Price City Hall

 by Peter

I was in Price the other day for a meeting that took place at the city hall on the corner of Main Street and 200 East. This building, labelled on the south as Price City Hall and on the east as the Municipal Auditorium, was constructed in 1938-1939 by the Works Progress Administration. It includes city offices, the library, and an auditorium that can hold over 1,000 people. The Utah State University - Eastern campus' Prehistoric Museum is also attached to the building and is well worth a visit in its own right.

Price City Hall. Photo from Wikimedia by Tricia Simpson. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Municipal_Building_Price_Utah.jpeg

The WPA was one of the alphabet soup agencies of the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was one of the relief agencies that employed men on public works projects, especially public buildings and roads. You can find WPA buildings and other structures in many cities throughout Utah.

The pictures are not the greatest. I only had a few minutes before my meeting, and did not take the best photos. However, of interest in the building are the four-foot tall murals around the top of the entrance lobby that display the history of Price. The murals were painted by the local artist Lynn Fausett between 1938 and 1941, under commission from the WPA. One interesting aspect of the WPA was their Federal Arts Project, which employed artists for public works. Other similar WPA programs employed writers, including such well-known names as Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison, to produce guidebooks about various states and other workers who collected thousands of oral histories from people across the country.

Here are a few photos of Fausett's murals, which are four feet tall and stretch 200 feet in length. The city has hung explanations of the historical figures and events in appropriate places under the murals:

And some additional WPA artwork on the walls of the room where the meeting was held:

I found this little phone booth built into the lobby to be charming. You can see the mural around the top of the door:

If you're passing through Price, the city hall is worth a visit.