Post Office Stories
The Selling of the Venice Post Office: More than a touch of evil
February 15, 2012
BY GRETA COBAR
Venice Beach, California, is an idyllic, bohemian, beach-side community that was once home to The Doors, Jimmy Hendrix, Janice Joplin, and Beat generation poets Stuart Perkoff and John Haag. Today it still embraces alternative lifestyles and artists and performers who don’t seem to fit in anywhere else.
The town's romantic archiecture, beaches, and piers have also attracted many filmmakers, and Venice has been the backdrop of several movies, like "They Shoot Horses Don't They?", "Heat," and "The Net." The famous opening title sequence in Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" was shot in Venice back in the fifties.
Also known as Venice of America, the city was founded in 1905 by tobacco millionaire Abbot Kinney, who re-created the Italian sister city’s architecture, canals, a lagoon with gondolas, the whole bit. After its annexation by the city of Los Angeles in 1925, Venice saw many of its historical buildings, canals, and lagoon destroyed. What survived is now considered to be the number one tourist destination in Southern California.
In the center of town majestically sits the Post Office, a 1939 Works Projects Administration building. It houses the 1941 “Story of Venice” mural by Edward Biberman, a renowned California painter. The beautiful, well-preserved mural depicts Abbot Kinney and his vision of Venice, as well as the oil wells and the destruction that followed annexation.
Truly the heart of the community, as all roads lead to it much like all arteries lead to the heart, the priceless post office building is now going to be sold. Citizens and local organizations voiced their objections to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), but they were ignored. Venice residents and community associations then filed an official appeal with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) asking for a hearing, but the PRC granted the USPS motion to dismiss the appeal.
At issue with the PRC was the USPS claim that the closing of the Venice post office was essentially a “relocation,” because services will be moved to what is currently the USPS Annex, located 400 feet away. The appeal argued that the closing of the Venice post office should be considered a formal discontinuance, entitled to a full closure process, including a hearing before the PRC. The Chairman of the PRC, Ruth Goldway, is a Venice resident, so she chose to recuse herself from the vote because the case involved her own neighborhood. The other three members of the PRC unanimously voted in favor of USPS’s decision to dismiss the appeal.
The plan now is to combine postal retail services with the mail sorting activities currently taking place in the Annex, and to sell the historic post office building.
Community input to the USPS has centered on selling the Annex instead, which could fetch three times more money than the beautiful post office building. Venice mail sorting operations could easily fit into the basement of the current post office, and sorting operations for all other neighborhoods could move to other, less expensive locations.
It seems as if the effort to privatize the Postal Service by selling off post offices is spearheaded not just by the owners of private shipping organizations, but by USPS higher-ups as well. Even the Public Representative of the USPS supported the dismissal of the appeal, even though the community is overwhelmingly united and outspoken against such action.
Aside from implementing cuts and closures that can only diminish revenue, the USPS has been intentionally suppressing revenue at the Venice branch. For example, on January 22, when the price of stamps increased from 44 to 45 cents, the Venice post office did not have one cent stamps for sale. It consistently has had only a limited selection of stamps, which is a major deterrent to stamp collectors and picky customers.
Furthermore, for the past two years only two of the five windows have been open for customer service regardless of the length of the line or the waiting time. The USPS’s own provision to provide service in less than 20 minutes has been ignored on a daily, hourly basis. Overworked clerks have to constantly deal with frustrated customers, which only contributes to their poor morale.
The retail facilities planned for the Annex consist of only two service windows, fewer parking spots for customers and employees, and significantly less mail sorting space in a facility that, according to current Venice postal employees, is already overcrowded. In addition, the neighborhood surrounding the Annex is strictly residential, and the establishment of retail operations would have a negative environmental impact in a coastal zone that has not been addressed or considered.
Bill Maher, press spokesperson for the USPS, told Venice residents that the local post office has historical status, which proved to be untrue, as federal buildings are ineligible for such status. Locals are now trying to place the building on the National List of Historical Buildings, which would not stop the USPS from selling it, but would prevent the buyer from tearing it down. Public access to the building and the mural cannot be guaranteed, though, if the sale does proceed.
Los Angeles has a poor history of historical preservation. The covenants attached to the sale of historic downtown hotels have easily been broken in recent years. In addition, a Biberman mural removed from the downtown post office has disappeared and has not been found since. In the mid 1980s Biberman himself embarked on a mission to find his displaced mural, to no avail.
