Stop Thief! USPS and the Bronx General Post Office

For the sake of future generations, please speak up now to save the Bronx General Post Office. The USPS is moving rapidly to dispose of this iconic New Deal era building and to further erase the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive political agenda.

The Bronx General Post Office is a jewel among our many beautiful post offices. The lobby is an everyman’s gallery of thirteen oversize murals by Ben Shahn and his wife, Bernarda Bryson Shahn. Inspired by the Walt Whitman poem I Hear America Singing and titled America’s Resources, the murals depict the dignity of those who perform manual labor.  

Many post office murals are painted on canvas. The Shahns’ murals are egg tempera on plaster frescos and are considered part of the building. A fear is that if the building is sold, ownership of the murals will pass from public to private ownership. The structure itself gained entry to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. The nomination documents state that “the most noteworthy features of the Bronx Post Office are the thirteen interior murals,” but unfortunately the lobby and its artwork were not landmarked.

The New York City Landmark Conservancy is working with the artist’s son, Jonathan Shahn, to urge the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the building’s public interior spaces and the historic murals that adorn them.  You can add your voice by contacting the Chair of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Robert B. Tierney at rtierney@lpc.nyc.gov Meanwhile the USPS has given preliminary approval to the sale of this building. The only administrative relief remaining is an appeal to the USPS Vice-President for Facilities.  Any one may make a written request for review but the request must be postmarked by Saturday, April 13, 2013.

Please send a letter of any length to this address: USPS Vice President, Facilities 2 Congress Street, Room 8 USPS Facilities Implementation Milford, MA 01757Letters must be postmarked by Saturday, April 13, 2013

Some photos and more information below the line.

"2,200 of the nation's post offices were built during the Great Depression as a morale booster for a country that was losing confidence in its government. So to see them turned into a restaurant or a film studio or real estate office or law offices is just undoing all of that. Frankly, I think the effort to privatize them is to remove all signs that the government can do great things."

                                                         --Steve Hutkins in USA Today

In the fall of 1938 Ben Shahn, assisted by his wife Bernarda Bryson Shahn, began work on the cartoons for a major cycle of thirteen egg tempera on plaster frescos for the Bronx General Post Office. The murals, sponsored by the US Treasury’s Section of Fine Arts, were chosen after a competition involving 198 contestants.  The panels represent a panorama of American agriculture and industry depicting men and women throughout the country engaged in labor, from rural cotton and wheat fields to urban textile factories and steel mills. With hydroelectric dams and industrial blast furnaces completing the powerful imagery, the artist’s intention was “to show the people of the Bronx something about America outside New York.”

Shahn and his wife met while Shahn was assisting Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller Center project, Man at the Crossroads. The Rivera mural was chiseled from the wall in 1934 at Nelson Rockefeller's request in a notorious act of artistic censorship.

Resources of America exemplifies the successful integration of art and architecture in a public building. It is a fine example of “buon fresco,” the mural technique from the Renaissance revived by Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera. Shahn was at the forefront of this revival in America; he was also one of the leading artists of conscience of his generation.

In 1932 Shahn exhibited an acclaimed sequence of 23 gouache paintings of the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti.  In 1937 Shahn and Bryson did the Jersey Homestead Murals in the planned farming and manufacturing community later re-named Roosevelt.

Shahn’s artwork (as a painter, graphic artist, and photographer) is well-represented in major museums across the United States, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and San Francisco’s De Young Museum. As early as 1947, Shahn was the youngest living artist to have received a retrospective at MoMA.

The Bronx is not alone in having a threatened post office.  Many towns and cities have post offices that occupy a special place in their historic downtowns. We should not have to lose any of them.  Last year the National Trust for Historic Preservation took the unusual step of placing an entire category of buildings, our historic post offices, on their list of 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

The financial troubles of the post office are not part of this diary, but if you are unfamiliar with this issue or believe that the post office financial problems are simply caused by the internet please read Laura Clawson’s excellent background diary from a year ago. Or check out Save the Post Office.

The Bronx is fighting back for their post office. On April 1st, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr and more than thirty other elected officials wrote the USPS to offer their "strongest objections" to the sale of the Bronx General Post Office.  

At a poorly-publicized daytime public hearing on Feb. 6, community members rallied against the proposed sale.

“We are appalled that, despite request for further community consultative processes at that hearing, the United States Postal Service has seen fit to issue a final sale determination,” read the letter, signed by Borough President Diaz, nine city council members, 16 state representatives and three Congressmen.

The Postal Service’s “refusal” to host evening hearings or accept community input electronically “when taken together, seem designed to minimize the public input during this important process,” the letter read.

“We cannot and will not accept that the Postal Service could come to such a deleterious determination affecting such an important part of the our Bronx heritage,” the letter concluded. Read the entire letter from elected officials to the USPS here.

UPDATE: Save the Post Office has an excellent post on a legal challenge to the sale of the Bronx General Post Office.  The National Post Office Collaborate is organizing the challenge and the Save the Post Office article includes a link to a letter written to Tom Samra, USPS Facilities Vice-President, by Ford & Huff, their law firm.