Historic Post Offices
Dismantling the Public Realm: Post Offices for Sale
November 5, 2011
In July the Postal Service outsourced its real estate and property management business to CB Richard Ellis, the world’s largest commercial real estate company. Today the USPS-CBRE website is up and running, showing off some 90 post office buildings as well as 36 land parcels, all for sale. The Postal Service must be in a big hurry to dismantle itself — the website has a page on "About USPS" and all it says is "Under Construction." Maybe it should say, "Under Deconstruction."
When the story was first reported back in July, the Wall Street Journal said that CBRE had been hired “to advise the agency on the 300 million square feet of property that it owns or leases.” Tom Samra, vice president for facilities at the postal service, said, “We'll be putting buildings on the market and terminating leases, where possible." Over the next six months, Mr. Samra said, the agency and CBRE are looking to craft a plan on how to curtail the portfolio in line with the lower mail volumes seen by the agency.
That plan is now being implemented, and it turns out that CRBE will be doing a little bit more than “advising” the Postal Service. The company is now the “exclusive” real estate agent and provider for the U.S. Postal Service. It is taking over the negotiation of leases, and it is working with broker Caldwell Banker to market and sell post office buildings and lands.
As reported in a USPS News Link (thanks to Postal News for catching this), Samra says that the USPS real estate holdings are a valuable yet underutilized asset, and they cost the Postal Service a lot of money to maintain. The Postal Service calls them “surplus buildings,” but they are “underutilized” and “surplus” because the Postal Service made them that way. It has moved carriers out of downtown post offices to annexes on the outskirts and in the suburbs, like in Camas, Washington, where a New Deal post office is now for sale, with postal services moved to the annex. It has shifted from owning to leasing spaces, like in Palm Beach Florida, where it sold off the New Deal post office and moved the post office to a rented space in a strip mall. It has opened up “alternative retail access points” in Wal-Marts and Staples so that business is siphoned off from the brick-and-mortar post office, and now it says that customers “prefer” it that way.
The Postal Service didn’t hire the biggest real estate company in the world because it wants to sell off a mere 126 properties. The Postal Service owns over 8,000 properties, as well as leasing about 27,000. The new CBRE website is just a preview of coming attractions. The Postal Service wants to sell off the entire network, or at least a huge portion of it. The model is Europeans countries like Sweden and Germany, where nearly all of the post offices were closed and replaced by postal counters in private stores and businesses.
Among the 90 post offices for sale on the new website are ten historic buildings (seen in the slideshow), most of them on the National Register of Historic Places. They are part of the nation’s architectural treasure, and they are now up for grabs, waiting to be sold to the highest bidder. Over the coming years, we’re going to watch thousands of post offices sold, and many of them will be historic landmark buildings that are the pride of their communities. The American people own 8,000 post office buildings, over 2,000 of them built during the New Deal and before. How many of them must we watch get turned into restaurants and clothing stores and real estate offices before people say, Enough?
Post offices are a fundamental part of the public realm, along with libraries, public schools, state colleges, national parks, and the public transportation system. This public infrastructure was built and paid for by the American people, and that's who owns it and that's who it serves. Now the public realm is under assault by the corporate elite, which wants to see everything transferred over to the private realm, where they can make a profit off it.
But it shouldn't be up to a handful of executives in L'Enfant Plaza, the USPS Board of Governors, and a few members of Congress to decide what happens to the Postal Service. The post offices don't belong to them. Those are our post offices. They belong to the 99%.
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Send to friendFish Stories: New Deal P.O. in Geneva IL, for sale
July 4, 2011
In 1843 women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller, on a road trip around the country, stopped for a few days in Geneva, Illinois, a new settlement on the western fringe of Chicago. In her book Summer on the Lakes, she wrote that it reminded her of a New England village, and she discovered many New Englanders living there, "generous, intelligent, discreet, and seeking to win from life its true values." She went to church and listened to a sermon, then spent a couple of days "passing some happy hours in the woods that fringe the stream, where the gentlemen found a rich booty of fish."
They must be proud of the fishing in Geneva. When the federal government commissioned a mural for the post office in 1941, the painter, Manuel Bromberg, had to work out the subject matter with the people of the town. The title of the mural is "Fish Fry in the Park."
The mural embellishes the Geneva post office, built by the New Deal in 1938. Located within the Central Geneva Historic District , which contains 68 historic buildings (including Frank Lloyd Wright’s P. D. Hoyt House), the post office was a busy place for decades. But years ago, as part of a nation-wide strategy to abandon large downtown post offices, the Postal Service moved the mail carriers to an annex behind a MacDonald’s.
