Bronx General Post Office
The Bronx General Post Office is a historic post office building at 558 Grand Concourse in the South Bronx in New York City, New York, U.S. Designed by Thomas Harlan Ellett, the four-story structure was completed in 1937 for the United States Post Office Department and later served as a United States Postal Service branch. The interior includes a series of 13 murals created by Ben Shahn and Bernarda Bryson for the U.S. Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts. The building's facade and interior are New York City designated landmarks, and the structure is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The building is three stories high. It occupies an entire city block and is surrounded on all sides by a granite terrace. The facade of the basement is made of granite, while the rest of the facade is made of gray brick with marble arches. On the facade, flanking the main entrance on the Grand Concourse, are two sculptures: The Letter by Henry Kreis and Noah by Charles Rudy. The building has about of interior space, spread across a basement and three above-ground stories. The murals are in the lobby, the only part of the building that is customarily accessible to the public, while the rest of the building included offices, equipment, and employee rooms.
Efforts to develop a central post office for the Bronx date to 1902, and the site was acquired between 1910 and 1913. There were various attempts to provide funding for the building in the 1910s and 1920s. U.S. Postmaster General James A. Farley and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. announced plans for the building in 1934. A groundbreaking ceremony took place on June 13, 1936, and the building formally opened on May 15, 1937, as the Bronx Central Annex. Shahn and Bryson were hired in 1938 to paint the murals, which were finished the next year. The building became the Bronx General Post Office in 1963, when the sectional center facilities for Manhattan and the Bronx were split. The murals were renovated in the 1970s and 1990s. The USPS sold the building in 2014 to Youngwoo & Associates, which began redeveloping the building. Subsequently, Youngwoo tried to sell the structure in 2019 and again in 2024.
Site
The Bronx General Post Office is located at 552–582 Grand Concourse in the South Bronx in New York City, New York, U.S. The site occupies an entire city block, with an area of about. It has a frontage of about on 149th Street to the south, on Anthony J. Griffin Place to the east, on 150th Street to the north, and on the Grand Concourse to the west. Anthony J. Griffin Place, a short street at the rear of the building, was originally known as Spencer Place, but it was renamed after the death of U.S. Representative Anthony J. Griffin in 1936. Hostos Community College and the entrances to the New York City Subway's 149th Street–Grand Concourse station are directly to the south, while Lincoln Hospital is to the southeast. Prior to the construction of the post office building, the site had been divided into 22 land lots.Architecture
The Bronx General Post Office was designed by consulting architect Thomas Harlan Ellett for the Office of the Supervising Architect. When the building opened, Architectural Forum wrote that "the building subtly suggests a Georgian precedent without the use of traditional detail", while The New York Times described the architectural style as a "modern style with modified classical ornament". Ellett regarded the building as being designed in a "contemporary Georgian" style. As built, the building is three stories high with a penthouse.Facade
The building is surrounded on all sides by a granite terrace, which has a classical-style balustrade. Because the site slopes down to the east, the basement is exposed on the building's eastern facade. To the west, a set of steps leads up to the main entrances on the Grand Concourse. The entrance steps are flanked by pedestals with swag and rosette motifs, which form the ends of the balustrade on either side. Atop the pedestals are bronze flagpole bases with foliate decorations.The facade of the basement is made of granite. The rest of the facade is made of gray brick, with round-arched Vermont-marble frames around the windows and doors. Above the imposts of each arch are additional round arches made of brick, which encircle the marble frames of each window and door. There is a band course running across the facade above the Grand Concourse entrance, which bears the inscription "Bronx – United States Post Office – New York". The inscription is flanked by rosettes.
On the facade, flanking the Grand Concourse entrance, are two sculptures: The Letter by Henry Kreis and Noah by Charles Rudy. Both are carved out of white marble and measure wide by tall. Kreis's sculpture depicts someone giving a letter to a mother and child in their family. Rudy's sculpture depicts a dove giving a message to the biblical figure Noah after a great flood, an allusion to the USPS's unofficial motto "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds". Rudy was nominated for the Architectural League of New York's Henry O. Avery Prize for his work, receiving an honorable mention.
Interior
Sources disagree on the building's precise area, though it has about. The floor slabs of the superstructure are composed of cinder concrete arches, while the floors themselves were covered in wood. The building's exterior walls are generally made of brick, with a plaster finish on the interior, while the interior walls are made of plaster with metal wainscoting. The workspaces generally have exposed ceilings, and the lobby, corridors, and certain special rooms have plaster ceilings. The restrooms have glass wainscoting.Originally, the main floor had about of usable space. On the first floor was the main lobby. The Internal Revenue Bureau also had a sub-office on the first floor, and mail carriers working the South Bronx worked on the same level. Mail collected from the South Bronx and Washington Heights, Manhattan, during afternoons and evenings were delivered to the first floor and then further distributed to recipients. The second floor had about of usable space. The second floor handled mail that was headed to the South Bronx and Washington Heights, and it had sorting and distributing equipment. There were also work areas and lockers on the second floor. As built, the structure had a penthouse with of storage rooms and offices. The basement had a garage with room for over 100 vehicles, and the sub-basement had a power plant and engine room. There was also a shooting range for security guards, which was located on the roof. Throughout the building were a series of hidden passageways and ladders.
Main lobby
The main lobby is the only part of the building that is customarily accessible to the public. As originally envisioned, the main lobby had postal windows. The main lobby is a double-height room designed in a modern classical style. The space is split into five bays. The center three bays are aligned with the three entrances from the Grand Concourse, on the lobby's western wall, while the northernmost and southernmost bays correspond to the windows on either side of the entrance.The floor is made of patterned dark-gray terrazzo and light-gray marble. The walls are wainscoted in marble, and there are murals atop the wainscoting on each of the walls. The ceiling is supported by full-height marble columns in the Ionic order, and there are marble Ionic pilasters along the walls. The ceilings themselves are made of plaster and are divided into coffers, with four globe-shaped lamps hanging from the ceiling. On the west wall, the three center bays contain exit doors, and the outer bays have windows. The south wall has two marble pilasters, which flank a bronze gate topped by a marble plaque. Two engaged columns separate the east wall into three portions; the northern section of the east wall has customer-service counters, while the central and southern sections have niches. Pilasters also divide the north wall into three sections, with a doorway in the western section and customer-service counters in the other two sections. Polished brass was used for hardware and furniture, and there were also painted metal screens. The original furniture has been removed and replaced with equipment such as kiosks.
The Bronx General Post Office is one of several 1930s post offices in New York City with murals that were painted through the Works Progress Administration program. The lobby has thirteen mural panels inspired by the words of Walt Whitman. The series has variously been called The Industrial and Agricultural Resources of America, America at Work, Resources of America, or just America. They were completed in 1939 by Ben Shahn and his partner Bernarda Bryson, who had been selected through an architectural design competition. The murals, made of egg tempera applied onto plaster, celebrate American industry and the products of labor. Twelve panels depict various workers in industry and agriculture. They are derived from photographs that Shahn took between 1935 and 1938, while he was employed by the Farm Security Administration. The largest panel, on the northern wall, depicts Whitman addressing American workers and their families; the panel includes depictions of farmhands, factory workers, and engineers. The Whitman panel originally contained a quote from one of Whitman's poems, which was swapped out after a Jesuit professor objected to it.