Going Postal: Post Office Style in America

This essay is published on Medium.com

The new Post Office creed: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, except when undermined by a corrupt administration comfortable with disenfranchising huge swathes of the pubic, in order to illegitimately hold on to power”.

While Trump is trying to undo the Post Office, in part out of anger/jealousy directed to Amazon (Jeff Bezos, actually) for making so much money and owning the Washington Post and in part to game the election to boost his ever-shrinking chances (and in part just to be a dick) we often overlook just how local this federally-owned presence really is. Post Offices (P.O.s) are part of every community in America, and in small communities they are hubs of civic exchange. The Postmaster/mistress (another naming convention we really need to change) often knows every single person in town, where they live, what kind of person they are, what kind of mail they get and send, and where every single residence and business in town is located.

Even more than UPS and Fedex (and when was the last time you saw DHL or an Amazon drone stopped by?) they are the most frequent visitors to every home and business in the nation, often walking right up to the front door, or maintaining a respectful distance for those with mailboxes or apartment mailrooms. It can be an incredibly intimate transgression, but one that we accept without much fuss. They are, for many of us, the closest we get to the federal government and for the most part they are the best face the federal government has (91% approval, beating out NASA and the CDC) although I am still trying to get my mail carrier (11231) to close the gate after her trek up and down my stoop. Based on her recalcitrance I think she may be trying to tell me to fuck off. I get it…it’s a relationship, after all.

The people themselves, their uniforms and trucks have virtually no discernible style, rendering them almost transparent (unlike the ‘hotties in brown’ working it for UPS!) a part of the street furniture. As much as they may be the most intimate federal presence in our lives, they are also the most invisible. The image of the kindly/bumbling mail carrier, from Mr. McFeely to Cliff Clavin to ‘Hello, Newman’ is almost too impactful. Mostly they are inconsequential (if indispensable).

The buildings are another story. They almost inevitably have character, though not often possessing actual presence. Even the banalest post offices tend to be local landmarks, but the best of them are quite remarkable architectural statements of their time, often filled with art created in that small window in time when the Section of Fine Arts operated, a division of the Treasury Department, from 1934–1943.

Post Offices form a national catalog of the most inoffensive buildings of their time. Like Ed Ruscha’s volumes of photos of ‘Some Los Angeles Apartments’ they are a chronicle of architecture in the seams; neither attempts at brilliance nor completely pointless tropes. They live (are ‘situated’ in the argot of architects) in what everyone these days seems to call the ‘liminal’ zone. It is, to be blunt, where nearly all of us actually live; in between our aspirations and bald necessity. They are background buildings, but by virtue of their content, they are also iconic. ‘Non-conic’ would be one way to say it, and I am working on others…Itty-Bitty-Iconic, Iconicish (or Iconish), Miniconic. I’ll keep working on it.

There are exceptions, of course, to the middlebrow architecture that is the postal norm. On the smaller end of the spectrum would be post offices like my own upstate versions. Our tiny town has two post offices (12581 and 12506) both of which are miniscule and one of which is so fucking adorable that no one can pass it without smiling. The Bangall, NY (12506) P.O. was built in the same year as the largest Post Office in America (10001), but is smaller than a single bathroom in that behemoth.

The Farley Post Office (10001) is the biggest and most remarkable of all Post Office buildings. Not only did it actually coin the ‘neither snow nor rain nor heat…’ unofficial motto (apocryphally it was sketched in as a placeholder by a partner at McKim Mead and White’s office, adapted from Herotodus describing the Persian postal system in 500AD, filling the block-long architrave, just barely, and it stuck) but it was open 24/7, making it busiest on April 15, filled with tax return procrastinators and December 25 with those who care about those things.

Its façade is almost Germanic (well, Speer-ish) in its relentless and monumental repetition, with what must be the longest continuous steps since ancient Rome (not including Speer). But rather than progress through the linear façade into a centralized space inside, like the New York County Courthouse (12 Angry Men territory), it matches each one of the 21 bays, across a wide concourse, with a single postal window! It is almost manically regimented, but there is no grander postal experience than 10001, the General Post Office.

It is also remarkably non-hierarchical or insanely democratic, depending on your perspective; no matter which door you choose you will face a single postal window with a single postal worker. No door is more important than others, and none are accentuated except by the single central flag over the central matching door. It’s a one-to-one relationship between the individual citizen and the nation’s second largest (after the armed services) federal agency.

The McKim, Mead and White partner responsible, William Mitchell Kendall, was taking the ‘history of delivery’ as seriously as anyone, ever, has, and added names of those historical individuals responsible for the idea of a postal system to the flanking pavilions. Those include Cardinal de Richelieu (who apparently made the French poste more accessible to mere mortals), Charlemagne, Emperor Cyrus of Persia and a whole host of others who helped make mail delivery a foundational idea of civilization. That level of seriousness and historical familiarity is pretty much lost on us 100 years later, but it is emblematic of the almost religious fervor that Federal Buildings embraced to become the new classicism in our lives.

Farley, named for FDR’s Postmaster General, is destined to be an extension of Penn Station (formerly housed in the almost matching, utterly majestic McKim, Mead and White building across 8th Ave., sadly demolished) and offices for Facebook, but while it was a ‘building-in-waiting’ photographer Margaret Morton spent weeks in the building documenting its slightly ruinous state.

She took a few of us on a tour when her photos were being displayed in the building; ironically a show of inaccessible spaces displayed in the same inaccessible spaces. Margaret was (she died in June, 2020, suddenly) a remarkable photographer, called the modern Jacob Riis and, for four decades, a beloved professor at The Cooper Union.

Her elegiac images of Farley connect America’s largest Post Office to the smallest. The sense of familiarity, even humble familiarity, reposition Farley’s former grandeur to align with the hominess of our town’s tiny P.O.. It’s the opposite of what Margaret was famous for; her photographs of the homeless enclaves built first in Tompkins Sq. Park (10009) elevate the least distinguished and most ad hoc homes to real places with real people. She followed those residents as they were displaced by the demolition of the Tompkins Square Park fabrications to train tunnels (The Tunnel), local abandoned factories (Glass House) and outdoor gardens (Transitory Gardens).

Farley, along with hundreds of other P.O’s, was embellished, some 25 years after opening, along with a few of the more than 1,000 P.O. murals created by the Section of Fine Arts in the Treasury Department. It was the genesis of the 1% for Art programs we still see, with Treasury devoting that substantial sum to employ artists (during the Depression) and benefit P.O.’s everywhere. The style is remarkably consistent, ranging from Norman Rockwell (skirting Grant Wood) to Thomas Hart Benton with a brief stop at Edward Hopper, and with topics from the quotidian to heroic, from family to industry, from rural to metropolitan and rendered in tones from smoky black and white to brilliant color.

They represent the style d’etat, social realism primarily depicting white workers, and often depicting white postal workers, doing the sweaty work of the day. They address race only in stereotypes; Native Americans supplicating or slaughtering, African Americans as menial laborers, and white men as the engines of society. They are visual slogans, easy to read instantly internalize; America is back at work! Our way of life is secure! Society functions! We have built a nation!

Today the heroism of the Post Office is back; valiant carriers of our most sacred right, the vote. It’ll be a while before we can start complaining about not closing gates, late and damaged mail and the price of postage; in our isolation we are reliving the indispensability of a system that reconnects us to everything we have currently lost.

Even the banality of the PO buildings is a thrilling reminder of normalcy.