The Venice community has been extremely outspoken and active in its efforts to save the post office. Two very successful rallies took place, attended by the likes of Bill Rosendahl, District Councilperson, and Debra Padilla, Executive Director of The Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), alongside dozens of community members and activists.
A third rally is planned for February 18, 2 to 4 p.m., in front of the post office. Thousands of petition signatures have been collected in the neighborhood and online at www.change.org (search Venice Post Office to sign). For the latest updates or to just show that you "like" our efforts, please visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/savethevenicepostoffice.
Many local organizations and politicians have come together to stop the sale. They include the Free Venice Beachhead, SPARC, Venice Arts Council, Venice Chamber of Commerce, Venice Neighborhood Council, Venice Peace and Freedom Party, Venice Stakeholders Association, Venice Town Council, Art Deco Society of Los Angeles, Edward Biberman Estate, New Deal Preservation Association, Los Angeles Conservancy, Council member Bill Rosendahl and Congressperson Janice Hahn.
Just like many other communities across the country, Venice is heart-broken to lose its post office. Public outcry continues, the local paper covers the topic in its every edition (www.freevenice.org), and we are still collecting petition signatures. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the law firm that has been representing us pro bono thus far, is currently assessing the possibility of a legal challenge before deciding whether it will continue to represent us.
Let’s not allow one of our oldest government institutions — with its strong labor unions ensuring good wages for workers and a network of post offices that benefit the poor, disabled, rural residents — to be dismantled in ways that favor big, private business. Contact your Congress representatives and urge them to support H.R.1351 and S.1853, which would ease the requirement that the USPS pre-fund the health benefits of employees for the next 75 years in a ten-year period and would refund $18 billion of overpayments (and that’s aside from $75 billion the USPS has overpaid into the Civil Service Retirement System).
The USPS is a self-sufficient federal business that private shipping companies want destroyed. Let’s not allow our politicians to be bought out this time as well.
(To contact Greta Cobar, email gretathegreat99@aim.com.)
(Photo credits: Venice post office; town center with p.o.; mural; 1910 postcard of Venice arcade; "Touch of Evil." More on the Venice story here.)
Printer-friendly version
Send to friend"This Post Office will not be closed in vain"
January 10, 2012
The post office in Ukiah, California, will close permanently on Friday, after a long fight. It’s a beautiful New Deal post office located in the heart of downtown. There’s a very good story about the closing by Carole Brodksy in the Ukiah Daily Journal.
"It's despicable," said attorney Barry Vogel, who worked with a group of citizens to prevent closure of the Ukiah branch. “These closures take the guts out of local communities, subjugating us so that we become less free. We have fewer services and it makes life more difficult for hard-working people who have used this post office for 75 years.”
The post office contains an historic mural, "Resources of the Soil," by Ben Cunningham (1938). Postal officials have said the mural would be preserved when the building is sold, but that's cold comfort to the people of Ukiah.
The community didn't even merit a complete discontinuance process, since the "post office" is being relocated to a carrier annex on the edge of town. An appeal was filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), and the brief was extremely thorough and beautifully done. But the PRC dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction, since the law doesn't cover relocations. (Other historic post offices are closing as "relocations" in Venice and Palo Alto, California, and in Yankton, South Dakota.)
Some 5,000 signatures were gathered opposing the Ukiah closing, but to no avail. The closure represents a serious blow to downtown economic activity, and a piece of local history will be lost forever. And it will mean no more walking to the post office.
“This Post Office will not be closed in vain," says Vogel. "There is a level of community synergy developing across the country. I don't know how many people it will take, but soon there will be enough of us in our small communities to stop this."
(There’s more information about what happened in Ukiah on the Ukiah Post Office website and the Facebook page that local citizens maintained about their efforts to save the post office. And here's a story, after the closing.)
(Photo credits: Resources of the Soil; Ukiah post office)
Another post office closing: It's the same old story, don't you know?
November 15, 2011
The post office in Clements, Minnesota, is closing on Friday, the day before the USPS suspension on closings goes into effect. Other than that sad detail, the story is all too familiar.
