In Praise of the Post Office –– Architecture Critic Morgan

In Praise of the Post Office –– Architecture Critic Morgan

The Post Office is a miracle. We have known this, but the Pandemic has really thrown the importance of the Postal Service into high relief. Postal workers are essential, front-line civil servants whose job ties this vast and diverse country together.

Despite insensitive alterations over the years, the classical woodwork, tiles, and WPA murals make East Providence an example of beautifully designed post offices of the past. 

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Add the crush of holiday shipping, and we are reminded of how much America depends upon the USPS. A postal clerk at the Thayer Street station told me how irritated customers have been with Covid distancing restrictions. There's nothing to complain about: Your Christmas packages to Aunt Min in Kansas or the grandkids in Virginia are delivered quickly and safely for what seems a modest charge. Postal workers have been frontline heroes during the pandemic, helping the keep the country connected.

The physical post office is the embodiment of the miracle. More than just a convenient place to buy stamps, mail packages, and peruse wanted posters, the post office is similar to a public library–a temple of democracy. Like a pub in an English village, the post office is a meeting place where news is exchanged, while the architecture of post offices used to serve as manifestations of national pride.

From 1852 to 1939, the federal government constructed all post offices, courthouses, and customs houses; the Supervising Architect of the Treasury designed almost all of them. Many of the supervising architects were significant designers who upheld standards of probity in presenting America's public face.

From 1934 to 1943, out of work artists under Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration were commissioned to paint 1,000 murals on post office walls. This New Deal program was part of a massive hiring of painters, writers, musicians, architects, filmmakers, playwrights, and other creative people. The result was a golden age for the arts in America, a cultural flowering rarely seen since the Italian Renaissance.

 

Following World War II, rapid population growth, the ubiquity of the automobile, and the development of the suburbs hastened the decline of "Main Street." Exemplary post office design was pretty much a thing of the past.

In 1970 President Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act, which transformed the Post Office Department into the more corporate Postal Service. Prior to this act

 Congress oversaw all aspects of mail delivery, but the attempt to run the Post Office strictly as a business failed as a commercial enterprise.

During the Reagan era it was decided to lease post offices rather than build them, another example of choosing foolish economies over the public good. This explains why so many recent postal facilities are found in strip malls, hardly any more differentiated than the tire stores, take-out food joints, and nail salons around them. (Both my mother and mother-in-law, in their respective small towns in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, suffered when the center-of-the-village post office was replaced by bland boxes to which they were required to drive–so much for fostering community.) Compound this with a national aesthetic blindness, along with the notion that the "postal service" could be streamlined to operate like a discount department store, and it is no wonder that elegance and style became relics of the past.

It seems unlikely that our post offices will again be temples of the commonweal. But we do know that attempts to run the Postal Service "like a business" with no government support has clearly not worked. The Post Office is a necessity, a public utility, like roads or municipal water.

 

Let's ask the Biden administration to reward the Postal Service by extending it meaningful government support. This conveyor belt of American commerce deserves taxpayer dollars more than do tin pot dictators, desert princes, and scads of far less worthy domestic programs.

 

Architecture critic William Morgan has a doctorate in American art from the University of Delaware.