New York, NY 10001
Posted by: 
KoosKoos
N 40° 45.059 W 073° 59.676
18T E 584873 N 4511600
This is the James Farley post office in New York, New York. It's the main post office for the city and is open 24 hours a day.
Waymark Code: WM5MR0
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 01/22/2009
Views: 33
From Wikipedia:
The James A. Farley Building was constructed in two stages. The original monumental front half was built in 1912 and opened for postal business in 1914; the building was doubled in 1934 by the then Postmaster General, James A. Farley, and replaced the 1878 Post Office at Park Row and Broadway. Where it backs up to Ninth Avenue: along the side streets, McKim, Mead, and White's range, which continues its Corinthian giant order as pilasters between the window bays, was simply repeated in order to carry the facade to Ninth Avenue. Farley's building supply firm General Builders Corporation had the Federal contracts under the Hoover Administration to provide building materials for the construction of the Post Office Annex.
The monumental façade on Eighth Avenue was conceived as a Corinthian colonnade braced at the end by two pavilions. The imposing design was meant to match in strength the colonnade of Pennsylvania Station (McKim, Mead, and White, 1910) that originally faced it across the avenue. An unbroken flight of steps the full length of the colonnade provides access, for the main floor devoted to customer services is above a functional basement level that rises out of a dry moat giving light and air to workspaces below. Each of the square end pavilions is capped with a low saucer dome, expressed on the exterior as a low stepped pyramid. Inside, the visitor finds an unbroken vista down a long gallery that parallels the colonnaded front. The north end of the gallery houses a small Museum of Postal History.
The building prominently bears the inscription: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, which is frequently mistaken as an official motto of the United States Postal Service. It was actually supplied by William Mitchell Kendall of the firm of McKim, Mead & White, the architects who designed the Farley Building and the original Pennsylvania Station in the same Beaux-Arts style. The sentence is taken from Herodotus' Histories (Book 8, Ch. 98) and describes the faithful service of the Persian system of mounted postal messengers under Xerxes I of Persia. The USPS does not actually have an official motto or creed, but nonetheless the inscription on the building is often recognized as such.
The Farley Building was instrumental to maintaining service levels in the New York City area following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks when it served as a back up to operations for the Church Street Station Post Office located across the street from the World Trade Center complex. Advances in automated mail processing technology, coupled with adjustments to postal distribution and transportation networks now make it feasible to absorb associated mail volumes at the Morgan Center.
Type of structure:: Stand alone
re-enter Zip Code here:: 10001
Current Status:: Still in Use
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Visit Instructions:
To post a log to an existing U.S. Post Office waymark, you will need to post a picture of the front of the building, with the name of the post office in the background if that is possible.
A description of your Post Office is required, such as when it was built, history, outstanding or unique features, population of the city or town, just do a quick internet search and find an interesting bit of information about the city or town and add it to the long description, to make it more interesting. Even just adding in the population of the area can give others an idea of how many people this post office serves. This description should be at least three sentences.
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