The Postal Service cites declining revenues over the past few years and a reduction in workload as the reasons for closing the Clements post office. But both those factors are basically the same thing, and they are primarily due to the recession and therefore temporary. The real reason is that the post office is running at a deficit, and not a very big one at that.
The post office brings in about $51,000 and it costs about $61,000 to operate. And that’s using the Postal Service’s method for calculating the revenues. It only includes postage from walk-in customers and doesn’t consider the value of processing and delivering mail. As for the social and economic value of the post office to the town or the costs citizens will have to bear in traveling to another post office, the Postal Service doesn’t even begin to consider them.
Forget about the fact that the Postal Service is not permitted to close a small rural post office for running at a deficit. The Postal Service doesn’t care, and it has found a variety of ways to get around the law. Like saying that there are other postal facilities nearby (even though nearby may mean more than ten miles, as in the case of Clements) or there’s a vacancy in the postmaster position (a vacancy it chose not to fill) or there’s a problem with the lease (usually avoidable). There’s only one reason all these post offices are closing — they’re running at deficits. Otherwise, why bother?
As always, there was a community meeting in Clements, and everyone spoke up, but what they realized, says the city clerk, is that their suggestions were not being considered. The community suggested reducing the hours on the post office, but the Postal Service said no (even though the Postmaster General is now considering this alternative). There was talk of a village post office, but one person who was interested in hosting a VPO never heard back from the Postal Service about it. There were probably other places a VPO might have been located — there are 26 businesses in town — but that’s not happening. The community even offered to run the post office on a volunteer basis — no go, said the Postal Service. Residents wanted mailboxes in front of their homes, but they’re getting cluster boxes.
The lease on the post office runs until June 30, 2014, but as of last Thursday, the owner of the building had not even been informed by the Postal Service it would no longer be leasing the building. Perhaps that’s because the Postal Service will be covering the cost of the remaining time on the lease. It’s just $4,158 a year, so that’s only $11,000 in owed rent. No big deal for a $70 billion a year operation like the USPS — it’s just the savings on closing the post office for a year.
One more thing: Think the Postal Service is worried about people with disabilities? The mayor of Clements is wheelchair bound.
The city clerk said that “the entire process was not handled very well,” and she hopes the Postal Service has learned something so other communities don’t have to experience what Clements did. Don’t count on it. We’re going to be reading this story over and over and over again.
(Photo credit: Clements Pine street — the post office is in between the church and the Redwood Electric Co-op, photo by Debora Drower. Details on the story, as reported by Troy Krause for the Redwood Falls Gazette.com, and Fritz Busch for The Journal.)
Philistines at the Gate: The Venice Post Office on the Chopping Block
October 30, 2011
On Monday of this week, Ruth Goldway, chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), will be speaking in Venice, California, at a meeting of the Venice Post Office Task Force. The subject of the meeting: the fate of the Venice Main Post Office, a beautiful example of New Deal architecture, which the Postal Service has decided to close and sell, a decision now being appealed before the PRC. The Postal Service has been selling off historic post offices right and left, and it’s really a crime, but no one can stop it.
For Goldway, the trip to Venice will be something of a homecoming, and she probably knows the Venice post office well. Though born and raised in New York City, Goldway lived in southern California for over two decades. During the 1970s, she worked in California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, and from 1979 to 1983, she was a council member and mayor of Santa Monica, which borders Venice. She subsequently worked in Los Angeles at California State University and the Getty Trust. Unfortunately, it seems that Goldway's history with Venice has made it necessary for her to recuse herself from the appeals case.
The Venice post office was built in 1939 by Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration. It’s a beautiful building, and it contains a prized New Deal mural, “First Thirty Years of Venice’s History," by Edward Biberman, a California Modernist whose work appears in the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery. The mural features Venice’s founder, Abbot Kinney, surrounded by the town he created.
Normally when the Postal Service wants to close a post office, it has to go through a formal discontinuance process that gives the community an opportunity to express its concerns. But in this case, the Postal Service says it’s under no legal obligation to go through that process because the “post office” is not really “closing” — it’s just being “relocated" to a carrier annex.
Tell that to the citizens of Venice. They know a closing when they see one, and they know that closing the Venice post office will do irreparable harm to their community. They’ve protested to Postal Service officials, formed a task force to organize their efforts, and filed an appeal with the Postal Regulatory Commission.
