The City Hall Post Office and Courthouse was designed by architect

Alfred B. Mullett Alfred Bult Mullett (April 7, 1834 – October 20, 1890) was a British-American architect who served from 1866 to 1874 as Supervising Architect, head of the agency of the United States Treasury Department that designed federal government buildi ...

for a triangular site in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

along

Broadway Broadway may refer to: Theatre * Broadway Theatre (disambiguation) * Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S. ** Broadway (Manhattan), the street **Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...

Civic Center A civic center or civic centre is a prominent land area within a community that is constructed to be its focal point or center. It usually contains one or more dominant public buildings, which may also include a government building. Recently, the ...

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, in

City Hall Park City Hall Park is a public park surrounding New York City Hall in the Civic Center of Manhattan. It was the town commons of the nascent city of New York. History 17th century David Provoost was an officer in the Dutch West India Compan ...

south of

New York City Hall New York City Hall is the seat of New York City government, located at the center of City Hall Park in the Civic Center area of Lower Manhattan, between Broadway, Park Row, and Chambers Street. Constructed from 1803 to 1812, the building i ...

. The Second Empire style building, erected between 1869 and 1880, was not well received. Commonly called "Mullett's Monstrosity", it was demolished in 1939 and the site used to extend City Hall Park to the south.

History

Since 1845, the city's main post office was located in the Middle Dutch Church on Nassau Street, a dark 18th-century building that by the 1860s was stretched past its capacity. Congress eventually approved funds for a new central post office, and a competition was held for design proposals. Fifty-two designs were submitted, but none were judged acceptable. Five firms—

Richard Morris Hunt Richard Morris Hunt (October 31, 1827 – July 31, 1895) was an American architect of the nineteenth century and an eminent figure in the history of American architecture. He helped shape New York City with his designs for the 1902 entrance fa� ...

, Renwick and Sands, Napoleon LeBrun, Schulze and Schoen, and John Perret—were selected to collaborate on a single design. Together, the firms produced a Second Empire concept that borrowed from Renwick's

Corcoran Gallery of Art The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Overview The Corcoran School of the Arts & Desig ...

and the

New York State Capitol The New York State Capitol, the seat of the New York state government, is located in Albany, the capital city of the U.S. state of New York. The capitol building is part of the Empire State Plaza complex on State Street in Capitol Park. Housi ...

. Feeling the proposed design was too expensive, Mullett took over the project, which nonetheless cost $8.5 million. This coup may have influenced opinions on his final product. The iron framing was clad with a pale granite quarried in Dix Island, Knox County, Maine.''Appleton's Dictionary''. Regarding the building's lack of popularity, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' wrote in 1912:

The Mullett Post Office has always been an architectural eyesore, and has, from the first, been unsatisfactory to the Postal Service and the Federal Courts beneath its roof.

Built in five stories (the fifth in its

mansard roof A mansard or mansard roof (also called a French roof or curb roof) is a four-sided gambrel-style hip roof characterised by two slopes on each of its sides, with the lower slope, punctured by dormer windows, at a steeper angle than the upper. Th ...

) with a basement for sorting mail and a subbasement for machinery, the building housed the main New York Post Office, as well as courtrooms and federal offices on its third and fourth floors. It had

pneumatic tube Pneumatic tubes (or capsule pipelines, also known as pneumatic tube transport or PTT) are systems that propel cylindrical containers through networks of tubes by compressed air or by partial vacuum. They are used for transporting solid objects, a ...

s for efficient mail transfer to other post offices. Unfortunately, the cramped trapezoidal site required the post office's loading docks to be on the side facing City Hall and the park. The building's French Second Empire style and architectural vocabulary were similar to its surviving siblings, the Old Post Office in St. Louis, Missouri, and the

Old Executive Office Building The Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB)—formerly known as the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB), and originally as the State, War, and Navy Building—is a U.S. government building situated just west of the White House in the U.S. c ...

in Washington, D.C. On May 1, 1877, during the building's construction, three workers were killed when a concrete slab collapsed, prompting an investigation by the city and a public rebuttal of accusations of misconduct from Mullett. The building's former site is directly across Broadway from the

Woolworth Building The Woolworth Building is an early American skyscraper designed by architect Cass Gilbert located at 233 Broadway in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It was the tallest building in the world from 1913 to 1930, with a ...

. With the passage of time and changing tastes, architectural criticism now regards the City Hall Post Office as one of Mullett's best works, providing a now-missing defining element at the bottom of City Hall Park.

Notes

External links

City Hall Post Office "Mullets's Monstrosity"
pictures at nyc-architecture.com

New York Daytonian {{coord, 40.712, -74.0074, display=title, format=dms 1880s architecture in the United States Alfred B. Mullett buildings Civic Center, Manhattan Courthouses in New York City Demolished buildings and structures in Manhattan Former federal courthouses in the United States Government buildings completed in 1880 Post office buildings in New York (state) Second Empire architecture in New York City

History

See also

Notes

External links