La Mairie (Town Hall)

Built in 1870 to 1871 on Goubert Avenue, the Hôtel de Ville was the institutional centre of French Pondicherry's municipal life. Its white neoclassical facade, colonnaded front, and carved wooden interior placed it firmly in the tradition of French civic architecture: a building that said, visibly, that this was a city with a government, a council chamber, and a claim to permanence.

The building housed the municipal council, the registration offices, and the administrative apparatus of the French comptoir for nearly a century. After the de jure transfer of Pondicherry to India in 1962, it continued in use, hosting the Pondicherry Legislative Assembly in the 1960s before the Assembly moved to Rue Victor Simonnel.

In October 2014, a large section of the original structure collapsed following heavy monsoon rains, a combination of age, deferred maintenance, and the particular vulnerability of coral-stone buildings to prolonged saturation. The administration moved to annexe buildings. Reconstruction and restoration work has been underway since, aiming to return the building to something approaching its original form.

The Pondicherry Municipality's day-to-day administration now operates from No. 1 Dumas Street, a short walk from the seafront. The Town Hall itself, when restored, remains one of the most architecturally significant colonial civic buildings in South India.