The case for the appeal argues that community deserves the full discontinuance procedure because the post office is, for all intents and purposes, closing. The building will be sold, and the new retail facility in the annex is very small compared to the one at the historic post office. The brief submitted by James Smith on behalf of the Free Venice Beachhead newspaper describes the post office very nicely and explains how vital it is to the community:
“The [Venice Main Post Office] VMPO was a Works Project Administration building that includes a cornerstone dated 1939. Thus this historic building has been at the center of Venice community life for 72 years. It is located on the central plaza in the center of the main commercial district of the town. It is constantly busy with postal customers arriving on foot, by bicycle and auto. There is no busier building in the Venice community. Generations of Venetians have patronized this building on a regular basis throughout their lives. Upon climbing the stairs or handicap-accessible ramp, they entered an attractive lobby with a deep wood finish. Their eyes automatically turn to the beautiful and well-preserved “Story of Venice” mural by artist Edward Biberman on the south wall. The mural was painted in 1941 by the famous artist, and is his last surviving mural. It is seen by hundreds of people per day, thanks to its position in the post office lobby. The aesthetic charm of the building, and the museum-quality art in the lobby, is beloved by this community which is filled with artists, poets, muralists and connoisseurs of art. The character of the Venice community as an arts haven means that the blow to the community of losing both the building and the mural is far greater than it would have been if it were a nondescript building that was bereft of art.”
The brief makes several other arguments for keeping the post office open. It points out that it makes more financial sense to keep the main post office and sell the annex instead, and it challenges the Postal Service’s claim that the character of the building and mural will not be altered. As the appeal notes, once the building is in private hands, the mural will not be available to the public, and the building will no longer be a center of community life.
The Postal Service has also given out conflicting information about the public hearing. It has said that a hearing is not necessary because it’s not a closing, but it has also said that a meeting took place at a small restaurant, although it’s been difficult finding anyone who was there for it, and no record of the meeting seems to exist.
For its part, the Postal Service says the PRC has no jurisdiction to hear the appeal because no discontinuance has occurred — it’s just a relocation — and it has promised to follow the statutes contained in the National Historic Preservation Act when it comes to reusing or disposing of the property and preserving the mural.
The community in Venice has also applied to the PRC for a “suspension of determination” — which would block the closing of the post office while the case is being heard. The Postal Service has objected to that as well, arguing that “granting a suspension of the relocation will frustrate the Postal Service’s efforts to immediately reduce costs, in light of its critical financial situation.”
The Postal Service doesn’t say how much a delay of a couple of months would cost, but it can’t be much, and it’s certainly not going to do anything to help with a $20 billion deficit. There’s no rent to pay, and the employees are just moving to the annex, so there’s no savings there either. Plus, the building has not been sold yet, so no revenue will be coming in from the sale anytime soon. How much could it cost to postpone the closing and “relocation” while the appeal is heard?
It seems crass and callous even to mention miniscule cost savings when the future of a community icon is at stake, but that’s the Postal Service for you. The American people own a vast network of brick-and-mortar post offices that has taken over two centuries to build, and more than two thousand of our post offices are historic architectural treasures. But the executives of the Postal Service seem to think that this legacy belongs to them, and they act as if they can do whatever they want with it. They are disposing of these buildings as fast as possible, selling them to the highest bidder, with no regard for communities, history, art, or the country. It’s really amazing that the people entrusted with our post offices care so little for them.
(Photo credits: Venice post office (that’s a FedEx box in front); Biberman’s mural; Rip Cronk’s mural of Abbot Kinney on a wall in Venice. And read more about the effort to save the Venice post office at the Free Venice Beachhead.)
Vigil in Modesto: Auction ends today, and whoever wins, we all lose
August 4, 2011
The post office on 1125 I Street in Modesto, California, closed on June 3, 2011, and it’s been up for auction since June 9th. The bidding ends in a few hours, on Aug. 4 at 5:41 p.m. central time. Whoever wins this auction, we’re all going to come out losers. The Modesto post office is a national treasure, and it’s a crime that the government has seen fit to sell it off.
So far there have been four bidders, and as of early this morning, the going price is $650,000. (The bidding deadline keeps getting extended, so check for Updates at the end of this post.) There may be a flurry of last-minute bidding, but if the price is anything like this, that only makes the crime worse. Similar post offices in Palm Beach, Florida, and Westport, Connecticut, have sold for over $3 million. You can follow the bidding today to its sad final moment on the website of the GSA auctions page—it’s featured in the slide show at the top.
