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The Rosenthal Building had an abundance of ornamental detail, including caryatids, an atlas supporting stacked oriel windows, reclining figures atop the entry pediment, round-arched and segmentally-arched windows, and a Mansard roof with l'oeil de boeuf windows. The facade had the emphatic courses separating fenestrations of each floor typical of French and German Renaissance architecture. Harold Kirker observed of the Rosenthal Building: "A typical example of the Beaux-Arts answer to the iron buildings of the seventies and the Romanesque piles of the eighties is Salfield and Kohlberg's Rosenthal Building, whose single virtue is in displaying in one scheme every cliche that the academically trained architect was capable of producing. Both David Salfield and Hermann Kohlberg arrived in California in the eighties, the latter with some years service as a government architect and a too accurate memory of the Teutonic Beaux-Arts villas of Frankfurt or Stuttgart." (See Harold Kirker, California's Architectural Frontier, [Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith Publishers, Incorporated, 1986], p. 116.) Kirker's observation may have been extreme, but the building did demonstrate the Beaux-Arts emphasis on accurate reproduction of historic styles.

PCAD id: 17409