Death of the Post Office

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine
13 May 12

ast Tuesday, for reasons we need not go into here, I happened to be in the U.S. Post Office in Geneva, New York. It is in an old, brick building downtown, just up from the lakefront. It was constructed between 1905 and 1906 in the Colonial Revival style, with four white columns out front arranged, so the architects say, in a Doric entablature. There are huge, arching windows arranged on either side. It is one of 13 post offices throughout New York state that were constructed by the Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department under the direction of James Knox Taylor, a man who was not beyond some political chicanery. (Taylor got into trouble when he picked his old partner to design the customs house in New York City.) In 1989, the Geneva Post Office was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Inside, it was cool and a little dark and it smelled sweetly of old varnish. The woodwork was polished and the brass finishings shone brightly. The marble countertops were cool and clean. There is a mural inside called "The Vineyard" that was painted in 1942 by a magical realist named Peter Blume. (Blume raised no little happy hell himself; in one of his paintings, he portrayed Mussolini as a jack-in-the-box.) This is a place, I thought, where you come to do business. This is a place, I thought, where you would feel confident in doing so.

There is a reason that post offices were once built this way. There is a reason why, during the New Deal period alone, the country built 1100 post offices, and why it commissioned murals like "The Vineyard" to be painted in them, and why there were marble countertops and brass fittings and glistening woodwork. Authors Marlene Park and Gerald Markovitz, who wrote about why post offices were built the way they were, explained that "The New Deal sought to make the national government's presence felt in even the smallest, most remote communities.... The post office was 'the one concrete link between every community of individuals and the Federal government' that functioned 'importantly in the human structure of the community.... [The post office] brought to the locality a symbol of government efficiency, permanence, service, and even culture."

Well, we certainly can't have that, can we?  READ MORE