Michigan Post Office Murals Project

On the cornerstone of many post offices in southeastern Michigan, you can find the same names and titles. The Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., the Postmaster General, James A. Farley, the Supervising Architect, Louis A. Simon and the Supervising Engineer, Neal Melnick. Each of these men worked for the federal government and lived far from Michigan in Washington, D.C. In both Plymouth and Blissfield, cornerstones announce the presence of the federal government and thus connect the region to the nation’s capital and to other post offices built in the New Deal era.

The United States Post Office system benefited from almost 200 million dollars of funding from a series of appropriation laws between 1934 and 1936 as part of the New Deal. This funding was used to build many new post offices in small towns and larger cities across the country. Although the building program spanned the coasts, the design work was largely not left to local architects. The Treasury Department determined it was no longer economical for private architects to handle the proliferation of smaller design projects.¹ In 1933 the role of the Supervising Architect was relocated to the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department.² Under this change, the Supervising Architect oversaw the design of all federal buildings. The American Institute of Architects, whose members did not believe quality design or innovation could emanate from the Procurement Division, objected to this centralization. Initially, the Treasury Department doubled down and in 1937 only four private architects contributed to the design of post offices.³ However, by 1938 the Office of the Supervising Architect began to reintroduce competitions in which local architects competed to collaborate with the Supervising Architect for the design of government buildings.

The temporary expansion of the role of the Treasury Department in the nation's architecture can be explained through the issue of volume. Three times the number of post offices were built in the 1930s than in the previous 50 years!⁴ The Treasury Department met the moment with the creation of type designs. These designs originated from a 1935 study to develop norms for space allocations in federal buildings. As a result, a 1937 report indicates the Office of the Supervising Architect issued eleven type designs to standardize production and cut costs.⁵ In cases where type designs (drawings that set standards for post office construction) were not cut and pasted onto the landscape, clear aesthetic directives guided the Supervising Architects. The Treasury Department professed that post office architecture should possess “simple governmental character” and either reflect local color or in major cities a monumentality capable of professing the “dignity of the federal government.”⁶ Although the directive allowed for a range of styles—from Spanish Colonial in the Southwest to Colonial Revival on the East Coast—these new structures announced the expansion of the federal government in all corners of the United States. While fiscal concerns placed downward pressure on the possibilities for post office buildings, the mere presence of federal architecture in small towns nation signaled the government’s investment in restoring local economies.⁷

Despite the Director of the Treasury’s glowing appraisal of post offices built between 1933 and 1937, some members of the architectural community had little regard for the office of the Supervising Architect. One architect declared that federal buildings appeared as if the government inserts coins into a slot machine and buildings “come out…neatly wrapped in cellophane not touched by human hands.”⁸ However, in Architects to the Nation, Antoinette J. Lee maintains that Louis A. Simon, the Supervising Architect starting in 1934 who oversaw the post office building boom, rescued the office’s reputation. According to Lee, Simon introduced restrained classicalism to post office design that delivered the sort of monumentality up to the task of representing the federal government. Simon’s work can be seen across Michigan—let’s take a look at his design for Plymouth.

The Post Offices of the Ann Arbor Area

Does the Plymouth post office conform to local architecture or monumental architecture? What would the historical regional architecture of Michigan be? The city of Detroit originated as French trading post which became a frontier of an emerging settler colonial empire until the mid-nineteenth century. While there is certainly a history of Indigenous architecture in Michigan, an architectural style that government officials would have understood as sufficiently American does not come to mind.

Instead, many of the post offices in Michigan bear Simon’s signature restraint that his contemporaries called a “suitable bromide” for the over-the-top French Neoclassicalism of his predecessors.⁹ For instance, the office in Plymouth features squared-off classic features and symmetrical massing in red brick, evoking what Lois Craig has described as a “starved classicism” that balances modernism and the antique.¹⁰ Minimal Art Deco-inflected ornamentation—vegetal lamp posts and iron meander pattern flourishes—recall early twentieth skyscrapers of downtown Detroit and other major American cities. The office in Plymouth does not specifically nod to the state of Michigan but rather combines an edited classical elevation with the modern architectural decoration of emerging centers of capital. In this way, the post office links the Detroit region to the seat of the nation’s power but does not locate the region in its longer spatial history—one that could have included structures, such as Potawatomi dome-shaped dwellings called wigwams.

While many of these New Deal-era structures still stand in the centers of small Michigan towns, the intervening century has changed their function and context. For instance, Simon’s post office in Plymouth now houses Westborn Market—an upscale grocery store. Shoppers sip coffee or peruse the greeting card carousel in the vestibule under the Carlos Lopez mural. (see Plymouth Mural) Part of the larger goal of the constellation of New Deal programs was to use federal funds to combine regionally specific art and architecture to house and adorn public institutions. Some preservationists may see the privatization of the Simon building as a deviation from the spirit of the New Deal. Their concerns may be valid—it would be interesting to know if Westborn Market was under any obligation to maintain Simon’s structure of Lopez’s painting. However, the changing function of the New Deal era building raises the question of what counts as public. When I visited the Plymouth post office on a sunny fall morning, it was milling with people. More people occupy Simon’s architecture, and more people view Lopez’s mural now than if the building had remained a post office in our increasingly digital world. This does not mean that a Westborn Market is more public than a post office. Rather, it suggests the definition of space that the public wants to use shifts with time.

Changes undergone by the Chelsea Post Office offer another chance to reflect on the original goal of the New Deal building program. The Chelsea post office and its Section of Fine Arts mural (see Chelsea Mural) are now housed in the corner of a strip mall with an on-brand USPS blue roof. The Chelsea location clearly detours the original mission of the Treasury Department to link the postal service with the aesthetic reminder of nationalism. National pride may not be the first feeling upon pulling into this parking lot. However, if another goal of the Supervising Architect was to imbue post offices with the local color—the new Chelsea location does match the suburban sprawl of much of the region better than Simon’s “starved classicism.” Although a car-centric shopping plaza does not legibly fit a proper historical style, is this regional architecture? The changes to both the Plymouth and Chelsea post offices provide case studies with which to reflect on the concepts of the public and the region which were at the core of their origination as New Deal buildings.