With only a retail business and a staff of three, the space is now considered “under-utilized,” so the Postal Service has been trying to sell the building. It put it up for sale in 2009, but there weren’t many interested buyers, except for a local company, Fagans Graphic Design. Company president Joe Stanton said he gave up on trying to buy the building because dealing with the federal government became a “nightmare.”
The property is currently valued at $1.2 million. The real estate firm Jones Lang is handling the sale, reports the Geneva Patch. “We think it’s an interesting property for redevelopment,” said the company’s senior VP Jeff Gittelman. He imagines the building “as the home of several retailers or a new downtown restaurant.”
Postal worker Jim Cowell said, “It’s built to be a post office. Nothing else should be here.”
The fate of the mural has been of concern to Geneva’s citizens since they learned the building was for sale. In January the mural was temporarily removed for restoration; it’s supposed to be remounted later this year.
“This restoration is a benefit to the community,” said USPS rep Robert Hart, in a USPS press release back in January. “The Postal Service makes every effort to preserve and safeguard the art in our buildings for future generations.” Unfortunately, when it comes to preserving and safeguarding the post office buildings themselves, the Postal Service has, well, other fish to fry.
(Photo credits: Post office exterior; mural; for sale) Here's a video about the mural.
The Postmaster General talks about privatization and real estate
June 28, 2011
If you’re a masochist or have nothing better to do, you might watch the video of Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe’s appearance on the Larry Kudlow show last week. Kudlow begins the segment saying, “The US Postal Service is in big trouble, and now there’s talk tonight in Congress of a bailout. . . . Isn’t it time to end the monopoly and privatize the Service?”
Donahoe tries to set the record straight—the Postal Service is not going broke and it doesn’t need a bailout, just Congressional approval to stop requiring it to pre-fund retirement healthcare. But what’s interesting is just how commonplace it’s become to advocate privatizing the Postal Service.
A few minutes later Larry gets to the point. “So Patrick, look, I love FedEx, Fred Smith is my favorite CEO. Why don’t you let him absorb you? How about that? The guy’s a magician, he’s a miracle worker. And he’ll make a deal with Google and you all can live happily ever after without a government bailout.” Donahoe laughed off the idea and suggested the USPS might instead absorb Fed Ex.
But Fred Smith? Besides being the founder of FedEx, Smith is a free market fundamentalist who has served on the board of directors of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank that cranks out white papers arguing for the privatization of the Postal Service. Smith himself has written articles about how the Postal Service should be confined to non-competitive markets—the areas that FedEx won’t touch—and how it should be “dismantled as these markets shrink.” In testimony before Congress in 1999, he said, “Closing down the USPS . . . is an option that ought to be considered seriously.” In 2009, Smith and FedEx “launched a multi-million-dollar campaign against legislation that would make it easier for 100,000 of FedEx’s workers to unionize.” According to this (socialist) website, Smith’s main contribution to the mailing industry “has been to undermine the union wages and conditions won by the U.S. postal and UPS workers.”
Later in the interview, Kudlow and Donahoe talk real estate. “You’ve got big real estate holdings,” says Kudlow. “In some sense, you’re a real estate holding company. Why don’t you make use of that and start selling off the real estate left and right?”
“We are,” replies Donahoe. “As a matter of fact we sold the GPO (General Post Office) in New York couple of years for $230 million. . . . We’ve sold properties all across the US.”
Too bad Donahoe didn’t take the opportunity to defend the Postal Service’s network of brick-and-mortar post offices. And why point proudly to the sale of New York’s James Farley Post Office, one of the grandest in the country? Isn’t that just symbolic of how far the Postal Service has fallen from its former glory? Anyway, if you’re in the market, there are plenty of post offices for sale. Maybe yours is one of them.
(Photo credit: James Farley post office; Fred Smith; Westport CT post office for sale, sold recently) (More photos of the the James Farley, here)
Tearing Down the House: The Selling of the Post Office
June 23, 2011
A few days ago, US Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe compared the financial problems of the Postal Service to a fiscal failure abroad. “"Look what's going on in Greece,” he said. “There's nothing safe.” The comparison between Greece and the Postal Service is apt, but not in the way the Postmaster General probably meant.
