Working with George Mahan, Jr. in 1939, he was the architect of the Greyhound Bus Station in Jackson, Mississippi.
[4] Working with Ben Watson White, he designed the Blytheville Greyhound Bus Station in 1937.
[2] Along with Henry Ehrensing, he was the architect of the Grand Palace Hotel, New Orleans (built originally as Claiborne Towers), and promoted by its developer as "likely to be one of the greatest buildings the South has ever seen.
"[8] At the time, Claiborne Towers was the South's largest apartment project, with a planned 1036 units that included air conditioning.
[1][10] Van Powell was the author of The American Navies of the Revolutionary War,[13] a collection of his paintings, with descriptive notes by the artist published in 1974 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.