Post office sale is a surrender to corporate interests

July 30, 2012

The selling off of the U.S. Postal Service properties is the latest example of the movement to corporatize what’s left of the public sector. It comes in a long line of privatization efforts — from shrinking the public school system to expanding the prison system to contracting out the U.S. military. UC students have firsthand experience of what this means. If the trend continues, it won’t be long before UC Berkeley carves a corporate logo on Founders’ Rock.

The proposed sale of the nearly century-old Downtown Berkeley Main Post Office is yet another close-to-home example of the public surrender to corporate America. Berkeley’s is just one of hundreds of post offices now up for sale around the country, albeit exceptional in its design.

Berkeley residents protest sale of main post office

July 25, 2012

Living New Deal team members Gray Brechin and Harvey Smith appear in a recent article on the Berkeley post office in The Daily Californian.

[Harvey] Smith and others would like to keep the building, which has notable historic and architectural value, in the public sector. Completed in 1915, the post office is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and contains two pieces of Works Progress Administration artwork, including a mural of early Berkeley history by Suzanne Scheur.

Dozens rally to save Berkeley’s historic post office

July 25, 2012

Project Scholar Gray Brechin is featured in a recent article on the fight to save Berkeley’s historic post office building. Read the full article in Berkeleyside here.

Gary Brechin, a historian who has written extensively about historic post offices, rallied the crowd by describing the importance of the post offices around the country that were built in an era of government expansion. Now dozens of those buildings, from the New Deal era and earlier, have been put up for sale, part of a Congressional plan to privatize the post office and an “old fashioned 19^th century land grab of the 21^st century,” he said. Brechin encouraged the crowd to fight back.

“What we are going to do here is build a national coalition to take our property and our post office back,” said Brechin, who is hoping to set up meetings with other communities whose post offices have been put up for sale. These include Palo Alto, Burlingame, San Rafael, Modesto, Ukiah, La Jolla, and Venice.

Celebrating the “workhorse” Bay Bridge

July 16, 2012

Living New Deal Project team member Sam Redman, is featured in a recent San Francisco Chronicle article on efforts to record oral histories regarding the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Although the approval for the bridge predated the New Deal, numerous construction projects complimenting both the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge were a result of federal works projects. Read more here.