The celebration Wednesday marked a milestone, yes. In reality, though, it continues an ongoing celebration that began last year and will conclude next year.

After all, the construction of Huntsville’s new downtown city hall is less about a giant work project and more about a building that, according to Mayor Tommy Battle said, is planned to stand for the next 100 years.

And constructing buildings like that doesn’t happen often. So when a crane raised the final beam for the building from its position laying across sawhorses, there was applause. Then when the crane began to lift the beam toward its home on the seventh floor, there was applause again.

Related: Huntsville’s new city hall, under construction, already transforming downtown

That’s how the topping-out ceremony went – representing a sort of midpoint of construction of a building that broke ground last year and will cut a ribbon next year.

“That’s what we’re shooting for in this building and that’s 100 years,” said Battle, who described the building as “iconic” three times in a six-minute speech.

City employees signed the beam in advance of the ceremony while the mayor and city council scribbled their names on the beam Wednesday.

“One hundred years from now, we will have the signatures from many of the 2,500 city employees, from the city council and the mayor’s office and the administration who all had a part in making this building happen,” Battle said.

And as a reminder for the need of the new $90 million city hall, Battle held up a bucket used to catch rainwater filtered through the leaky roof in the current city hall that opened in 1962. He joked that there may be a giant crushing celebration of all the buckets that will become obsolete in the new building.

Brandon Tucker of Turner Construction, which is building the new city hall, said work is about 52 percent complete. The moving-in process of city employees is expected to begin next spring and completed in the summer.

Magnolia branches adorned the signed beam, which also included an embedded American flag. The greenery, Tucker explained, is an observance of centuries-old tradition.

“The reason why is back when the Scandinavians and the Norwegian cultures did this, they did it as a focus on asking for forgiveness from the land and thank you (to the land) for the wood that has been provided for the structure. And we celebrate that process here today.”

As for updates on construction, the most noticeable change is that work has started on the parking deck on the south side of the city hall site. The new city hall, of course, is built on the site of the former city parking deck.

Once completed, Battle said it will be representative of a city that last year was ranked the best place in the country to live – and, this week, ranked the second-best place to live.

“This city hall will reflect that,” he said.