US Post Office Troy
The US Post Office Troy is the US Postal Service branch in Troy , New York . It is located at the intersection of Broadway, Fourth Street ( US 4 ) and William Street. It is historically the tenth building in which the post office is housed in the course of the city's history. The post office uses ZIP codes 12179 to 12182. In 1989 the building was inscribed on the National Register of Historic Places and it is a Contributing Property of the Central Troy Historic District , which comprises much of the city's business district.
The building was built during the Great Depression as part of a comprehensive job creation program to stimulate the economy and create jobs. Louis Simon, the then chief architect of the United States Department of the Treasury , used a design for the post office in a simplified neoclassicism that replaced a previous building that was popular at the time. The painter Waldo Peirce painted two murals in the counter hall in 1938 and made Troy one of three in the United States to feature his works.
building
Exterior
The post office is a two story seven to ten yokes comprehensive Stahlskelettbaugebäude on a granite pedestal. On the two main facades, the entrances are lined with pilasters over the full height of the building, on which a simple frieze sits. At the ends the frieze is decorated with abstract stars and at the corners, where the surface of the stone changes from stone to rustication , with stripes. On the Broadway side, the frieze bears the inscription “UNITED STATES POST OFFICE” across the width of the main entrance, which is below.
This main entrance is reached by a few granite steps. It is surrounded by limestone and is surrounded by original wrought iron lamps and lamp posts . The windows on the sides are also framed by decorative limestone, they are set back like the main entrance and the eight windows on the side facing Fourth Street. A side entrance similar to the main entrance, but less decorated, is two yokes from Broadway.
The facades in the north and east are made of brick in the American bond and are closed off by limestone blocks. On the north side, part of the building protrudes from the facade. The facilities of the loading ramp are integrated into it. A brick fireplace sits on the roof of the northeast corner of the house.
interior
Inside there are two interconnected entrance halls along the two main facades. An original epoxidized aluminum - vestibule at the main entrance and a smaller marble lobby at the side entrance open into the main hall, the floor of terrazzo and with dark green marble pedestals and marble lambris equipped. The tiled walls are interrupted by four countertop windows, which are lined with marble pilasters. The furniture in the hall is newer, the counter windows and the iron panels above and some of the mailboxes are original.
There is a wall painting by Waldo Peirce at both ends of the counter hall , both depicting regional themes. The one to the east shows Rip Van Winkle and that to the west is titled Legends of the Hudson . Peirce contributed little to public art , with only two other post offices (in Westbrook , Maine and Peabody , Massachusetts) having murals made by him.
history
Troy's first post office opened in 1796, during the first decade after the city was founded, and was located in a lawyer's office on First Street. During the following century it was housed in seven other locations in the city center, remaining in the last two locations for an extended period of time, from 1846 to 1882 in the Atheneum Building on First Street and then in the Masonic Temple on Third Street until 1894 When the United States Congress approved the construction of the city's first federal building in 1886, the post office was one of the federal agencies that would receive space in the new structure.
The land for the new building was purchased for $ 99,982 and construction, which began in 1890, cost $ 323,000. In 1894 the granite building in neo-Romanesque style was opened and the clock tower became one of the most outstanding landmarks of the city of Troy.
In 1931, when the Great Depression began, an amendment to the Public Buildings Act of 1926 approved the construction of 136 Post Office structures to combat growing unemployment . Troy was one of them, the Treasury Department, under whose roof the US Postal Service existed at the time, the project could not begin and it had to be re-approved in 1934.
The plans called for the old post office building to be demolished and when architect Louis Simon's construction plans became public, there was resistance among parts of the population to the old post office being demolished just forty years after it was built. The resistance was not enough to stop the project, however, and after 154,000 had been raised to purchase the additional land required, the post office moved to the Hannibal Green Building across the street in 1934, where it was operated during construction . Stones from the old building are still sporadically visible in the city and its surroundings, mainly as retaining walls , fence posts and, in one case, as a tombstone .
Peirce painted his murals in 1938, two years after the new building opened. The building has only been slightly modified since then. Only in recent years has a fire escape been added inside on the northwest corner, and one of the former counter windows has been converted into a self-service station. The original tables for the postal customers and the main entrance doors have also been replaced.
aesthetics
At the time of construction, the Treasury Department preferred the Colonial Revival style for buildings in smaller towns and neoclassical structures in larger cities. Louis Simon mostly worked out the smaller objects himself and left the larger projects to contractually hired architects, although he deviated from this principle in Troy. His building also shows influences from other architectural styles.
Neoclassicism is the dominant architectural style and, with its rectangular floor plan, cites early classical public buildings of the 19th century. The influence of contemporary architecture of modernism , particularly the kind Décos is recognizable by the stylized, streamlined ornamentation.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d Larry Gobrecht: National Register of Historic Places nomination, US Post Office-Troy ( English ) New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation . December 1986. Retrieved November 14, 2008.
Coordinates: 42 ° 43 ′ 53 " N , 73 ° 41 ′ 18" W.