United States Post Office (Mineola, New York)

The U.S. Post Office Mineola is the post office for the ZIP code 11501 in Mineola in Nassau County, New York. This village belongs to the Town of Hempstead. The building is located at the northeast corner of the intersection of First and Main Street.

The post office is built of brick buildings in the style of Colonial Revival and was built in 1936 during the Great Depression as part of a job creation program, as some other new post offices in upstate New York. The floor plan of this building is in this style unusual - the only other similarly constructed post offices in New York are also located on Long Iceland: the U.S. Post Office Oyster Bay and the former post office in Port Washington - and is approximately hexagonal, so that the main entrance to the southwest points to the street corner. The project was one of the last works by Peabody, Wilson & Brown and was therefore included in 1989 in the National Register of Historic Places.

Building

All six sides of the two-story steel truss building are clad with bricks, the Flemish Association are executed. The front porch is made of granite and is edged with dolerite, on the flanks are iron lanterns. The middle three of the five Säulenjoche are recessed to allow the Kalksteineinrahmungen the double doors. Above each of the bay window is a rose window and a grill made ​​of bronze in the form of an implied eagle. The inscription United States Post Office in bronze letters is located between the rosettes and Mineola, New York is carved into the frieze above the main entrance. The building is covered by a flat roof with Kalksteinverkleidungenframent.

Inside the building, the original pink Tennessee marble wall paneling has been preserved with a darker border strip. Above the marble is flush with molded cornices as a transition to the ceiling. The floor is a terrazzo with inlaid brass strips, whereby the area is divided into zones of different colors. In contrast to other post offices in this size that were given in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration commissioned missing in the lobby of this post office a mural.

History

The complex situated in community free of Urban Mineola had already played a central role in the field at that time primarily used for agriculture and was therefore chosen in 1899 as the county seat of the newly formed Nassau County. In the first decades of the 20th century resulted in improvement of road and rail connections to a suburbanization in Nassau County. This growth required, among other things, a new post office.

1931 allowed a supplement to the Public Buildings Act of 1926 the construction of 136 new post offices in the state of New York, of which sixteen accounted settlement on Long Iceland, including Mineola. The property was built in 1933 purchased and with the design of Peabody, Wilson & Brown were commissioned, a New York architectural firm that had projected some larger estates on Long Iceland - about Charles Millard Pratt Seamoor in Glen Cove - or even the City Hall in Huntington. The construction company A. J. Paretta Contracting of Long Iceland City began in 1935 with the work that has been completed in the following year.

The post office in Mineola is the only federal building, Peabody, Wilson & Brown designed and one of her last works. Julian Peabody drowned early in 1935 with the sinking of a ship off the coast of New Jersey and Archibald Manning Brown left the architectural firm to guide the team that the Harlem River Houses projected; these were the first financed by federal funds housing project in New York City.

Architecture

The style of the Colonial Revival became popular for new construction of post offices in New York since 1905, when in the region around the Finger Lakes, the City of Geneva was the first built in this style post office. In the 1920s, this style was widely used and even later, in the 1930s, when the government tried to compensate with public buildings, the impact of the global economic crisis. In general, the style of the Colonial Revival was used without using specific models. Some of the few exceptions are some post offices in the Hudson Valley: Hyde Park, Poughkeepsie, Rhinebeck and Wappingers Falls. These collected at the request of then President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was from the area, each specific non-existent building in the style of the period of Dutch colonization after. The post office in Mineola used elements of the Colonial Revival in particular at the borders of the input, the pediments, trim and windows.

The advent of the Art Deco style and related elements of modernism in the 1930s was reflected in the building by a flat roof, the broad limestone ornaments and the lack of cornices at the roof edge. The abstract outlines of the eagle in the rosette accents to modern times and away from the Colonial Revival.