For much of the summer, roof repairs shrouded City Hall in a shimmery coat of white linen-like construction netting, barely visible as breezes rippled the sheets. Over the last two centuries, change has often been in the wind for City Hall and its surrounding park, as mayors, agencies, visionaries, grafters and others put forth ideas for an appropriate civic center — including getting rid of City Hall entirely.

The building attracted naysayers almost from Day 1. In 1805, a couple of years after work on City Hall began, The New York Gazette published a letter from “A Householder” calling it “a bottomless pit,” a sentiment echoed in 1826 in The New York Evening Post, which disdained it as “a magnificent palace” that should be “put in a state of preservation and suspended.”

The City Council began using the building in 1811, and an 1818 review in The Port Folio was no doubt more to its liking: “The brilliant whiteness of the facade, in contrast with the placid verdure of the lawn, in front, produces a luminous and aerial effect that fascinates every spectator.”

City Hall Park, indeed all city property, also fascinated Tammany Hall, which built the Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street, completed in 1872, at a moderate price for construction and a huge tab for graft.