Communities Fight to Save U.S. Post Offices and New Deal Art

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Coast to coast, from the Bronx and Chelsea in New York City to Venice, La Jolla, Ukiah, Redlands, and Berkeley in California, the Postal Service has decided that it will sell historic downtown post offices without looking at alternatives.

Hundreds of post offices are up for sale or lease, and the list is growing. Of the 56 U.S. post office buildings currently for sale, six are on the National Register of Historic Places and more may be eligible.

The Berkeley-based National Post Office Collaborate has filed suit in federal court to stop the sale of the Renaissance-style Stamford, Connecticut, Post Office and is prepared to do the same for Berkeley and La Jolla, California and the monumental post office in the Bronx, renowned for its thirteen murals by New Deal artist Ben Shahn.

Stamford Post Office, Courtesy Save the Post Office
Stamford, Connecticut’s Renaissance-style post office may be sold and largely demolished for luxury condos.

After months of public protest and formal appeals by the city, on July 18 Postal Service officials announced that, despite near-unanimous community opposition, it would sell Berkeley, California’s historic post office, citing “dire financial circumstances facing the Postal Service.”

The announcement provoked a month-long encampment in downtown Berkeley to defend the post office and the New Deal artworks it contains.

Berkeley Planning Commissioners voted unanimously on a measure restricting the use of historic buildings in the civic center, including the post office, to community-serving purposes. The California State Legislature passed a measure urging the U.S. Congress to stop the sale of historic post offices and undo the constraints that Congress imposed in 2006 requiring the Postal Service to pre-pay 75-years of health benefits for Postal Service employees—part of the conservative agenda to privatize the U.S. Postal Service by pushing it into bankruptcy.

Berkeley Post Office Protest
Slated for sale: Downtown Post Office, Berkeley, California

Two weeks ago, the Downtown Berkeley Post Office was listed for sale. CBRE holds an exclusive contract with the U.S. Postal Service to sell and lease the post office properties, valued at billions of dollars. The USPS-CBRE relationship is the subject of an explosive exposè by investigative reporter Peter Byrne that found that CBRE — chaired and largely owned by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum — has consistently sold valuable public properties to its associates at prices well below market rates.

The Collaborate is urging an investigation by the USPS Office of Inspector General David Williams. Contributions to defray substantial legal expenses can be made to NPOC, PO Box 1234, Berkeley, CA 94701.

The CCC: Conserving Land and Youth, Again

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I looked up from news of another mass shooting at the industrial wasteland passing by the Metroliner on my way to D.C.  I saw a cage full of young men who have few prospects now but drugs, prison, and the military, and I recalled Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration during the last depression that no nation, no matter how rich, can afford to waste its human and natural resources. That connection by a man who, according to his wife, studied the American landscape from train windows so that he would know what was needed when he took office, spawned the Civilian Conservation Corps as a top priority of his presidency.

Prince George's County, Maryland

CCC Men at Work
Prince George’s County, Maryland

As remarkable a feat as the full-scale mobilization for war less than nine years later, the CCC saved the lives of millions of young men and their families. It provides a lesson by which we could once again save the land, water, and people whom we treat today as if we are rich enough to squander them en masse.

Roosevelt knew and loved trees. He planted thousands of them on his Hudson River estate both for their beauty and as a cash crop. As governor of New York while the nation sank deeper into the Great Depression, he pioneered a work relief program of reforestation that he would expand to national scope as president.

Just two days after his inauguration on March 4, 1933, FDR called a meeting of top administration executives to discuss the formation of a civilian army for the purpose of land reclamation. Fifteen days later, he told Congress that even more important than forestry, soil conservation, and flood control would be the “moral and spiritual value of such work” for the men who performed it. Four months after he entered office, about 275,000 young men and veterans had enlisted in the new civilian army. They quickly built thousands of camps of two hundred men each around the country and in the territories.

Frederick County, Maryland

CCC Statue at Gambrill State Park
Frederick County, Maryland

CCC Cabin, Lost River State Park, West Virginia

CCC Cabin
Lost River State Park, West Virginia

Before its dissolution during World War II, about 3.5 million men passed through the CCC. The federal government paid them $30 a month (worth about $480 today), of which $25 was automatically routed to their families in order to buoy local economies in some of the country’s most distressed regions.

