Coral Gables City Manager Peter J. Iglesias looks through renovation and restoration plans on Wednesday, March 4, 2026.
PHOTO BY AL DIAZ
adiaz@miamiherald.com
Coral Gables city employees are leaving their historic City Hall this month to make way for a comprehensive restoration — the building’s first since it opened in 1928. The project could take up to three years and cost taxpayers as much as $30 million.
FULL STORY: Coral Gables vacates iconic City Hall for full restoration. Here’s what to expect
Here are key takeaways:
• The roof, walls and windows are leaking. The building’s limestone and stucco exterior is badly cracked, and four of the Corinthian pillars in the colonnade are close to fracturing.
• Architects discovered that four failing exterior columns are missing the reinforced-concrete cores and steel reinforcement shown in the original building plans. The plan calls for removing those columns, installing steel supports, then reinstalling the originals over them.
• A major part of the project is replacing the building’s electrical, mechanical and fire-safety systems.
• The semicircular City Commission chamber, altered decades ago, will be returned to its historic layout, with the dais moved back to its original position facing the colonnade and eight tall windows.
• An entrance garden and courtyard on the west side that was partially paved over will be restored to architect Phineas Paist’s original symmetrical design. Paist modeled City Hall after the Philadelphia Exchange building of 1834.
• Restoration architect Richard Heisenbottle’s team still needs three to four more months of deeper analysis before construction can begin. One open question: whether the building contains asbestos.
• The city opted to replace the original 1928 wooden casement windows with custom steel replicas designed to meet hurricane standards, a decision that drew objections from preservationists and some residents.
This report was produced with the assistance of a proprietary tool powered by artificial intelligence and using our own originally reported, written and published content. It was reviewed and edited by our journalists.