The causes of the Greek mess are complex, but it’s easy to see how the crisis is being exploited. Today’s New York Times has an article titled “Some Greeks Fear Government Is Selling Nation.” It’s about how Greece is being forced to adopt an austerity program requiring it to auction off the country’s prime assets in a “fire sale of national patrimony.” The "crown jewels of Greece’s socialist state” are now likely to go to the highest 
bidder—the ports, the telephone company, the railway system, and some prime Mediterranean real estate—even the postal system and maybe the Parthenon—all up for sale. It won’t be long before wealthy investors from Germany and the other big European powers who are pushing austerity “end up purchasing the assets for a hefty discount.”
That’s pretty much what’s going on with our Postal Service. It finds itself in a financial dilemma—due partly to circumstances beyond its control but also because of its own past decisions—that is now being used to justify a fire sale of some of our country’s great architectural treasures and a vast network of brick-and-mortar post offices. The Postal Service is basically selling off its assets and privatizing itself.
Thousands of small rural and neighborhood post offices are being closed, and citizens (the Postal Service likes to call them “customers”) are told they should take advantag
e of one of the 70,000 alternative retail outlets the USPS has developed through partnerships with retailers like supermarkets and Office Depots. It won’t be long before the brick-and-mortar post office is just a memory.
The Postal Service has also been selling off some amazing historic post offices. For many years now, it has been moving its mail processing centers from large downtown post offices to annexes in the suburbs, leaving millions of square feet of prime office space unused. That’s now being used to justify the sale of beautiful New Deal post offices in Greenwich CT, Westport CT, and Palm Beach FL, and other historic post offices like those in Elizabeth 
City NC, Joliet IL, and York PA. Here we are in the middle of a real estate slump, and the buildings are sold cheap, with wealthy developers turning them into high-end clothing stores, real estate offices, and a bag company.
The Postal Service may be getting a quick infusion of cash, but it's a buyer's market. The post office in Wesptort CT was appraised at $3.6 million, but it sold on May 18 for $2.35 million. The post office in Modesto CA, which must be worth millions, went up for auction in early June, but as of June 15, only one bid had been placed—for the minimum $100,000. The post office in Palm Beach FL was listed at $5 million but sold for $3.725 million. The buyer was real estate mogul Jeff Greene, who commented, "“You always want to get a good deal."
While it's the Postal Service that's selling the post offices, it's we the people who paid to build them and it's we who own them. Maybe we should be getting a better deal too.
Perhaps someone can explain how the nation could build 1,100 beautiful post offices in the middle of the Great Depression yet can’t afford to maintain its legacy of brick-and-mortar post offices today. It’s simply madness to destroy these centers of community and to sell off a legacy that’s taken so long to build up. As an ancient Greek saying goes, “God does not tear down men's homes, he ruins their minds and they tear them down themselves."
(Photo credits: Parthenon; Greenwich p.o., sold; Norwich p.o., coming on the market; York p.o., for sale)
"Harbor of Hospitality" may lose historic post office
June 16, 2011
Elizabeth City, North Carolina, was incorporated in 1793. Wikipedia provides several interesting facts about the place: It’s known as the “Harbor of Hospitality" because of its long history of shipping thanks to its location at the narrowing of the Pasquotank River. The city has been cited as one of "The 100 Best Small Towns in America" by author Norman Crampton. And it hosts the North Carolina Potato Festival, an annual celebration of the potato, one of the region's most important crops.
Elizabeth City has a downtown post office and federal courthouse that was built in 1906. It’s a stone-veneered Renaissance Revival building with handsome classical and floral embellishments in the lobby.
According to WVEC, this historic post office is slated to close July 22.
A petition drive has received 3,500 signatures, and citizens are urging their lawmakers in Washington to keep the post office open. Congressman G. K. Butterfield (D-NC 1st District) has written a letter to the U.S. Postmaster, saying the closing would have "serious consequences for about 200 businesses and could create hardship for many elderly residents who could have trouble getting to the branch on Ehringhaus Street."
In a letter to the editor of the Daily Advance, local resident Marjorie A. Berry writes, “I urge everyone to support keeping the Main Street post office open. We have to show the U.S. Postal Service that we are not nameless, voiceless people in some insignificant little town.”
(Photo credits: post office exterior; postcard)
Getting the band back together might not be all that easy, Jake: The Joliet Post Office Blues
June 11, 2011
The post office in downtown Joliet, Illinois, at the corner of Scott and Clinton Streets, was built in 1903. It was the city’s main post office until 1981, when a new post office opened on the west side. The building was designed by the federal government’s supervising architect, Taylor James Knox, in the Renaissance Revival Style. It also has an extension built in 1931-32.
