LEWISTON — Just before the current City Hall opened in 1892, the Lewiston Saturday Journal got a tour of the spanking new building it predicted would “be a joy forever to Lewiston.”

“We hope it will stand forever, an abode of just administration, peaceful co-laboring and honest government,” the paper said. “We believe and trust that this building will continue to be as bright, as beautiful, as cheerful, as sunny, as homelike and as artistic as it is today.”

That may have been a little too optimistic.

Yet it remains true that despite many changes during the past 132 years, including the demise of a third-floor auditorium that once had seating for 2,500 people, the brick-and-stone Baroque Revival building with its distinctive dome remains a marvel that landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

The Sun Journal recently took a tour that poked around some of the little-seen areas of the historic structure with some help from a trio of explorers — Dave Saucier, the city’s building superintendent; David Chittim, a city councilor who is also president of the Androscoggin Historical Society; and Angelynne Amores, the city’s communications director.

We saw jail cells, safes, bells, dragons and a good many helpful, hard-working municipal employees who didn’t seem to mind brief interruptions from their regular routines.

We learned that City Hall sometimes has bats in its belfry, but its real concern is pigeons. It installed chicken wire in the open-air arches atop the 165-foot tower to keep the pesky birds out. Peregrine falcons have been known to stake out spots in the bell tower, too.

But let’s start the brief tour on the first floor, where the City Council meets and pictures of mayors line the hallway.

The first thing that stands out is that the first 10 mayors — from Jacob Ham, the city’s first mayor in 1863, until Joseph Day took office in 1879 — all sported beards or moustaches.

Scores more mayoral portraits through the years feature all men, until Lillian Caron was elected to the city’s highest office in 1976.

The current mayor, Carl Sheline, implies his predecessors had it easy. Looking at the rows of mostly unsmiling politicians pictured on both sides of the central hallway, Sheline said, “These mayors didn’t have to deal with social media.”

It turns out that at the end of that long hallway, past the council chambers, there’s a door that leads, surprisingly, to a room loaded with jail cells.

There are 14 of them in there, just big enough for bunk beds. When it was full, they could squeeze 28 inmates inside the less-than-inviting spot, which included a single toilet hidden behind cast iron stairs that allowed access to several floors of cell space.

They cells used to lock, but Saucier said the city removed the locks after some young visitors managed to incarcerate themselves.

These days, the cells hold a whole lot of dusty paperwork that nobody wants but can’t yet be thrown away.

The police department used to be right next door, inside City Hall, but these days the space houses Saucier’s department.

There isn’t any access to a long-rumored tunnel under Pine Street that once connected the structure to the DeWitt Hotel that stood kitty-corner to the municipal building. Saucier said it did once exist, probably used by dignitaries, but was filled in more than half-a-century ago.

Heading upstairs, through grand halls, it’s impossible to miss the display showing the workings of a glorious old clock that used to be out of view atop the building, powering four huge clock faces on the tower’s outside walls.

Since a 2004 project updated the clock and moved the original workings to a large display case, the 600-pound mechanism that continues to power the clock is easy to eyeball. 

“This is a beautiful showpiece,” Chittim said.

Not far away is an old sleigh on loan to the city so residents can see a common form of transportation during Maine’s long winters from days past.

The second floor, which is home to the city clerk and finance offices, generally “hasn’t changed much at all” since construction of the building, Chittim said.

What it houses, though, is more limited than in the past. It’s hard to believe the building once contained school administration, the library, city courts and other offices and institutions that moved out long ago.

The third floor of the building originally featured the floor and stage of an auditorium that, on first viewing, the Journal called “a gem,” with a “light and graceful beauty.”

It bragged that “no other hall in Maine can compare with it” and insisted other cities “will envy us.”

LEWISTON’S PRIDE-THE NEW CITY BUILDING. by Maine Trust For Local News on Scribd

That hall, initially lit in part by a huge chandelier that relied on natural gas, became a focus of community events, from farming exhibits to hosting the first basketball game in Lewiston, when Bates College women in bloomers faced off as the sophomore class defeated the freshmen class by a score of 12-1.

The hall also became a renowned concert and dance venue. The Police Athletic League sponsored dances there — known as PAL hops —until the mid-1970s.

But unruly teenagers and a growing municipal bureaucracy brought the hammer down on the hall.

Today, it’s a sea of desks with computers perched on each, where government workers carry out the important business of serving the public.

A ceiling added to the auditorium space now divides the third floor from the fourth floor, which still shows tiered seating lining the outside walls. People once sat there and watched the stage and perhaps the dancing below in the big open space.

“It was nice at one time,” Saucier said.

Now, the fourth floor is full of utilities, oversized duct work, peeling paint and at least 10,000 nails that Saucier himself has pounded into makeshift walls, braces and all manner of mysterious infrastructure.

Suffice it to say, it is not a thing of beauty.

Yet a closer look finds remnants of what once was. There are, for example, still columns topped with fancy Corinthian capitals.

From the fourth floor, there are stairs that take visitors even higher, all the way to the belfry that still provides a stunning view of the city.

A 2,340-pound bell, cast by the McShane Bell Foundry in Baltimore, Maryland, still hangs there. Its thousand-pound chain that controlled the bell still vanishes into the walls, where the builder placed a series of timber breaks to make sure the bell couldn’t tumble down and destroy anything below.

The good news for taxpayers is the building appears to be in good shape and has shown it has staying power.

With a little luck, it will still occupy the corner of Pine and Park streets for many generations to come.