Where the county courthouse (SS1) has a mundane setting, San Angelo’s City Hall was accorded a monumental City Beautiful position, facing south on the axis of Irving Street. The city hall is one of Trost and Trost’s most impressive civic buildings, an early but highly refined rendition of the stepped massing that dominated county courthouse design for the next fifteen years. The six-story central portion, crowned by a pyramidal roof, steps down to four- and then three-story units. The one-story projecting entrance pavilion, preceded by broad concrete steps, has three round-arched openings with attached columns and moldings of geometrical bas-relief carving of a Romanesque character that recall the twelfth-century church St. Gilles-du-Gard near Arles, France. The verticality of the central tower is emphasized by four piers capped with stone urns that rise from the roof of the entrance pavilion to the cornice line of the fifth floor. Sentinel herms mark the tower’s fifth-floor corners, while the window spandrels boast a series of geometric cast-stone plaques.
Interior public spaces feature marble walls and massive marble-faced concrete columns topped by gold-and-polychrome painted capitals. Plaster-covered beams, painted to look like stenciled wood, run the length of the space. The main floor of the city hall includes a feature shared with other Texas city halls of the 1920s: a profusely decorated theater with a proscenium stage and tall round-arched doors and windows and a riot of wallpapered and painted details. Under each of the velvet theater seats is a wire rack, designed to hold patrons’ cowboy hats during performances.
Just west of city hall at 119 W. 1st Street is the flat-roofed, domestically scaled, brick-faced Kendall Art Gallery (1949, 1951, 1952, Donald R. Goss), a U-plan building configured around an interior patio. This was Goss’s first major work in San Angelo. It still operates as the home of the San Angelo Art Club.