File:Lobby Ceiling, Asheville City Hall, Court Plaza, Asheville, NC - 53419617744.jpg

English: Built in 1926-1928, this Art Deco-style building was designed by Douglas Ellington to serve as the City Hall for Asheville, North Carolina, replacing a previous city hall, which stood from 1892 until 1928 where Reuter Terrace of Pack Square Park is located today. City Hall stands alongside the Classical Revival-style Buncombe County Courthouse, which was built at the same time, and was originally proposed by Ellington to be a similar structure to City Hall, but the proposal was rejected by the relatively more conservative Buncombe County Commissioners, whom saw the proposed design as garish and too radical for the county. A bus station, which was to be located in a wing connecting the two buildings, was also never built. The building features an orange brick exterior, a marble-clad base, marble trim, metal frame windows, an arcade at the entrance with arched openings and a vaulted tile ceiling, Art Deco-style copper lanterns flanking the entrance, decorative trim surrounds at the windows at the central bays of the second floor of the front facade with pediments, engaged columns, and decorative sculptural reliefs, brick pilasters flanking the windows at the central bays of the building’s facades, windows in pentagon-shaped bays with pointed tops flanking decorative stone fins and pinnacles at the central bays of the sixth floor, setbacks at the corners of the sixth floor, an octagonal seventh floor, an octagonal polychromatic terra cotta roof above the seventh floor, with floral motifs and ribs, and an octagonal lantern at the top of the building’s roof. Inside, the building features a lobby with Art Deco-style pendants, decorative Art Deco-style trim, entrance doors with arched transoms, elevators with bronze doors, original operator levers, a stone trim surround, and bronze dial-style position indicators, a marble floor, a bronze letterbox, and marble wainscoting. The other areas of the building, besides the elevator lobbies and main lobby, have been modernized and updated to accommodate modern office needs. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, and remains in use as Asheville City Hall, with the building’s most recent change being the elimination of the staff positions of manual elevator operators in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, with the elevators being shifted to automatic operation.