Legoland’s City Hall Displayed Ahead of Discovery Center Opening
What’s nine feet tall, made of thousands of bricks, and inhabited by plastic residents? Legoland’s model of City Hall and One Liberty Place! The enormous model, which took nine Lego builders 930 hours to build, was placed for display at Philadelphia’s actual, life-sized City Hall in advance of the opening of the new Legoland Discovery Center at Plymouth Meeting Mall. The dual towers of One Liberty Place and Two Liberty Place are the first stage of the Discovery Center’s MiniLand attraction, which will feature Lego-scaled versions of landmarks around the City of Brotherly Love. Some of these include Boathouse Row, Independence Hall, and the Comcast Center. When it is all said and done, Miniland will consist of more than one million Lego bricks!
This model of City Hall will occupy the Miniland at the Legoland Discovery Center.
Mayor Jim Kenney was on hand for the revealing of the model, and, suffice it to say, he was more than a little geeked out over the replica of City Hall. He joked that it took 30 years to build the original, and that he hoped it didn’t take that long to build the model. He called it “just really cool” and admitted that he still plays with Legos at home. Although the Discovery Center will be located outside of Philadelphia proper (Kenney says that he would love to bring another one to Center City), Kenney stresses that Philadelphia is about not just the city, but the whole region. “I want to make sure we understand that Philadelphia is a region. We promote the region—not just Philadelphia within our city limits. It’s good for our own folks to go out to the suburbs and suburbanites to come to Philadelphia,” he said.
One Liberty Place was an appropriate Philly icon for Legoland to tackle first. Built in 1987 and standing 945 feet tall, it was the first building to defy the Gentlemen’s Agreement that no building should exceed the height of the William Penn statue at City Hall and was at the time the tallest skyscraper in Philadelphia.
