US Post Office Delmar
The US Post Office in Delmar is the branch of the United States Postal Service responsible for the ZIP code 12054 and is located on Delaware Avenue ( NY-443 ) in the middle of the hamlet. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. It is currently (October 2008) the only registered post office in Albany County .
The post office is a small brick building that was built in 1939/1940. The entrance hall of the post office is decorated with a wall painting that was created as part of a Works Progress Administration project and depicts the so-called Indian Ladder in the nearby John Boyd Thacher State Park .
Architecture of the building
The post office is a one-story brick building with five bays . The main double-door entrance is up a series of granite steps lined with iron railings. The doors are located between the row of Doric columns and the entablature; Above the door is a skylight with a cast aluminum eagle . The inscription "UNITED STATES POST OFFICE" is affixed with bronze letters on the frieze of the building, the inscription "DELMAR 12054 NEW YORK" is directly above the door. On both sides of the front door there are two original lamps and two windows with limestone sills and lintels . A wooden cornice runs along the eaves . The building is covered by a gable roof.
The side fronts each have a pair of windows. The gable ends are shingled and have a semicircular opening with star-shaped window posts. At the back of the building there are two side wings, a three-bay work space where the cornice has been replaced by a parapet , and a four-bay wing that was added later, copies the details of the roof of the main wing, but is not considered a contributing object to the register.
Inside the building, the entrance area leads into a hall with wooden panels. The L-shaped counter hall has a red and black terrazzo floor , a lamperia made of white marble and end strips made of black marble. These are replaced by tiles that form a simple cornice at the intersection of the wall and ceiling. A wall painting from 1940 , which the artist Sol Wilson made under an order of the Works Progress Administration , is on the wall above the postmaster's office . Most of the furniture in the building is original.
History of the post office
Delmar had had a post office since 1840 and was located in rented premises on Elsemere Avenue. In the place of today's post office there was a single-family house before it was built, which was demolished in the mid-1930s after the decision to build a new post office was made. As general contractor, Loucks and Clarke's Wallingford , Connecticut construction company won the tender, began excavating the foundation in 1939 and opened the new building in 1940. Since then, the building has only been significantly changed once, when a wing was added to the rear of the building in 1959 in order to cope with the increased volume of mail traffic.
layout
Louis Simon, who was then the chief architect of the United States Treasury Department , designed a total of 13 post offices for New York in the style of the Colonial Revival , which are similarly designed. The building in Delmar , however, is the only one that was built without a dome . (The post office in Attica had a dome at the time of construction, but this was later removed).
Individual evidence
- ^ NEW YORK - Albany County ( English ) nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com. Retrieved October 29, 2008.
- ↑ a b c d e f Larry Gobrecht: National Register of Historic Places nomination, US Post Office-Delmar ( English ) New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation . February 1988. Retrieved October 22, 2008.
Coordinates: 42 ° 37 ′ 21.9 " N , 73 ° 49 ′ 55.1" W.