The Personal Touch

One of the weirder parts of trolling through collections of old photos of NYC is finding a building that I’ve known my whole life. Here’s the main post office in Flushing, appropriately located on Main Street, probably taken shortly after its completion in 1934:

It was a not-quite-ten-minute walk from where I grew up and was, along with the public schools I attended, my introduction to civic architecture. The classical entrance portico certainly suggested a higher aim than the very plain red-brick facades of the apartment houses or the messy retail storefronts all around it.

Despite the date of construction, it was not one of the New Deal projects. Construction started in 1932, before FDR was elected, and the design was by the Office of the Supervising Architect for the U.S. Treasury, not one of the New Deal agencies. In addition to the portico, there are murals on the inside, above the service windows, depicting scenes of Queens history. If I recall correctly, the murals show the small towns and farmland of the mid-1800s. They’re pretty but do not have a lot to do with the 2,300,000 people who live there now.

What’s interesting is that it lives in my memory as a large building even though it’s two stories high and has a smaller footprint than the apartment house we lived in. I thought of it as large when I was a kid, too. Maybe, when I was 8, the portico had me conflating “large” and “grand.”