Joseph Finger had designed the city hall building in a stripped classical style. He wanted to place on the front terrace statues of John Kirby Allen and Augustus Chapman Allen, but the City of Houston lacked the funds needed to add the statues. The statues would have cost $8,000 and the city was still suffering from the Great Depression. The Texas Star Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) discovered this fact from reading a November 1939 article of the Scripps Howard "Houston Press" and publicized it in 2010. The statue project was dropped by the DRT chapter and the Oran M. Roberts Chapter 440, UDC, stepped in and raised the funds to have the Allen Brothers statues commissioned and cast in bronze.