US Post Office Mineola
The US Post Office Mineola is the post office for ZIP Code 11501 in Mineola , Nassau County , New York . This village belongs to the Town of Hempstead . The building is on the northeast corner of the intersection of First and Main Streets.
The post office is a brick building in the style of the Colonial Revival and was built in 1936 during the Great Depression as part of a job creation program, like several other new post offices in New York State . The layout of this structure is unusual in this architectural style - the only other similarly built post offices in New York are also on Long Island : the US Post Office Oyster Bay and the former post office in Port Washington - and is roughly hexagonal, so that the main entrance faces southwest pointing to the street corner. The project was one of the last works by Peabody, Wilson & Brown and was therefore included in the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 .
building
All six sides of the two-story steel frame building are clad with bricks made from the Flemish Association . The entrance terrace is made of granite and is edged with dolerite , with iron lanterns on the flanks. The middle three of the five column bays are recessed to allow the limestone framing of the double doors. Above each of the bay windows is a rosette and a bronze grill in the shape of an implied eagle . The bronze lettering United States Post Office is between the rosettes and Mineola, New York is carved into the frieze above the main entrance. The building is covered by a flat roof with limestone cladding frames.
Inside the building, the original pink is Tennessee - Marble - paneling with a darker bottom bar remains. Above the marble there is plaster with molded cornices as a transition to the ceiling. The floor is made of terrazzo with embedded brass strips , which divides the surface into zones of different colors. Unlike other post offices of this size commissioned by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, the lobby of this post office lacks a mural.
history
The Mineola settlement, which is located on a community-free area , had already played a central role in the then primarily agricultural area and was therefore chosen in 1899 as the county seat of the newly formed Nassau County. In the early decades of the 20th century, improvements in rail and road connections resulted in suburbanization in Nassau County. This growth also required a new post office, among other things.
In 1931, an amendment to the Public Buildings Act of 1926 allowed the construction of 136 new post offices in New York State, sixteen of which were in Long Island settlement, including Mineola. The property was purchased in 1933 and the design was commissioned by Peabody, Wilson & Brown, a New York architecture firm that had designed several larger country estates on Long Island - such as Charles Millard Pratt's Seamoor in Glen Cove - or the City Hall in Huntington . Long Island City construction company AJ Paretta Contracting began work in 1935 and completed it the following year.
The Mineola Post Office is the only federal building designed by Peabody, Wilson & Brown and one of their last works. Julian Peabody drowned in early 1935 when a ship sank off the coast of New Jersey and Archibald Manning Brown left the architectural office to lead the team that designed the Harlem River Houses ; these were the first federally funded housing project in New York City.
Architectural style
The Colonial Revival style had become popular for new post office buildings in New York since 1905 when the City of Geneva received the first post office built in the style in the Finger Lakes area . This style was widely used in the 1920s and later, in the 1930s, when the government tried to use public works to offset the effects of the Great Depression. As a rule, the architectural style of the Colonial Revival was used without using specific models. Some of the few exceptions are some post offices in the Hudson Valley : Hyde Park , Poughkeepsie , Rhinebeck, and Wappingers Falls . At the request of the then President Franklin D. Roosevelt , who came from the area, each of these imitated certain no longer existing buildings in the style of the time of Dutch colonization . The post office in Mineola uses elements of the Colonial Revival especially in the frames of the entrance, pediments , rosettes and windows.
The advent of Art Déco and the associated modern style elements in the 1930s made itself felt in the building through a flat roof, the wide limestone ornaments and the missing cornices on the roof edge. The abstract outlines of the eagles in the rosettes also set accents towards the modern and away from the colonial revival.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d e Larry Gobrecht: National Register of Historic Places nomination, US Post Office – Mineola ( English ) New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation . December 1986. Retrieved July 7, 2008.
Coordinates: 40 ° 44 ′ 34 " N , 73 ° 38 ′ 19" W.