The Old City Hall was built in 1874 as a commercial block on Fifth Avenue, seven years after Alonzo Horton founded New Town San Diego and eleven years before the railroad arrived. The city took it over in 1891, and for the next forty-seven years San Diego ran its municipal government out of a rented shop building. The structure also housed the city's first public library, beginning an institutional lineage that would eventually lead to Rob Wellington Quigley's 185 million dollar Central Library with its 140-foot dome. That the city operated from a building nobody had designed for civic purposes is a fair measure of San Diego's nineteenth-century self-image, a place that expected to become important and had not yet.
The building is Italianate, originally two stories with additional floors added later. The facade reads vertical, with arched windows under hood mouldings, a bracketed cornice, and cast iron detailing. It looks like its neighbors because it was built as one of them, a commercial block that happened to become the seat of government. The design follows the standard vocabulary of 1870s commercial construction, functional and respectable without ceremony.
