Montreal City Hall
The five-storey Montreal City Hall (French: "Hôtel de Ville de Montréal") is the seat of local government in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It was designed by architects Henri-Maurice Perrault and Alexander Cowper Hutchison, and built between 1872 and 1878 in the Second Empire style. It is located in Old Montreal, between Place Jacques-Cartier and the Champ de Mars, at 275 Notre-Dame Street East. The closest Metro station is Champ-de-Mars, on the Orange Line. As one of the best examples of the Second Empire style in Canada, and the first city hall to  have been constructed in the country solely for municipal administration, it was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1984. History and architecture. Construction on the building began in 1872 and was completed in 1878. The original building was gutted by fire in March 1922, leaving only the outer wall and destroying many of the city's historic records. The architect Louis Parant was commissioned for the reconstruction, who decided to build an entirely new building with a self-supporting steel structure built inside the shell of the ruins. This new building was modelled after the city hall of  the French city of Tours. Other changes included a remodelling of the Mansard roof into a new Beaux-Arts inspired model, with a copper roof instead of the original slate tiles. The new building opened on February 15, 1926. In 1967 Charles de Gaulle, the president of France, gave his Vive le Québec libre speech from the building's balcony.