The end of an era approaches.
Photo by Houston In Pics
Thousands gathered at 401 Franklin Street in downtown Houston to celebrate the opening of a new facility trumpeted as an “ultra-modern” marvel, the hub for the mail that would flow in and out of one of America’s fastest growing cities.
Inside the rugged Brutalist building, a lattice-like grid of thin masonry, postal workers were expecting to sort through the millions of pieces of mail that would pass through the facility every year. Engineers touted the building’s efficient heating and cooling system, and employees zipped across the facility on electric buggies. The city’s postmaster said then, in 1962, that the facility “would establish a criterion for other post offices to copy.”
But on Thursday, 53 years after the ballyhooed opening of the Houston Post Office, the lunch hour traffic was sparse – a few police officers mailing Mother’s Day packages home, a lawyer, a family seeking passports and a few others.
On May 15 at 7 p.m., retail operations at the facility will cease permanently, yet another effect of the United States Postal Service’s struggles with rising debt and a sharp decline in business as clients turn to the Internet and private mail couriers.
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Six other post offices were targeted for relocation in Houston in the past, including the Third Ward’s historic Southmore Station, University Station, Greenbriar Station, Julius Melcher Station, Memorial Park Station and Medical Center Station, and cuts have also slowed delivery times. A massive outcry prompted the postal service to halt its plans to shutter the Southmore Station facility, which stands at the address of Houston’s first sit-in demonstration.
But agency critics and Houstonians said Thursday they would be mourning the loss of the building and the move.
“Every time a post office closes, big or small, I think it’s a loss to the community and country,” said Steve Hutkins, creator of Savethepostoffice.com. “If it’s a big one, like the Houston one, it’s clearly a big (loss), and it’s about diminishing quality of postal service in the country.”
The downtown post office has been on the block since at least 2009. The city considered putting in a bid for it last year, possibly as a new location for HPD and the municipal courts, but dropped the idea shortly thereafter in the wake of wailing and gnashing of teeth by developers who had been eagerly awaiting its appearance on the market. The Urban Land Institute hosted a design contest for the site in 2012 to generate some ideas about how to use the space – at one point, a transit center was envisioned as an anchor for it – but I rather doubt we’ll get anything other than high-end apartments or condos, possibly with some retail/restaurant space on the bottom, like with the Rice Hotel. But first, it needs to be sold. I’ve no idea when that might happen. Swamplot has more.