Hôtel de Ville, Courbevoie

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Hôtel de Ville in Courbevoie is the town hall of a suburb just northwest of Paris, located on Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville. It was finished in 1858 and designed by architect Paul-Eugène Lequeux in a neoclassical style. The building is protected as a historic monument since 1980.

History
- The first town hall was a small guardhouse funded by public subscription after the French Revolution. It was expanded in 1819 but became too small by the mid-1800s.
- A new town hall was built nearby on the site now called Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville. Construction began in 1857 and the building opened in 1858.
- The main front has five sections. The center section projects forward and has a four-column Doric portico and a clock in the pediment designed by sculptor Louis Nicolas Adolphe Megret.
- Inside, the Council Chamber is on the ground floor, and the Wedding Room is on the first floor. The Wedding Room measures about 18.5 by 14.2 meters and features eight wall panels by Alexandre Séon showing the stages of life, with a ceiling painted to depict the four seasons.

Annexes and later history
- In 1897, an annex was built to house the police and the library to the north of the main building.
- In August 1944, German troops fired on a crowd gathered in front of the town hall just before the town’s liberation in World War II.
- In April 1961, activists using the Organisation armée secrète bombed a telephone booth in the town hall, injuring two officials and eight members of the public.
- The police and library annex was demolished in the early 1980s and replaced by a large glass-fronted building along Rue Albert Simonin, completed in 1983.