BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Federal Triangle -- Old Post Office / Trump Finger -- Outside

DC -- Federal Triangle -- Old Post Office / Trump Finger -- Outside:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Wikipedia Description: Old Post Office Building (Washington, D.C.)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Old Post Office Pavilion is located the intersection of 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, in Washington, DC. Its strong arches, squat columns, and 315 ft-high tower make it the third tallest structure and the last major example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture in the District of Columbia. Scarcely used as a post office, it has been rehabilitated today into office and retail space shared by the federal government and private businesses. The expansive interior atrium is now home to shops, entertainment space, and a food court.

National Park Service rangers from Pennsylvania Avenue National Historic Site provides tours of the Old Post Office Tower affording one of the most spectacular views of Washington from its 270 foot-high observation deck. The tower includes an exhibit room depicting the building's long struggle for survival. Visitors can also view the Bells of Congress, replicas of those at Westminster Abbey and given by the Ditchley Foundation to the United States to celebrate the 1976 U.S. bicentennial. The official bells of the United States Congress, they are one of the largest sets of change ringing bells in North America.

History:

In 1880, Congress approved the building of a new post office. By legend, the site was selected by Senator Leland Stanford of California; the new post office was hoped to revitalize the seedy neighborhood between the Capitol building and the White House. It was designed by Treasury official Willoughby J. Edbrooke in the style of Henry Hobson Richardson, and construction commenced in 1892. Edbrooke later designed the Landmark Center to serve Minnesota.

When completed in 1899, the massive edifice was the largest office building and first steel frame construction building in Washington. It was also the first federal building on Pennsylvania Avenue. During opening ceremonies, the postmaster of Washington fell to his death down an elevator shaft.

During construction, however, Richardson's 1886 death and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois had popularized neo-classical architecture at the expense of Victorian forms; the new structure was derided as "a cross between a cathedral and a cotton mill" by the New York Times. The Old Post Office Building was less than ten years old when cries were heard that it should be torn down. One local man, Nathan Rubinton, carved by hand a model of the building so that when it was torn down people would remember how it looked.

In 1914, the District of Columbia Mail Depot was moved to a larger building constructed next to Union Station. Although only 15 years old, the building at 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue was dubbed the "old" post office. In the 1920s, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's building commission developed the surrounding Federal Triangle complex and actively sought the building's demolition. Because of the "Great Depression" of 1929, they did not have enough funding to demolish the "old tooth" in 1934.

The Postmaster General moved to a newly constructed office building directly across 12th Street in 1934, and the fate of the building appeared to be sealed. The only reason that the Old Post Office was not then razed then was a lack of money due to the Great Depression. For the next 40 years the building served as overflow space for several government agencies. As no particular agency was made responsible for it, the building fell into decay.

By 1962, the neighborhood around the building had also declined. President John F. Kennedy appointed a Pennsylvania Avenue Commission to study ways to improve the area; in 1964 it returned several recommendations, including demolition of the Old Post Office Building to allow completion of the Federal Triangle. In 1970 and 1971, demolition permits were issued and Congress appropriated the money for the building's removal.

But local citizens who had grown to admire the building's architecture banded together to save it. Nancy Hanks, the politically influential chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, joined the effort and prevailed in convincing Congress to reverse its decision. In 1973 the Old Post Office was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and starting in 1976 it was extensively renovated, including scrubbing its blackened exterior.

On February 15, 1983, the Old Post Office was officially renamed the Nancy Hanks Center in recognition of her devotion to the arts and the preservation of architecturally significant buildings.

An exhibit room in the renovated tower depicts the struggle for survival of the Old Post Office building and features the Rubinton model.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
1999 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera. From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on). In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year. In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded. Trips this year: A week at a timeshare in Gordonsville, VA, two weeks in Tennessee, which included attending my first Fan Fair country music festival, and family visits to North Carolina and Florida. Image quality for my pictures is variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints at varying quality/resolutions. The Great Pandemic Digitizing Project: When I was first setting up my website in August, 2000, I had decided to digitize some of my favorite pre-digital slides and prints. The scans were fairly low resolution but they were good enough. With COVID forcing me to stay indoors, I decided to rescan ALL of my pre-digital images from multiple sources (slides, prints, and negatives) at a much higher resolution and quality setting. (I digitized Dad's slides at the same time). Instead of replacing my original scans, I added the new scans to existing pages, figuring I'd select the best ones later. As a result, multiple versions of images appear on most of these early pages. At some point, I'll take the time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates.
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Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].