Hall, which New York City's government repossessed when Congress departed. Finished in 1704, it was falling apart by 1812. With barely any recorded objection or a campaign to restore the relic, it was wantonly demolished, to be replaced by the new City Hall farther uptown. A few artifacts were presciently salvaged and dispatched, for reasons unknown, to the grounds of Bellevue Hospital on the East River (where they were preserved by the commissioners of Charities and Correction). Most of the detritus was sold for scrap.

The current building was constructed in 1842