Queenswalk: The Forest Hills Station Post Office

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the government, through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) began building all sorts of public works projects as a means of getting the vast number of unemployed people back to work. It was the largest and most ambitious aspect of the New Deal. Over the course of the WPA’s existence, almost every city, town and village in the United States received some kind of public works project, all built by local people. They built schools, parks, bridges, roads and post offices, among other things. Post offices were a very popular project, as almost every community could use a nice new post office.

Here in New York City, dozens of individual post office branches were built over the course of the ‘30s. Many were designed in the Colonial Revival style of architecture; so many that we’ve come to think of the Colonial Revival post office as the norm. But as the decade drew to a close, some of the new post office buildings started to appear in the more modern architectural language of the day; variations on Art Deco and the new International Style.

The office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury was responsible for the designs of the nation’s post offices constructed through the WPA. The architects working for the office produced thousands of post offices, most in the conservative Colonial Revival style, which was the approved style of government buildings throughout the ‘20s and ‘30s. But as the program progressed, an amendment was written to allow the office to hire outside consulting architects for many of these buildings. Architects were unemployed people too, and hiring outside of the agency was part of the WPA’s efforts to employ the nation’s artists and creative professions, who were also struggling to make a living.

One of these architects was Lorimer Rich. Far from a starving artist with an obscure background, Rich had a pretty impressive resume. He had graduated from Syracuse University in 1914. He then went to Europe, as did many fledgling architects of his social class, to do the Grand Tour, study the great buildings, and take classes. Unfortunately, World War I broke out, and he returned home, and enlisted in the Army.

After the war was over, he was hired by the prestigious firm of McKim, Mead & White, where he worked for eight years. In 1928, he left and opened up his own office in Washington DC. He became one of the many architects designing post offices and other government buildings for the Architect of the Treasury. During the course of his tenure there, he designed 21 government buildings, including six post offices in New York City. They are the Flatbush Substation, Station “A” in Williamsburg and the Kensington Station in Brooklyn. He designed the Morris Heights Post Office in the Bronx, the Madison Square Post Office in Manhattan, and this post office in Forest Hills.

Rich enjoyed marrying his architecture with the work of contemporary sculptors. That’s probably something he learned in the offices of McKim, Mead & White. Stanford White had been a great collaborator with the great sculptors of his day, and although he was long dead by the time Rich arrived in his offices, that tradition was a part of the firm’s working philosophy. Rich’s collaboration with sculptor Thomas Hudson Jones would lead to his most famous work.

In 1926, Rich and Jones won the competition for their design of a monument for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or Tomb of the Unknowns, in Arlington Cemetery. Quarrying and cutting the stone for the monument began in 1929. It took a year to cut all of the stone, and then some had to be recut. The pieces were assembled in 1930, further carved and sculpted in 1931 and formally completed in April of 1932. Today, it is one of the nation’s most treasured sites.

Lorimer Rich’s design for the Forest Hills Post Office was very different from his other post office work. They were all designed in either the Colonial Revival or neo-Classical style. Forest Hills P.O. is in the streamlined International Style, a sleek, modern and minimalistic style of architecture that grew out of Art Deco. It was championed by American architects Raymond Hood and Philip Johnson, and was highly influenced by European architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.

The design not only represented a new direction for post offices and government buildings, it also represented the freedom some of the consulting architects under the Architect of the Treasury office were offered. There are only a handful of contemporary post offices in New York State that were allowed to stray from the government approved Colonial Revival mold.

The Forest Hills station is clad in reddish-brown terra cotta panels, something quite new and innovative in building materials. New technology developed allowed terra cotta to be extruded in such a way as to produce a high quality, low cost terra cotta ceramic veneer. Terra cotta tiles were ancient, but this new ceramic veneer was lightweight, cheap, and quite sleek and modern.

There are only three other similar terra cotta veneered post offices in the state; the Woodhaven Station in Queens, modeled after Forest Hills’, Canal Street Station in Manhattan, and the New Rochelle Post Office, which is so altered, it no longer counts. The post offices’ terra cotta was produced by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company, one of the oldest and finest companies in the country, located on Staten Island.

The design of the one story building is outwardly simple, with very little ornamentation, as per this new minimalistic style. The only ornament appears in the lettering spelling out “United States Post Office, Forest Hills Station, Flushing, New York,” and the large terra cotta relief sculpture called “the Spirit of Communication” created by sculptor Sten Jacobson.

Sten Jacobson was a Swedish-born American sculptor. Prior to his commission to create this relief, he had painted murals in area churches, among his more well-known work. He was chosen by the Treasury department to create art for public buildings as part of the WPA program to employ artists and artisans. Some of the greatest works of public art were created by WPA artists in this program. Lorimer Rich, who enjoyed collaborating with artists, was happy to have Jacobson on board.

“The Spirit of Communication” is a nude female figure holding a dove and a clock. She’s right over the entrance to the building, and as can be expected, when she was first revealed, local residents protested and complained about the nudity. They called it bad art in bad taste. Amazingly, she stayed as she was, and in 1990 was appraised at $150,000. Fortunately, she is now cared for and protected for the valuable piece of art that she is.

The Forest Hills Post Office broke ground in 1937 and was completed in 1938. The exterior hasn’t changed much, but the simple utilitarian interior has been altered a bit for necessary changes in mail, security and technology. The building still retains much of the original marble and terrazzo detailing.’

Lorimer Rich moved back to New York City after his WPA and Arlington stint. In the 1950s he designed a great number of buildings for his alma mater, Syracuse University, including the Law College, the Low Gallery and various other buildings and dormitories. He was a professor of architecture at Columbia University for many years, as well. In 1971, he was awarded Medal of Honor from the National Sculpture Society for his collaborative efforts with sculptors.He moved to Camden, New York, his hometown, and died there in 1978. He was 87 years old. He’s buried near his greatest creation in Arlington Cemetery.

The Forest Hills Post Office, located at 106-28 Queens Boulevard, was placed on the National Register for Historic Places in 1988.

(Photo: Greg Godfrey for Michael Perlman and the Rego-Forest Preservation Council)

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