From the Notebook

The imposing United States Post Office in New York City was a very late work of McKim, Mead & White—so late that two of the firm’s namesake founders, Charles McKim and Stanford White, had been dead for several years when it was completed in 1913.

By that point, McKim, Mead & White was a well-oiled machine that ran on an army of anonymous architects, but the project is now primarily credited to William M. Kendall.

The gleaming white five-story structure occupies two blocks of prime real estate in Midtown Manhattan and was built to complement its original neighbor, Pennsylvania Station,¹ also designed by McKim, Mead & White, and demolished in 1963.

The firm’s output in later years was often unremarkable and derivative, but there’s something special about this building, which is chock-full of exquisite materials and elegant details that reveal thoughtful attention to design despite the project’s massive scale.

Built for a hefty $6 million, the original structure included over 400,000 square feet of floor space and was composed of 165,000 cubic feet of Massachusetts granite, 18,000 tons of steel, 7 million bricks, and 200,000 square feet of glass.²

Most of that glass was used in the giant skylight over the building’s central workroom, which was reportedly the largest room in the United States when the facility opened.³

The building’s public-facing interior spaces were elaborately decorated with Tennessee marble on the floors and walls, topped by ornamental plaster ceilings featuring the seals of 10 nations recognized for doing “great things for the advancement of the universal mail service.”⁴

A Harvard professor reportedly suggested that the architects add the inscription spanning the building’s facade, quoting Herodotus: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”⁵

The statement originally referred to mail service in ancient Greece, but its inclusion in the building’s design made it an unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service.

A portion of the building is still used as a post office, but the bulk of the structure now houses the Moynihan Train Hall, which opened in 2021.

The demolition of Penn Station is often cited as the event that launched the historic preservation movement in the United States, and the dark, dank, subterranean maze of low-slung corridors that replaced it is entirely unworthy of one of the world’s great cities.

Although that unnavigable mess still exists, the conversion of the former post office into a modern train hall has restored much-needed prestige to New York’s landscape, and it’s encouraging to see such a fine building put to a worthy new use.

Gallery

Floorplans and Sections⁶

References

1. “New York’s New Post Office A $6,000,000 Wonder”. The Sun (New York), March 2, 1913, p. 1. ↩︎
2. ibid. ↩︎
3. ibid. ↩︎
4. ibid. ↩︎
5. ibid. ↩︎
6. A Monograph of the Work of McKim Mead & White, 1879-1915. New York: The Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1915. ↩︎

References