[Concluded from yesterday’s Part 3 and the preceding Part 1 and Part 2.]
If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some.
– Benjamin Franklin, Postmaster General
Once it becomes inevitable that some post offices will be closed, as we have seen by critiquing an uncritical article by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times (March 8, 2013) and its livelier comments section (green Arial), the closed buildings will be sold, and when that happens, far from wanton destruction, the buildings are often revived into much more dynamic and valuable uses, such as mixed-use or housing, as illustrated by this Dallas landmark I found on the Intertubes:
Post Office and Courthouse, shortly after its completion in 1930
High on the top of my list of favorite downtown buildings is the old U.S. Post Office and Courthouse at 400 N. Ervay. But the building, built in ’30, has gone unused for decades. That changes immediately … converting the sprawling complex into a mixed-use project that’ll include everything from 78 apartments with a rooftop terrace to a downstairs bakery.
[Snip]
Council Member Angela Hunt commented, “Shawn Todd’s restoration of Dallas’ old U.S. Post Office and Courthouse is a terrific example of historic preservation and adaptive reuse. His project is a win all the way around — it restores a downtown landmark, it brings a tax-exempt property onto the tax rolls, and it helps create a vibrant downtown with a great mix of retail and residential.”
The lobby at 400 North Ervay – restored with private capital for mixed use
[By the way, two minutes’ Googling uncovered multiple examples of these conversions – it’s a pity that the New York Times author lacked the technology to make such a search herself. Oh, wait … – Ed.]
You mean I should have done research?
As the Dallas conversion and many others illustrate, the qualities that make old post offices obsolete for their original purpose – their high ceilings, downtown or CBD locations, and historic or anachronistic construction – also make them terrific candidates for New-Urbanist downtown residential living. Decommissioning as a post office reincarnates the buildings with new vitality.
New York City’s Pythian Temple:
Converted from a Knights of Columbus lodge into condominiums
The lintel inscription reads, If fraternal love held all men bound, how beautiful this world would be.
Condemning old obsolete post offices to continued non-conversion can renders them hollow shells, seen by a few and used by fewer, until they decay back beyond recovery.
Properties are occupied by money, because without money they cannot get maintenance, upkeep, renovations, and adaptation to changing environments. Take away their economic purpose, as retail or commercial or housing, and the property eventually dies.
Which leads to another question, the ultimate one:
6. If the buildings need to be preserved, who should pay for their preservation?
Advocates say there have been too few public discussions or assurances that prized buildings will be protected.
Who pays for nice? The question is not rhetorical. Somebody will pay, and more than likely, that somebody will be the market – because markets are the expression of what people actually value, as distinct from what they say they value.
421 ATLANTIC STREET, STAMFORD, CONN.
This 1917 building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, features a pair of monumental granite steps and balustrades that provide access up to a landscaped terrace.
The first goal is to keep the [Santa Monica] post office as a post office, preservationists say.
Naturally, but that is not going to happen.
But if it has to be sold, they say they want to ensure that any new owner is sensitive to the building’s cherished history and architectural distinction.
‘Cherished’ history – cherished by whom? I apologize (just a bit) for interjecting these speed bumps, yet they go to the heart of the debate; if policy is to be decided on what is cherished (passive voice, abstract emotional-laden concept), where does cherishing stop?
“It could be a restaurant, a store, offices,” said Adrian Scott Fine, the Los Angeles Conservancy’s director of advocacy –
A Fine head
Before his current post, Mr. Fine worked at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, then before that for a decade at Britain’s National Trust.
– “as long as you keep those features that define the building.”
Here lies the greatest objection to historic preservation rules voiced by developers of my experience: what constitutes “features that define the building”?
Lynn C from New York (summing up)
Why do preservationists think money isn’t an issue in the restoration and upkeep of old buildings, or that owners have endless wealth?
For some opponents of development, open-endedness can be an objective in itself, for it means that the standard to be achieved is a retreating rainbow, which has the effect of slowing or stopping development, and that may have been the real goal all along.
20 PALMER SQUARE, PRINCETON, N.J.
This 1937 classic revival building is within a historic district. The interior mural, from 1939, depicts an encounter between Native Americans and European colonists and has drawn some criticism for being racially insensitive.
The WPA rural inside Palmer Square
“Unless these features are appropriately defined, the building can be ‘preserved’ without continuing to exhibit the features that made it important in the first place,” said Ms. Lemlein of the Santa Monica Conservancy.
In the building here on Fifth Street in Santa Monica, preservationists point to Art Deco features of the exterior, to the wood paneling in the public lobby and to the original light fixtures as elements worthy of protection. They are trying to establish a covenant for the building, which postal officials said in a letter last December to the State Historic Preservation Office was, “slated for sale,” though it has yet to be listed.
It’s safe to say that preserving things as they are has been the focus of Mr. Fine’s thirty-year career, but his longevity is matched by a newcomer’s intensity:
Another person who is tracking the issue is Steve Hutkins, a New York University professor whose Web site, Save the Post Office, attempts, among other things, to map the sale and possible sale of the buildings.
Post Office lover Hutkins
“They are losing iconic buildings,” said Mr. Hutkins, who questioned whether the Postal Service is “artificially inflating the seriousness of the deficit problem to justify downsizing.”
Mr. Hutkins has taken on the post office closure issue with the zeal of a new convert; from the proposal to close some post offices he has built a theory of conspiracy that somehow this is all a plot by unnamed elected officials.
The city joined in Representative Henry A. Waxman’s appeal of the Postal Service’s decision to close the post office.
What difference does one post office make?
“I think they got it wrong,” Mr. Waxman said in an interview. “It’s a Depression-era structure, it’s an historic structure, one of the few Art Deco buildings in Santa Monica.”
Then buy it, City of Santa Monica, and you can preserve it all you like.
[Editorial note: After having done this ultra-close reading, a theory occurs to me: the New York Times was played. Perhaps the Santa Monica Conservancy and its allies in California decided their issue was getting insufficient attention, and in conversation with Mr. Waxman’s office, the question was asked, “How can we put pressure on the Administration?” “Why not make it into a national issue by having the New York Times run a credulous feature?” “Well, I know a culture reporter …”]
People value what they pay for; and given this, then its contrapositive is equally true:
What people do not pay for, they do not value.
What’s it worth to you?
The main post office in Berkeley, Calif., includes a mural of the city’s history painted by Suzanne Scheuer.
Instead of relying on its tax-exempt status to make other people pay for the building’s conservation, I’m sure the Santa Monica Conservancy is willing to step up, as Mr. Malkin and Mr. Silver did (in Part 2), and make a dramatic gesture to preserve such an iconic building by voluntarily agreeing to pay local real estate taxes,
“Buy what thou hath no need of, and ere long thou shall sell thy necessities.”