Completing the Rodney Square complex and echoing the colonnade of the City-County Building (WL30), this classical-style former federal building was constructed using work relief funds initially authorized by President Hoover. The historic Winchester mansion on the site was condemned to make way for it. Owing to the Great Depression, work was shared among many local architects. Martin's chief designer, Albert Kruse, contributed much of the exterior detail. The building was fully equipped with eighty electric clocks and sixty telephones. Small murals were installed in 1938, Chemistry and Industry and Chemistry and Agriculture (Herman H. Zimmerman), and Landing of the Swedes (Albert Pels, later well known as an artist in New York City). In the 1980s, a Philadelphia firm's transformation of the public edifice into a highrise bank office tower, involving radical revisions to the interior and the facade, was controversial.