For its date, this federal building was an unusually monumental neoclassical design, perhaps out of respect to the adjacent Alamo. It recalls Cret's work at the University of Texas at Austin (
AU41) where he also adopted a modern version of Spanish-inflected classicism. The monumental in antis Ionic colonnade at the second story gives depth to what would have otherwise been a rather boxlike mass. A six-foot-tall mural, San Antonio's Importance in Texas History (1939) by Howard Cook, wraps the lobby. It is the largest of the 106 works placed in sixty-nine post offices throughout Texas that were produced during the Great Depression by the Section of Fine Arts of the Public Works Administration (PWA).