The story
Providence City Hall anchors Kennedy Plaza in Rhode Island's capital, a Second Empire monument completed in 1878 — mansarded, granite-faced and marble-stair'd, the kind of Gilded Age municipal palace that seems designed to generate after-hours stories, and Providence's has: telling gathered from custodians, night staff and reporters over decades describes footsteps in the fourth-floor corridors when the building sits empty, the historic elevator travelling uncalled, doors along the aldermen's chambers opening, cold drafts on the grand stair, and a figure in frock coat glimpsed in the upper halls — associated in tradition with devoted clerks and mayors of the building's first era, identifications wholly of lore. City ghost tours include the hall among Providence's storied stops, and staff share the accounts with municipal good humour. A working seat of government: visits mean public hours and business decorum. Present City Hall as civic-architecture heritage first, its telling the affectionate institutional kind that grand old public buildings keep.