Philadelphia architect Lippincott’s design for this five-story emphatically cubic courthouse is clad in coursed ashlar limestone with matching terra-cotta ornament and cast-aluminum spandrels between the steel-framed windows. A series of fluted piers that separate the windows are capped by a running frieze of stylized bas-relief eagles, all barely breaking forward from the wall plane. Above the frieze is the windowless fifth floor, formerly the offices of the National Weather Bureau. Inside the south entrance is El Paso artist Tom Lea’s 53 x 11–foot mural, Pass of the North (1938), depicting fourteen historical figures of Indians, friars, conquistadors, and ranchers against the stylized landscape of the Sierra de Juárez, Franklin Mountains, and the Rio Grande.