The CCC “boys” left a largely unseen legacy of vastly expanded and improved national, state, and regional parks; of lodges, bridges, roads, dams, trails, amphitheaters, and their signature fine stonework, much of which endures eighty years later. They planted entire forests now in their maturity. Instructors in the camps provided job training and educational opportunities upon which many of the men built careers. Veterans often remembered the CCC as salvational— and as the best years of their lives.

Bascom Lodge, Mount Greylock, Adams, Massachusetts

Bascom Lodge
Mount Greylock, Adams, Massachusetts

In today’s terms, the 3.5 billion trees the CCC planted sequestered millions of tons of carbon while conserving soil, water, and wildlife. At a time when climate change increasingly threatens life on the planet and so many young men and women have lost hope, we should remember who and what once worked. We have, after all, been drawing rich dividends on CCC labor ever since.

Congress to Postal Service: “Drop Dead!”

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The fire sale of our post offices is accelerating while the media remain largely asleep at the wheel.

In July 2011, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) gave an exclusive contract to liquidate the public’s property to the giant commercial real estate firm C.B. Richard Ellis (CBRE), which also advises the Postal Service on which properties to sell.  It’s no surprise, then, that so many of the post offices listed for sale or already sold happen to be in expensive real estate markets like Santa Monica, Venice, Palo Alto and Berkeley in California; Greenwich, Connecticut; Towson and Bethesda in Maryland; Northfield, Minnesota; and New York City.

CBRE is effectively owned and chaired by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband, billionaire private equity financier Richard Blum. If you visit the CBRE website devoted to marketing postal properties you will find no distinction between superb, historic post offices and blandly utilitarian processing facilities or vacant lots. For CBRE, it’s all simply real estate thrown into the same lucrative bin. A listing on the National Register of Historic Places and the presence of art works created during the New Deal only serve as impediments to moving those properties quickly.

The USPS seems only too happy to help with removing those obstacles. To get around historic preservation rules, for example, the USPS claims that it is not actually closing and selling the historic buildings that it is, in fact, closing and selling, but is simply “relocating services.”

Former Bethesda Post Office

Former Bethesda Post Office
Bethesda, Maryland, built in 1938.

New “consolidated” Bethesda post office

New “consolidated” Bethesda Post Office
Bethesda, Maryland, 2012.

These relocations mean the USPS will be paying millions of dollars in rent from which it is exempt in buildings it now owns. Further, it means trading ennobling public spaces for outlets in strip malls and Walmarts devoid of the aesthetic or historical merit in which the USPS once took pride.

The fire sale of the public’s portfolio is largely the result of legislation Congress passed in 2006 to effectively put the Postal Service out of business by requiring that it prepay billions to cover health benefits for its future employees—payments that no other government agency or business is required to make. For more than a year, the Postal Service has been seeking legislation that would allow it to reduce the $5 billion annually it must pay the U.S. Treasury, but Congress has failed to act. In September, Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe warned that the Postal Service could be insolvent within the year. “Absolutely, we would be profitable right now,” he told The Associated Press, when asked whether congressional delays were to blame for much of the postal losses, expected to reach a record $15 billion this year.

To staunch the bleeding, some 3,700 post office properties are being studied for possible sale—often without public review or input. Attorneys for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in a lengthy letter to the USPS enumerated the many preservation and environmental laws that the agency appears to be ignoring in Berkeley and elsewhere. On October 22 a USPS representative curtly responded that the Trust’s request to be a consulting party was premature and its allegations were “not correct.”

In 1935, Stephen Voorhees, the president of the American Institute of Architects, wrote that the profession’s job was to “hold up before the people a high standard of excellence both in design and craftsmanship, utilizing for this purpose every aesthetic and technical resource of the nation, so that every citizen may have the opportunity of becoming familiar with good architecture, good painting and good sculpture.”

Edward Biberman's Venice Post Office Mural

Edward Biberman's Venice Post Office Mural
Despite community opposition, the USPS sold the Venice Post Office at 1601 Main Street to Hollywood producer Joel Silver. At a press conference closed to the public, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the L.A. Conservancy lauded Silver, the producer of the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon action films, for re-purposing the building for his film company. Silver is now seeking exclusive rights to the post office lobby mural, “Story of Venice,” completed in 1941 by Edward Biberman. Biberman, who died in 1986, was himself a champion of public murals. The Coalition to Save the Venice Post Office is fighting for public access to the mural.

