The entire group is of characteristic Philadelphia brick construction, delightfully mellowed by age, with marble and white-painted wood trim. The main building is two stories high with a decked gable roof, heavily balustraded between large, arched quadruple chimney stacks at each end, corners heavily quoined with marble and ends without fenestration other than a round bull's-eye window in each. Across the one hundred and seven feet of the Chestnut Street facade there is a range of nine broad, high, twenty-four-paned windows with flat gauged brick arches and high marble keystones, the central window being replaced by a simple, very high and deeply recessed doorway with a broad stone stoop before it. Tying into the keystones is a horizontal belt of marble across the entire front. A similar belt is located immediately beneath the window sills of the second story, and between the two belts and ranging with the windows are nine oblong marble panels set into the brickwork. On the Independence Square facade everything is subordinated to the great square steeple-like clock tower, centrally located, which stands its entire height outside but adjoining the walls of the main building. In construction the lower two stories of the tower correspond to those of the building itself, and the cornice of the latter is effectively carried around the tower. Above, the tower rises two more stories of brick with pedimented and pilastered walls in the Ionic order and surmounted with classic urns and flame motives. Above this level the construction of the clock tower is of white-painted wood, one story with Corinthian pilasters and another balustraded, rising in four-sided diminutions to the octagonal, open arched belfry and superstructure, above which is a tapering pinnacle and gilt weathervane. It is a tower of grace, dignity and repose, a tower suggestive of ecclesiastical work, perhaps, yet withal in complete harmony with its situation and purpose. In the base of this tower is the main entrance, a simple and dignified pillared doorway in the mutulary Doric order with double four-panel doors, and a magnificent Palladian window in the Ionic order above, to which reference was made in a previous chapter. Thus three distinct orders of architecture are used in this tower alone, presenting another instance of the great freedom with which early American architects utilized their favorite motives.