Demonstrators gathered at the Bronx General Post Office in autumn of 2013 to demand that it be saved, not just as a building, but as their post office. The structure, designed by Thomas Harlan Ellett, was completed in 1937 and designated a New York City Landmark in 1975; it made the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The massive brick masonry structure with its tall marble-faced arches owes something to the modernist as well as neoclassical movements of the Thirties, and the exterior features two stone sculptures, "Noah" by Charles Rudy and "The Letter" by Henry Kreis.
The Bronx G.P.O. occupies the entire block on the Grand Concourse between 149th and 150th Streets, and its expansive granite terrace reinforces its role as a public space. The U.S. Postal Service is popular with the public, with approval ratings hovering between 84 and 91%. When the above crowd gathered, they were responding to moves by the Post Office to sell off hundreds of properties as part of cost-saving measures. The cost-saving measures, in turn, were prompted by a 2006 law passed by Congress requiring the Postal Service to fund its pensions for the next 75 years. A careful search will reveal no privately-owned entities required by law to fund their pensions for the 75 years ahead, and very few entities of any kind with their public approval routinely averaging well over 80%...
Around 1,100 post offices were built during the New Deal, many as part of Works Progress Administration efforts to create jobs and offer improved mail service. They have proven to be popular buildings, partly because of their style and solidity of construction, and also because of the public art that was included in the projects from their inception...
Inside the Bronx GPO, 13 murals called "Resources of America" were completed by Ben Shahn and his wife, Bernarda Bryson, in 1939. These tempera-on-plaster frescoes were landmarked along with the building's interior in 2013, the year of the demonstration, and the year before the Bronx GPO was sold to developers...
Unlike contemporary work by artists like Charles Sheeler, the images by Shahn and Bryson exalt the humans rather than the machines. The government contract was awarded as a result of a blind competition, after Shahn and his wife has already achieved some fame in the art world...
When the building was sold for $19 million to a developer in 2014, Studio V Architecture created an extensive scheme to adapt the building to host mixed uses including retail and restaurants, and to save the murals. But the initial effort collapsed, the building was sold again in 2018, and as of 2019 the project was only partly complete, with a rooftop restaurant open at present. In the meantime, by April 2019 Bronx residents had lodged complaints with their Congressional representative about delays in mail delivery. This was before a newly-appointed Postmaster General took further steps to sideline mail-sorting equipment and reduce staff hours. This was also before the full impact of a global pandemic could be absorbed, along with the effects on medical supply deliveries by slowdowns in mail...
Across the country in Oak Park, Illinois, a new post office designed by architects White and Weber began construction in 1933, the worst year of the Depression, and after Congressional action in 1935 to provide about $70,000 of added funding, was finally finished in August of 1936. This New Deal post office is still serving its original purpose...
The Oak Park Post Office at 901 Lake Street has always had good architectural company. Right across North Kenilworth Avenue at its intersection with Lake Street is a seminal work of Prairie Style public architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple*, completed in 1908...
This is what the Oak Park Post Office on Lake Street looks like today. The stripped-down neoclassicism of the limestone exterior has weathered well, and the Streamline Moderne grillwork above the entry, with its stylized tribute to the history of American transport from horses and covered wagons to monoplanes, has been preserved.
The skylit interior of the Oak Park Post Office has retained its original materials and finishes, along with elegant lighting fixtures echoing Art Deco and Streamline Moderne...
Also inside are J.Theodore Johnson's four murals, completed in 1939, telling stories from American history. This one is entitled "La Salle's Search for Tonti, 1680". As with many murals from the WPA period, the viewpoint is that of the European settlers rather than that of the continent's original inhabitants.
Way out West, the City of Golden, Colorado went through five different post office locations before acquiring a New Deal post office in 1940. Designed by Louis A. Simon, its plan and form was adapted to a number of other New Deal post offices. It's still in service, and is shown below in its original form, with copper roof shape and rooftop lantern echoing the land forms of the mesas beyond...
An awkward entry enclosure added in 1959 mars the clean lines of the original, but the building is well maintained, and serves a growing Front Range community...
The interior of the Golden Post Office is more modest in scale and ambition than the Oak Park one, but like Oak Park it offers a generous helping of public art. Kenneth Evett painted "Building the New Road" in oils and tempera in 1941 as a WPA project, after studying with Thomas Hart Benton. It depicts a lunchtime break in the building of a road in Clear Creek Canyon (I've been on that road). The painting combines romanticism and realism, depicting workers of different races, their wives and children, and some softening touches contrasting with the hard landscape...including a little girl feeding a chipmunk, a horse waiting for some hay, and two dogs possibly scheming how to steal some lunch. It's a vision of people working together to build their way out of hard times. It wasn't the way the country always worked, but it was the way school kids were taught it should work. Less than 3 decades later, it was a country that sent explorers to the moon...
A few miles to the south and east, this South Denver post office was completed in 1940 with funding from the U. S. Treasury. The symmetrical facade echoes the spare, modern classicism of other Federally-funded projects during this era, but the mix of bricks and limestone suit the smaller scale, and the hipped roof with its red clay tiles may be a nod to the region's history as well as its propensity for snow.
Inside, there's nothing as grand or expansive as the Bronx or Oak Park post offices, just a series of linked spaces providing counters for mail service and places for customers to stand. There is a mural, however, that's been obscured by a clunky lighting installation...
When you get past that industrial lighting you realize that there is something to see here, and that the painter, Ethel Magafan, treated "The Horse Corral" with affection and a robust sense of form. The tempera work was completed in 1942, a time when the outcome of the wars then raging in Europe and the Pacific was much in doubt. Still, the artist seems to find her perspective on man and nature as fitting together in a kind of essential harmony, with the curves of living creatures echoing the shapes of the hills beyond. There's a kind of optimism here too, optimism that might have been hard for many to maintain as the world lurched from a global depression into global war. It's an attitude that may serve us at the present moment, if we can find it somewhere under that Western sky...
*Footnote: For an earlier essay on a WPA project, see "Roadside Attraction: The Beach Chalet, San Francisco", posted March 25, 2016. For a photo essay on Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style architecture in Oak Park, including the Unity Temple, see "Chicago: City of Architecture, Film and Ideas Part 1", from Nov. 2, 2017.
Photo Credits:
Top: New York Daily News
2nd & 3rd: 6sqft.com
4th & 5th: welcome2thebronx.com
6th: Studio V Architecture, reproduced at newyorkyimby.com
7th, 9th & 12th: livingnewdeal.org
8th: the author
9th: digitalcommonwealth.org
10th: pinterest.ie
11th & 13th: livingnewdeal.org
12th: Kimberly Ah
14th: City of Golden, Colorado
15th thru 17th: the author
18th: livingnewdeal.org
19th & 20th (bottom): the author
What a thoughtful, timely post. So cool that there are 2 WPAs so close by in Colorado!
ReplyDeleteThanks for having a look at this one. The there are 205 WPA projects in Colorado, with murals in all kinds of public buildings. The Living New Deal website has listings by state; not surprisingly, California is the champ, with 2,082 projects.
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