The people of Joliet learned this week that the Postal Service is planning to close their post office. As required by law, the USPS held a meeting to hear comments from the public, but apparently the Postal Service didn’t do a great job notifying local residents about it. As the Herald-News reports, Mayor Thomas Giarrante learned of the meeting a few hours before it took place. “They didn’t notify anybody,” he said.
Plus, the meeting was held across town at the West Side post office on McDonough Street. “We need to at least have a meeting on the East Side with the people who use it,” Giarrante said, adding that one of the problems with closing the facility is that some users don’t drive. “Some of the people (who use the downtown facility) walk to that post office. I don’t know how they expect those people to get to McDonough Street.”
Thomas Mahalik, vice president of marketing for the City Center Partnership that promotes business development downtown, said he learned of the meeting just the day before. “The thing that got some people upset is the way they disseminated the information,” he said. Besides the surveys put in the postal boxes, others were available “behind the counter,” Mahalik said. “You almost had to ask for them in order to do the survey.”
The Scott street post office is on the National Register of Historic Places. As the application for historic designation states, “Throughout the years, this building has funtioned as a provider of a necessary public service, a symbol of growth, a source of community pride and a distinctive architectural creation which has survived the passage of time and retained its basic architectural integrity. The Joliet Post Office is a physical link that connects present-day Joliet to the past history and development of this community. As such, this building is an important landmark and a valuable resource to the people of Joliet.” (More on the history of the building, here and here.)
The Veterans Memorial in Joliet's Bicentennial Park contains a large mosaic (1992) depicting many of the city's landmarks, including the post office.
Joliet, Wikipedia informs us, was the home of a prison from 1858 to 2002, featured in songs by Memphis Minnie and Bob Dylan. The 1980 film
"The Blues Brothers" has scenes shot in Joliet, and John Belushi's character has just been released from the prison, hence his nickname, Joliet Jake Blues.
Given the problems of notification with the public meeting, civic leaders are trying to persuade the Postal Service to hold another meeting. But the Postal Service has not agreed to it, and instead extended the comment period a couple of weeks.
(Photo credits: Post office exterior; postcard; mosaic)
The Old Days of Greenwich, and the New
June 11, 2011
The federal government has a long history, going back to the early nineteenth-century, of constructing buildings intended to symbolize the power, stability, and prosperity of the nation and its government. Court houses, custom houses, and post offices were designed in the latest styles and using the best technology, and they were supposed to be monumental and grand to inspire confidence in the federal government. In the first decades of the twentieth century, these buildings were done in the neo-classical style, calling to mind the great democracies of Greece and Rome. As an historian of federal architecture writes, the classical style of federal architecture ““bespoke the power, influence, and self assurance of a nation on the brink of world leadership.”
Among the federal buildings constructed at this time was the post office in Greenwich, Connecticut. Built in 1916, it features a concave façade facing the triangular Memorial Plaza Park. This unique adaptation to the site and other architectural features, like a recessed portico and foliated capitals on the columns, put the building on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, and it’s included in the Greenwich Avenue Historic District.
The Postal Service moved most of the sorting work from this site years ago to a facility on the outskirts of town, which turned the downtown post office into a small branch operation. As reported in the Greenwich Time, in April of 2009, the USPS announced it was putting the building up for sale.
Greenwich Patch reports this week that a buyer has been found—real estate mogul Peter Malkin, owner of the Empire State Building. And it looks like the old post office is going to be refitted as a clothing store. Local offices say it will be rented by the high-end retailer Bergdorf Goodman.
In the meantime, the USPS has reassured residents that they’re not losing a downtown post office completely. It will be moving to a new location about a half mile away: a former pet supply storefront.
The post office has a New Deal mural in the lobby entitled "Old Days of Greenwich," painted in 1939 by Victoria Hutson Huntley. It depicts Dutch fur traders and pilgrim farmers leaving the dock after loading a ship bound for New York with furs and potatoes.
As Greenwich Time reports, residents have expressed concern about the fate of the mural. USPS spokesperson Maureen Marion said it could be left in the building if the new owners agree to preserve it, or it could be moved to another location.
"Depending on what the next use of the building is may also dictate how that mural will be handled," Marion said. "This is one of our treasures, and we do try to take good care of them all."
Photo credits: Post office exterior, pet supply, mural,
The Latest News on Post Office Closings
What you can do when you learn your post office may close.
