Bronx PO

Ben Shahn’s murals, painted in 1938, greet customers in the main lobby of the General Post Office on the Grand Concourse at East 149th Street in the Bronx.
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: August, 2013

No one has ever said that the Bronx has more than enough grand civic spaces, where citizens feel ennobled just by walking through the doors.
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Demetrius Freeman/The New York Times
Though the exterior was designated a landmark in 1976, advocates want to extend legal protections to the lobby.
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Demetrius Freeman/The New York Times
A construction worker building a new locker cabinet in front of one of Mr. Shahn’s murals.
So the prospect of losing one of those precious places, the main lobby of the General Post Office on the Grand Concourse at East 149th Street, galvanized an unusual alliance of politicians and preservationists. They, in turn, persuaded the Landmarks Preservation Commission to move the lobby to the top of its agenda before the Postal Service ceases operations there and sells the building, as it intends to do.

Though the commission designated the exterior of the building a landmark in 1976, it left the lobby unregulated and unprotected. Now, it is hastening to do so, at its necessarily deliberative pace, which could mean landmark status inside and out by year’s end.

Best known as the setting for heroic 1930s murals by Ben Shahn (1898-1969) and Bernarda Bryson Shahn (1903-2004), the lobby has other earmarks of a good public space. Spend a little time there and you begin to notice that parents waiting in line — this is a post office, after all — seem comfortable allowing their children to run freely around the room. The lobby is a youngster’s delight, what with really cool echoes produced by marble and terrazzo surfaces, and all those tempting free boxes to unflatten.

At least for the hour I sat there on Monday afternoon, the post office felt like a throwback to public institutions of another time, where a patron’s dignity was a given, as was safety without intrusive security measures. The murals around the room portray a field hand, mill workers, an engineer and hard hats on the job — “Resources of America.” Their faces are those of the postal customers standing patiently below them.

A campaign for landmark designation brought together advocates who have never before fought shoulder-to-shoulder, like Representative José E. Serrano, a Bronx Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, and the artist Jonathan Shahn, whose parents painted the murals.

Mr. Shahn, 75, attended a public meeting at the post office last winter that included postal union leaders and neighborhood advocates.

“They not only talked about jobs and the maneuverings of the U.S. Postal Service,” he said, “but they spoke of the murals a lot — which I hadn’t expected — and about their importance to the community.”

“A lot of people reached the consensus that it was more than a post office,” he added, “that it was a center, an important place. They admired it for being a grand building with a lot of quality.”

Mr. Serrano spoke of the post office personally.

“Ever since I came to the Bronx as a 6-year-old from Puerto Rico, that building stood out as something special,” he said. “The lobby is magnificent. Those murals are part of the history of that community.”

Both men helped jump-start the designation process, said Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy; Mr. Serrano put pressure on postal officials as a member of Congress, and Mr. Shahn helped inspire many literate, heartfelt pleas from art experts around the country. Ira Goldberg, the executive director of the Art Students League of New York, even sent his letter to the landmarks commission through the United States mail — of all things.

Robert B. Tierney, the chairman of the landmarks commission, said the campaign was persuasive but also amounted to a push on an open door. “They were real letters from real people with real information,” he said. “And they had a good cause to work with. It was never, for me, a question of the importance and merit of saving the murals.”

Rather, he said, the question was how to protect artwork that would remain the property of the Postal Service in a space that would be leased for some other use. (A generous, well-lighted, column-free room at a subway hub would suggest a big-box store or a restaurant.) The Postal Service has said that it will not close the General Post Office until it has a replacement space lined up. It has not given a timetable.

The Postal Service will require that prospective buyers enter into a preservation covenant. “The concern is how strict the covenant is and who enforces it,” Ms. Breen said. “Tierney impressed upon them that designation gives them a greater leverage.”

That is because any owner’s plans to modify historic features in the space would have to be reviewed by the city landmarks commission, as well as the State Historic Preservation Office. In a statement, the Postal Service said further that a loan agreement for the artwork would “impose obligations for the protection and preservation of the murals on the new building owner.”

So whatever business takes over the post office, customers should still be able to share Mr. Shahn’s thrill at his parents’ work.

“The scale is what’s really overwhelming in these,” he said. “It’s so gigantic and powerful. You’re looking up at gods.” Gods that look a lot like us.