When I visied San Francisco's City Hall in the spring of 2009, there was a display in the South Light Court featuring a wooden model of the upper portion of the dome.

From the cutaway perspective, you can see that the highest balcony visible from the floor of the rotunda, called the whispering gallery for its unique sound-echoing effects, is merely a halfway point of the dome's full height.

The whispering gallery, shown in detail on the left, is represented by the lowest level in the wooden model cutout, above.

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