"When we’re done restoring it, it will continue to last for the next 100 years."

-- Richard Heisenbottle

After 98 years, the roof, walls and windows are leaking at Coral Gables’ historic City Hall, one of South Florida’s most prominent civic and architectural landmarks.

The building’s limestone and stucco exterior and concrete decorative bits are badly cracked in places, and four of the Corinthian pillars in the rounded colonnade that lends it the look of a fine Mediterranean cake are close to fracturing.

And so this month city administrators and commissioners are vacating their venerable home for temporary quarters to make way for a comprehensive restoration — the first since the three-story building opened in 1928.

It’s expected to take up to three years and cost Gables taxpayers as much as $30 million.

In the end, city officials promise, it will be worth the trouble and the money.

Read more at the Miami Herald

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