New Town Hall, Town hall in Mitte district, Hannover, Germany
The New Town Hall is a town hall in the Maschpark on the southern edge of Hanover's inner city, built 1901–1913 to plans by Hermann Eggert in eclectic style. It is about 129 metres long and 67 metres wide, with a main hall 30 metres long, 21 metres wide and over 30 metres high. Its tan hard sandstone facade from the Mehler quarries carries rows of arched and rectangular windows; a green copper dome with a clock and lantern rises above the central red-tiled roof, and two tall towers flank the central block.
The city administration left the Old Town Hall for the Wangenheim Palace in 1863, and by the 1890s a larger building was needed. City director Heinrich Tramm pushed the project; architect Hermann Eggert designed it, and it was built from 1901 to 1913 on 6,026 beech piles. Gustav Halmhuber finished the interior after Eggert was replaced. It opened on 20 June 1913 in the presence of Kaiser Wilhelm II, costing ten million marks.
The square in front of the north wing was called Trammplatz after city director Heinrich Tramm until September 2024, when it was renamed Platz der Menschenrechte because Tramm is seen as a pioneer of National Socialism. Inside, the Hodler-Saal keeps Ferdinand Hodler's 1913 painting Einmütigkeit, and the Mosaic Hall shows a Jugendstil triptych of a craftsmen's procession captioned "Handwerk hat goldenen Boden".
An elevator inside moves diagonally to carry visitors up to an observation platform high above the building. From this vantage point, you can see across the city and gain a different perspective on the surrounding area.
The dome lift, installed in 1913, runs on steam-bent oak tracks along an arched path that follows the curve of the dome, climbing 50 metres at an angle of up to 17 degrees. It was unusable in the colder half of the year; a new lift replaced it in winter 2007–08, after the old one's last ride on 4 November 2007 with Lord Mayor Stephan Weil.
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