For two generations, Atherton, a former member of the Carrère and Hastings office and later a collaborator with Philadelphia's Paul Cret on the Pennsylvania Battle Monuments, was Wilkes-Barre's most important twentieth-century architect. After World War II, perhaps influenced by Lacey, the firm shifted with the times toward modernism but within the Beaux-Arts straitjacket of symmetry. This is Wilkes-Barre's first International Style building, with horizontal strips of windows sweeping around rounded corners. Nearby, at 80 N. Washington Street, is the James M. Coughlin High School (1912), at the time the city's only high school—marking the assumption that most children would work in the mills and did not need higher education. The Beaux-Arts school is the work of Wilkes-Barre architect Owen McGlynn.