The oldest existing municipal building in New York is the Hall of Records, in City Hall Park, whose contents are erelong to be housed in a spacious, fire-proof edifice. It dates from the middle of the eighteenth century. Its site formed a part of the Common, and it stood appropriately convenient to the gallows, for it was originally a jail—the first building on the island ever designed exclusively for the detention of law-breakers. In popular parlance, as in practical use, it soon became the Debtors’ Prison. When the British occupied the town during the Revolution, it was turned to account as their principal military prison, being known as The Provost, in reference to the title of the brutal Cunningham, who was charged with the custody of American prisoners of war—amongst others, “that d—d rebel, Ethan Allen.” The building was a debtors’ jail again from 1787 to 1830; on the completion of alterations projected at the latter date, it became, in 1835, the Register’s office, and as such will probably see the close of the nineteenth century. [Illustration: ST. PAUL’S CHURCH.] [Illustration: CITY HALL.] Vastly more attractive to the eye than this treasury of real-estate records, and not wholly lacking in historic interest, is the adjacent City Hall. This really handsome building, in the style of the Italian Renaissance, was begun in 1803, and completed nine years later. The likelihood of the city’s extending beyond it seemed too slight to warrant lavishing upon its back the white marble which adds so much to the dignity and grace of its façade; the rear wall was accordingly constructed of a cheaper stone. In the “Governor’s room” on the second floor, used for official receptions, are the desk on which Washington wrote his first message to Congress, the chair in which he was inaugurated as President, and the chairs used by the first federal Congress. In the same neighborhood, just beyond the lower extremity of the old Common, now City Hall Park, stands St. Paul’s Chapel, Trinity parish—an edifice much older than the parish church, which for the past half-century, like its successive parent buildings, has stood farther down Broadway, opposing its bulk to the westward progress of Wall Street. Fenced off by iron palings, and bordered on each side by a strip of graveyard, the chapel turns a picturesque and perhaps scornful back upon the “topless towers” of Broadway—little dreamt of when its foundations were laid in 1766, or three-and-twenty years later, when President Washington attended service there on the day of his first inauguration. These heaven-aspiring structures were only beginning to turn the street into a canyon when the first President’s successor in office sat in the same pew on the same day a century later (April 30, 1889).