According to an article in CBS 13 Sacramento, Roseville city leaders are considering “giving their stamp of approval for a new hotel on the site of the old downtown post office.”
Roseville’s downtown post office on Vernon Street would soon be the site of a new first-class project.
“The vision we have for downtown is starting to come to fruition,” Roseville Economic Development Manager Wayne Wiley said.
The city purchased the property nine years ago to revitalize the downtown district. Now developers want to tear down the current building, which was built in 1935, and construct a new six-story luxury hotel. Read more.
According to the City of Roseville website, “The USPS has a lease agreement with the city through April 2020 for their current retail operations. The City is actively working with the USPS to keep the retail postal services in downtown.” The USPS Facilities Report says that the Postal Service has been leasing the building from the City since 2010, with an annual rent of $68,000.
Back in 2010, before the City approved the sale, there was a petition to save the post office. The petition expressed concern that “this last WPA Great Depression era building in Roseville could be purchased by a developer who could raze the building, or change it significantly, as has been done over and over on historical Vernon Street.”
Hanging in the Roseville post office is a bas relief carved in wood by Zygmund Sazevich entitled “The Letter.” It’s 12 feet long and three feet wide and divided into three panels. The left and right panels appear to depict postal workers carrying the mail, one by horse and one possibly by plane; the center shows a woman and her family receiving the letter. (For larger views of the images, click on the image.) According to Wikipedia, Sazevich was born in Russia in 1899 and immigrated to San Francisco in 1923. Another of his works is in the post office in Kent, Washington.
The Letter: Zygmund Sazevich
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- The Letter: Left Panel
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- The Letter: Center Panel
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- The Letter: Right Panel
(Photos: Roseville post office: Waymarking.com; Images of the “The Letter”: Placer County Historical Society)
