Kent City Hall

Sal is a voice that rides along as you drive Washington's roads: the road ahead, the pass, the stories of the places you pass.

Kent City Hall sits at 220 4th Avenue South, a masonry-and-concrete building that Fred Bassetti and Company, a Seattle firm, designed in 1971. The city paid for it with $1.5 million in local bonds. In the main lobby, Richard Beyer, an artist from Seattle, left a handful of sculptures made of brick. The fourth floor got a $60,000 expansion seven years after the building went up, because the city's departments had outgrown their space. No other building in Kent reached four stories, and a man from the Building Department said none was likely to. The reason was practical, not architectural. The Fire Department's ladders only reached three stories. A tall building in a town of low ones, held in check by a ladder. [1]