America’s historic post offices are unique in their variety and quality as well as in the public art that make them the People’s Art Gallery. Without the magnificent post offices built during the New Deal and before, Voorhees said, “there would be a distinct loss to the spiritual and patriotic relationship between the citizen and the government if its activities were carried on in bare warehouses without architectural significance or dignity and constructed as cheaply and as shoddily as the average speculative structure.”

The sell off and relocation of the post offices is the nightmare that Voorhees foresaw. Perhaps it is precisely to break that relationship between the citizen and government that our post offices are now regarded not as our shared legacy, but simply as surplus real estate to be liquidated.

For more on the loss of America’s post offices, why it is happening, and what you can do, visit https://www.savethepostoffice.com/

Shock Troops of Disaster

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In addition to the economic calamity of Great Depression, in the 1930s the country was further beset by environmental catastrophes such as floods, hurricanes, drought and a Dust Bowl, much as it is today. But in addition to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the nation had something else then that it does not have in 2012 to deal with devastating storm events such as Hurricanes Katrina, Irene and Sandy.

WPA flood relief, Louisville, Kentucky, 1937

WPA flood relief, Louisville, Kentucky, 1937
WPA workers pile sandbags for flood protection.

WPA and CCC workers were trained in disaster aid and recovery. In the event of natural disasters, tens of thousands of men and women could be quickly moved to affected areas to supplement the National Guard and other emergency workers.

The Work Projects Administration produced an 11-minute documentary titled “Shock Troops of Disaster” that includes dramatic footage of the extraordinary damage caused by the epic 1938 storm in New England as well as the recovery effort by federal workers. It is well worth watching today. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, it’s a vivid reminder of the vital role of federal government in disaster relief.

Dismantling the Post Office

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Modesto Post Office

modesto
Modesto Post Office – Photo Credit: Gray Brechin

The liquidation of our commonwealth continues to gather steam. Several months after I published an article focusing on the sale of the downtown post office in Modesto, California, I learned that my own post office might soon be on the market.

Nearly a century old, the Architect of the Treasury Department modeled the downtown Berkeley Post Office on the Brunneleschi’s Renaissance orphanage in Florence, Italy, giving this university town one of the handsomest federal facilities  in California.

Though, like the Modesto post office, Berkeley’s post office is not a New Deal structure, it contains two works of art from the New Deal period: a mural of Berkeley’s past by Suzanne Scheuer, and a sculptural relief by David Slivka.

There is no question that the U.S. Postal Service is in a state of crisis although many observers believe that crisis is more manufactured by those opposed to any government services than by competition from the Internet or private carriers. There can be no doubt, however, that many of the thousands of post offices scheduled for sale, closure, and possibly demolition sit on valuable real estate. Over 1100 of those facilities were built during the New Deal. They are often the finest buildings in many small towns, stately representatives of the federal government. Many contain sculpture, murals, and customized furniture whose fate is uncertain as the flags are lowered and post offices are thrown on the market.

U.S. post offices serve as vital gathering places and stimulants for downtown businesses that stand to be eliminated as post offices move to suburban shopping malls and are automated. Protests have been held as post offices have closed in Ukiah, Venice, and La Jolla., California. All contain New Deal art.

Opposition is growing to the progressive liquidation of the U.S. Postal Service and to the selloff of the buildings and art that were paid for and continue to serve the American public. New York University professor Steve Hutkins has devoted himself to stopping the privatization of this public resource, creating an invaluable website carrying information about community efforts around the country to save threatened post offices, as well as critiques of the ostensible crisis.

Rather than providing fewer services, for example, some suggest that the USPS could save itself and its invaluable assets by providing more services— specifically by reviving the postal savings bank that Americans once had and many other nations still enjoy.

One of the postal workers on the sculptural relief in the Berkeley post office’s loggia holds up a letter on which David Slivka carved a barely visible inscription. The return address is “All Mankind;” the recipient “Truth Abode on Freedom Road.”

