Peoria City Hall is one of the more striking civic buildings in central Illinois, built from reddish sandstone in a Romanesque Revival style that was fashionable for public buildings in the late nineteenth century. The building's heavy masonry, rounded arches, and corner tower give it a solidity that says something about how Peoria saw itself at the time it was built — a city with permanence, resources, and civic pride worth expressing in stone.
The building sits at the center of the historic downtown district, and its exterior is well worth a look even if you have no business inside. It has been preserved and remains in use as a functioning city hall, which keeps it maintained in a way that many comparable buildings in smaller Midwestern cities have not been. The surrounding downtown blocks contain other examples of early twentieth-century commercial and civic architecture that repay a slow walk.
Peoria City Hall is a Victorian-era red sandstone building from the 1890s that stands as one of the better examples of civic architecture from the period of Peoria's greatest prosperity. The building was designed in a Richardsonian Romanesque style with heavy rusticated stone, arched windows, and a corner tower — the architectural language of authority that American cities used to signal their permanence and ambition in the late 19th century.
The hall is still in use as a working city government building. It sits in the centre of the downtown civic cluster and its red sandstone exterior is immediately distinctive among the more recent commercial buildings around it. The exterior is the main point of interest; the interior is a functioning government office and not open for general tourist access, though the public lobby is visible.