The United States Post Office Canal Street Station, originally known as "Station B", is a historic
post office
A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional ser ...
building located at 350 Canal Street at the corner of
Church Street in the
Tribeca
Tribeca (), originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street". The "triangle" (more accurately a quadrilateral) is bounded by Canal Stree ...
neighborhood of
Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
,
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
. It was built in 1937, and designed by consulting architect Alan Balch Mills for the
Office of the Supervising Architect The Office of the Supervising Architect was an agency of the United States Treasury Department that designed federal government buildings from 1852 to 1939.
The office handled some of the most important architectural commissions of the nineteenth ...
of the
United States Department of the Treasury
The Department of the Treasury (USDT) is the national treasury and finance department of the federal government of the United States, where it serves as an executive department. The department oversees the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and ...
.
The building is a two-story and symmetrically massed, clad with buff
terra cotta
Terracotta, terra cotta, or terra-cotta (; ; ), in its material sense as an earthenware substrate, is a clay-based unglazed or glazed ceramic where the fired body is porous.
In applied art, craft, construction, and architecture, terracotta ...
panels with a black terra cotta base in the
Moderne style. It features a fluted terra cotta
frieze
In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...
with a tarnished silver finish.
According to the ''
AIA Guide to New York City'', "
e articularted inset bay windows on Church Streets are a wonderful mannerism ...
hat
A hat is a head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorporate mecha ...
give
the allusion of scanning the streets north and south, and add plasticity to the building."
[ p.81] The interior features a relief executed in 1938 by artist
Wheeler Williams
Wheeler Williams (November 30, 1897 – August 12, 1972) was an American sculptor, born in Chicago, Illinois.
Life and career
Williams studied sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He attended Yale, where he graduated ...
and titled "Indian Bowman."
[ ''See also:'' ]
The building was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...
in 1989.
See also
*
References
Notes
External links
*
Canal Street
Government buildings completed in 1937
Art Deco architecture in Manhattan
Tribeca
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