Also known as the Modesto Federal Building and the El Viejo, the building was always occupied by a post office, but in 1967 work on a new postal facility was completed and downtown Modesto was demoted from a main post office to station status. Workers were transferred to the new facility, leaving behind only a small retail operation. Other agencies, like the IRS, occupied the empty space, and custody of the building transferred from the Office of the Post Office to the General Services Administration in 1968. It’s the GSA that’s conducting today’s auction.
The post office contains nine original wall murals in the lobby, commissioned by the Treasury Relief Arts Project. The oil paintings were done in 1937 by Ray Boynton, with the assistance of several local artists, and they depict agricultural scenes: plowing, sorting and harvesting grapes; irrigating orchards; meat and cheese packing; grain harvesting and feeding cows.
In 1989, the GSA commissioned an historic structures study, apparently with the intention of restoring the building. At almost 100 pages, the report contains a wealth of information. Planning on the building began in 1913, a site was purchased in 1916, an appropriations bills to pay for it was defeated in Congress in 1919, a subsequent appropriation bill was approved in 1930, and it was finally completed in 1933.
Its design and construction were supervised by James Wetmore, Acting Supervising Architect for the Treasury Department. Wetmore gets the official credit for designing hundreds of public buildings in the 1930s, although there are only a few of them in California. The post office was the first civil federal structured erected in Modesto.
As the historic structure report states, “The Modesto Federal Building’s architectural significance and generally excellent condition demand a sensitive approach to the conservation of its remaining building fabric. At the same time, it must be realized that the building will continue to function as an active public building.”
Unfortunately, the report got that wrong. It’s unlikely that the El Viejo is going to remain an active public building. Non-profit groups, working through county officials, did express interest in buying the building, but the GSA decided to auction it to the highest bidder. It will probably turn into a real estate office (as in Palm Beach) or a clothing store (as in Greenwich CT).
The application to the National Register of Historic Places states that the building “displays a refinement of design and commitment to classical principles unmatched in Modesto. For this reason, and given the building’s heavy business and social use, the Federal Building stands out as a local landmark—a visual anchor for the neighborhood and a prominent architectural feature for the city…. As the first federal building erected in the city, it was a source of pride for Modestans and a locally prominent symbol of the federal government.”
That’s the saddest part of the whole story. The federal government built thousands of beautiful buildings during the early decades of the 20th century as part of the City Beautiful movement, and the New Deal put up over 1,100 during the depths of the Depression. These buildings were intended to be a source of pride and they symbolized the power and prestige of the federal government.
What does it say when these buildings are treated like disposable real estate, sold off cheap to the highest bidder, with no regard to the future use of the building? What kind of message does it send out about the power and prestige of the federal government these days?
One final note. On Tuesday the Guardian newspaper in Great Britain published a great article about the Modesto post office written by Gray Brechin, a geographer at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the Project Scholar for California's Living New Deal Project. Yesterday, yours truly was interviewed by the French newspaper, Liberation, about the selling of New Deal post offices.
But in the American press, there’s been hardly a word about the loss of these historic post offices. Fifteen of them have recently been put up for sale, and there are 35, as well as several pre-1933 buildings, on the closure lists released last week by the Postal Service. Why are the French and British more concerned about our cultural treasures than we are?
The El Viejo post office is being stolen from the American people. You don’t need to live in Modesto to be outraged.
(Photo credits: Modesto post office exterior; Packing cheese mural; Plentiful harvest mural; exterior with sculpture; interior)
UPDATE: Apparently the GSA extended the auction a few hours. The new closing time is August 5 at 10:30 a.m., central time. As of 7 a.m., the highest bid was $675,000, so it looks like that's about where things will end up.
UPDATE: The GSA has extended the auction again. The new closing time is August 6 at 4:50 p.m., central time, and the highest bid is current $725,000 with 11 hours to go.
UPDATE: The GSA has extended the auction again and again. It's up to $777,000, and supposedly ending today, August 8, at 7:06 p.m., but they'll probably extend it again. Is that common in auctions?
The Latest News on Post Office Closings
What you can do when you learn your post office may close.
