Rathaus (City Hall), Hamburg

The Hamburg Rathaus is the Rathaus—the city hall or town hall—of Hamburg, Germany. It is the seat of the government of Hamburg. It was constructed from 1886 to 1897 and still houses its original governmental functions with the office of the First Mayor of Hamburg and the meeting rooms for Hamburg's parliament and senate. After the old city hall was destroyed in the great fire of 1842, it took almost 44 years to build a new one. In 1971 a room in the tower was only discovered accidentally during a search for a document fallen behind a filing cabinet. So there is a probability that there are even more rooms than the currently counted 647 rooms. It is one of the few completely preserved buildings of historicism in Hamburg.