Slivka was, I believe, making a statement about the vital role played by this trusted government service that facilitates communication among all its citizens. We must care for those abodes, for they belong to those of us traveling freedom’s road.

Gray Brechin is Project Scholar for The Living New Deal.

UPDATE: In a letter to a Senate panel that oversees the Postal Service, Sen. Bernie Sanders and 26 other senators suggested specific measures to stop wholesale closings of rural post offices and mail processing centers, and spare many of the 220,000 jobs that the Postal Service wants to cut.

San Francisco Model Update

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Chronicle reporter Carl Nolte’s article on the WPA-made model of San Francisco (see News post of Sept. 11, 2010) elicited a great deal of interest in and information on the 3-D map, including a number of suggestions of where it might go. We have followed up on the suggestions; our chief concern is that it be made available to the public with interpretative text explaining how the model and other relief maps were made by WPA and CCC workers and for what reasons. We also want to be assured that the model will be well cared for since another similar one was reassembled and installed at SF’s Laguna Honda Hospital in the 1980s but it has disappeared without a trace.

Among the feedback we got was that the NE quadrant of the city is still intact at UC Berkeley’s Wurster Hall where it has been used for environmental modeling for many years. Professor Peter Bosselman has been using the model for teaching purposes, saving all of the original blocks as the downtown has been transformed by post-war highrises.

If reassembled, the model could be restored to a freeze-frame of San Francisco c. 1930 when — because of the Great Depression — building largely stopped.  Unfortunately, Prof. Bosselman wants to continue to use a portion of the model, and the rest remains in storage at UC Berkeley.  We would prefer that it be on public view and there were some guarantee of its good-keeping by the university (which has a checkered record on such things — see our 2012 posts on the sale of the Sargent Johnson sculpture).

WPA model update
Northeast quadrant of San Francisco model at Wurster Hall

Northeast quadrant of San Francisco model at Wurster Hall

San Francisco District Agricultural Association Grounds - Daly City CA
Model stored at UC warehouse in 17 wooden crates

WPA model update
Section of model showing upper Glen Park & Diamond Heights undeveloped in 1940.

WPA model update
Reporter Carl Nolte examining his neighborhood on a section of the model

WPA model update

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Chronicle reporter Carl Nolte’s article on the WPA-made model of San Francisco elicited a great deal of interest in and information on the 3-D map, including a number of suggestions of where it might go. I will be following up on the suggestions; my chief concern is that it be made available to the public with interpretative text explaining how the model and other relief maps were made by WPA and CCC workers and for what reasons. I also want to be assured that the model will be well cared for since another similar one was reassembled and installed at SF’s Laguna Honda Hospital in the 1980s but it has disappeared without a trace.

Among the feedback we got was that the NE quadrant of the city is still intact at UC Berkeley’s Wurster Hall where it has been used for environmental modeling for many years. Professor Peter Bosselman has been an exemplary steward of the model, saving all of the original blocks as the downtown has been transformed by post-war highrises. Thus, if reassembled, the model could be restored to a freeze-frame of San Francisco c. 1930 when — because of the Great Depression — building largely stopped.

WPA model update
Northeast quadrant of San Francisco model at Wurster Hall

San Francisco District Agricultural Association Grounds - Daly City CA
Model stored at UC warehouse in 17 wooden crates

WPA model update
Section of model showing upper Glen Park & Diamond Heights undeveloped in 1940.

WPA model update
Reporter Carl Nolte examining his neighborhood on a section of the model

Major WPA Art Exhibition in Walnut Creek

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National New Deal Preservation Association president and California’s Living New Deal collaborator Harvey Smith has, with gallery curator Carrie J. Lederer, culled collections in California and beyond for a major show of New Deal art at the Lesher Center for the Arts Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek. The American Scene: New Deal Art, 1935-1943, commemorates the 75th anniversary of the WPA which briefly sponsored a volcanic output from painters, sculptors, printmakers, musicians, actors, and writers. This major exhibition — assembling a wealth of art largely unseen for seven decades — will run from October 3-December 19, 2010. A free reception will be held at the gallery October 5, 6-8 PM at the Gallery. Visit www.bedfordgallery.org for more information.