The USPO Terminal Annex in Los Angeles

The United States Post Office – Los Angeles Terminal Annex, also known simply as Terminal Annex, is located at 900 North Alameda Street in Los Angeles, California. From 1940 to 1989, it served as the central mail processing facility for the city. Designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood and built by the Sarver & Zoss contracting firm from 1939 to 1940, the building's design was intended to be in keeping with the city's Union Station. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

At its opening in May 1940, the $3 million postal annex employed 1,632 postal clerks, carriers, and laborers to process 2 million pieces of mail per day. The facility was equipped with conveyors, chutes, weighing machines, cancelling machines, and sorting and facing tables. The lobby includes twelve Section of Painting and Sculpture murals painted by Boris Deutsch from 1941 to 1944.

Only ten years after its opening, the demands of the city's mail had outgrown the facility, leading to a $12 million expansion in 1950 that included an adjoining five-story parcel post building. By the mid-1980s, the volume had grown to 14 million pieces per day, leading to the construction of a new general post office in South Los Angeles. The Postal Service moved out of the building in 1995.

The Terminal Annex was used as a film location for the motion picture Dear God in 1995 and for the CBS television series EZ Streets in 1996, where the lobby was used to represent Los Angeles City Hall. For the 1998 movie City of Angels, it served as a hospital set. As of 2015, most of the building has been leased to CoreSite as a data center, though the lobby level houses a postal counter with stamp sales and mail pick-up for customers who rent mailboxes.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons