President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a personal interest in the design of the Poughkeepsie Post Office. In 1928, he wrote about his desire to preserve the stone buildings in the Hudson Valley built by early Dutch settlers. When it came time to build the new post office, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau demanded it be made of irregular fieldstone in the Dutch style, modeled after a demolished county courthouse built in 1809.
Architect Eric Kebbon originally turned in a design that was to use granite. Roosevelt personally ordered Kebbon to redesign the building to his specifications and halted construction until he did. Five hundred workers spent two years building the 63,000-square foot structure. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone on October 13, 1937, during celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Poughkeepsie's settlement.
The final building included a lobby with five murals commissioned by the Section of Fine Arts, depicting scenes in local and state history. The design influenced the new offices for the Poughkeepsie Journal newspaper and the Smithsonian Institution chose it as one of ten New York post offices among the five hundred most beautiful in the country. The building has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1989.
Today, the post office handles 300,000 pieces of mail a day and 10 million a year. On October 22, 2008, the cupola was damaged by a fire likely caused by heat guns used by painters during renovation. However, the rest of the building remained undamaged during the fire.
Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons
Written by Kyle McLonely
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