This is a massive two-story granite block on Appleton Street designed by W. J. Edbrooke. It was built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, featuring rounded arches over the windows and a recessed entry.
The building has an H-shaped floor plan and a five-story square clock tower. That tower is capped with a pyramidal roof supported by tripled round arches on each face.
The building spent four decades as a post office before its operations moved to a new facility on Kearney Square in 1936. It continued to house federal offices until the 1970s, when the city of Lowell took ownership. After the city used it for offices until the 1990s, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.
Today, the building has traded its sorting bins for courtrooms. It currently houses a division of the Middlesex County juvenile court system. It is a lot of work for a building that started its career simply trying to deliver the mail.
Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons
Written by Kyle McLonely
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