72. US Post Office--Canal Street Station

A.K.A.: Canal Street Station
Location: 350 Canal Street
Built: 1937
Architect: Alan Balch Mills
National Register Number: 88002358
Listed: May 11, 1989
Visited: May 21 and 24, 2008



When it was built back in the middle of the Great Depression, this Art Moderne block of dusty rose pink must've been a curious apparition, sited as it was in the middle of a neighborhood still largely defined by manual labor. And it was doubly curious as much federal architecture of the time was still so keyed to classicism, so much so that at the time Lewis Mumford could bemoan "...the Georgian post offices designed to make us believe that nothing has happened in the world since the Constitution was signed..." (It's hard to understand, though, how a Georgian post office could be intended--or succeed--as a denial of the present when the ugly fact of Depression filled every nook and cranny of experience.)



As the neighborhood's fortunes fell and rose, and as Art Moderne gave way to...whatever, little arrived to match it. It's still a streamlined counterpoint to the complications of Canal Street, what with its crowded sidewalks and its car stereo stores.

Honestly, I can only like it in a belittling way. It's like a flea market knick-knack that might've once graced a respectable middle class home but can now be gotten for a few bucks: dated, and looking cheaper than it did when it was new, but not lacking in charm. Maybe it's the pink.

62. US Post Office--Church Street Station

A.K.A.: Federal Office Building
Location: 90 Church Street
Built: 1935
Architect: Cross & Cross; Pennington, Lewis & Mills, Inc.
National Register Number: 88002359
Listed: May 11, 1989
Visited: April 13, 2008



In all weather save the worst, I could see it from my office in Tower Two: a block wide, and wider than tall; a cruise ship sailing through downtown Manhattan. Or a patch of desert. I have memories, possibly false ones, of its life from the street, the sun bearing down on expanses of limestone unrelieved save for air vents. Its blankness sucked the life out of the immediate vicinity, maybe even more than the monoliths across the street. People would walk by and not stop and not look up at the thing, at least on the Vesey Street side, because there was so little for the eye to focus on. Church Street was where the life was, with a few vendors of books and fruit mucking up traffic past and inside the entrances; inside the entrances, more confusion, more life, a warren of corridors and windows and lines.



It is something Art Deco, something Classical, but also neither: no fluted columns, no formal razzle-dazzle. It feels incomplete to me. The monumentality of its scale suggests a much taller building than is actually there. What happened to that building, I wonder.