Old Tampa City Hall and Hortense the Clock

Old Tampa City Hall is the ten-story 1915 municipal building at 315 East Kennedy Boulevard, still home to the Tampa City Council and topped by a clock called Hortense the Beautiful.

The City of Tampa's own history of the building, published in the City Clerk's January 2026 book Tampa's City Council and Old City Hall, says it was completed on August 30, 1915, after only 14 months of construction by McGucken and Hyer, Contractors. The Tampa City Council page, updated October 16, 2026, gives the council's contact address as 315 East Kennedy Blvd, City Hall, 3rd Floor, Tampa, Florida 33602, with office hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and the phone number 813-274-8131.

The building carries two layers of protection. According to the same city book, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and designated a local historic landmark by Tampa City Council in 1994. The National Park Service NPGallery record for Tampa City Hall, National Register Information System ID 74000639, shows a publication date of October 1, 1974, a period of significance of 1900 to 1924 and a significant year of 1915.

The key dates run from a 1912 bond proposal to the 1994 local landmark designation, as the City of Tampa and the National Park Service record them.

The Tampa firm of Bonfoey and Elliott won the 1912 design competition for City Hall against twenty-six competing firms, according to the City of Tampa.

The city's account in Tampa's City Council and Old City Hall says Bonfoey and Elliott designed a ten-story City Hall and a three-story police department directly to the south, joined by a second-story skywalk, with 35,000 square feet of office space. At the time, the book states, City Hall was the tallest building south of Jacksonville. It describes a concrete structure with a three-story base 93 feet square, an eight-story shaft 49 feet square and a 30-foot-square tower on the ninth floor, topped by a four-sided clock, a copper dome and a single flagpole, measuring 165.5 feet from base to roof. The Tampa Tribune of the day called it Tampa's City Hall Layer Cake.

The NPGallery record lists the architectural styles as Beaux Arts and Renaissance, names Bonfoey and Elliott as architects and McGucken and Hyer alongside them, and gives architecture as the area of significance. The city book adds that the base is clad in rusticated granite on the first story, that six limestone columns stand on the north and east elevations, and that a 1915 cornerstone sits at the northeast corner of the first floor.

Tampa built the 1915 City Hall as part of a decade of public works under Mayor Donald Brenham McKay, who proposed the bond issue that paid for it.

The City Clerk's biography of Mayor McKay gives his first term as June 7, 1910 to June 10, 1920, and lists the completion of City Hall in 1915 among the projects of those years, alongside paved streets, new sidewalks and sewers, the Lafayette Street (Kennedy Boulevard) Bridge, brick fire stations and Tampa's first public library, which opened in 1917.

The city's history in Tampa's City Council and Old City Hall says the building was designed as a symbol of hope for Tampa's changing image from frontier town to a substantial customs port and a leader in clear Havana cigar manufacturing, and that local papers lauded it as the Spirit of Tampa. It replaced the first City Hall, a $10,000 building constructed in 1890 at the southeast corner of Florida Avenue and Lafayette Street.

The growth behind that need is set out in the same history. Tampa had only 720 residents in 1880, the book says, before its population exploded during the 1880s with the development of Port Tampa and Ybor City; Ybor City was incorporated into the city in 1887, bringing Tampa's population to over 5,000, and a second cigar-producing center later grew in West Tampa on the western side of the Hillsborough River. By the early 1900s the Moorish style Hillsborough County Courthouse stood to the north across Lafayette Street from the old City Hall, with wood frame residences directly south and east of it on a 1903 Sanborn Fire Insurance Company map.

The clock is named for Hortense Oppenheimer, who led the Town Criers campaign that helped pay for it after City Council found no money for the clockworks, according to the City of Tampa.

The city book Tampa's City Council and Old City Hall identifies her as the daughter of prominent Tampa physician Louis Sims Oppenheimer and says the campaign raised $1,200 toward the clock. The W.H. Beckwith Jewelry Company donated the remainder needed for the 2,840 pound, four-faced clock, which was built by the Seth Thomas Company. Before City Hall was completed, the clock was nicknamed Hortense the Beautiful in honor of its benefactor, a name it keeps today.

The bell behind the clock faces is dated. The same history records that the bell is stamped McShane Bell Foundry Co. Baltimore, Md. 1914, and that at the dedication ceremony led by Mayor McKay the entire building, including the Roman-numeraled face of Hortense, was illuminated from base to dome. WUSF reported in 2012 the same origin story, naming the campaign Ye Town Criers and stating that it raised a third of the money needed.

Old City Hall has been restored in stages since 1982, with the most recent work on the windows, roof and copper dome in 2012, according to the City of Tampa.

The city book Tampa's City Council and Old City Hall describes the 1982 renovations by Rowe Architects as sensitive to the historic nature of the building: they removed non-original elements such as the 1962 fire escape and Bahama shutters and returned the wood sash windows to their original color. The elevators were replaced with modern units in 2010, and in 2012 deteriorating windows were replaced and the eighth-story roof and copper dome were repaired. The book says continuing maintenance covers the exterior brickwork, decorative terra cotta cornices and balustrade, the granite columns and lintels, the third-story roof and the mechanical systems.

Reporting on the 2012 work, WUSF described the clock tower's leaky copper roof and dome as replaced and cracked terracotta patched, while the city book describes the dome as repaired; the two accounts differ on that point. The City Clerk keeps a photo gallery titled Old City Hall in 2012 from the same year. Bay News 9 marked the building's centennial in August 2015, repeating the August 30, 1915 completion date.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, for this Tampa landmark against the City Clerk's January 2026 City Council book, the City Council contact page, Mayor McKay's City Clerk biography, the National Park Service NPGallery record and the 2012 and 2015 news reports cited above.