Author: Xingfu Ye

For this project, the location I choose is U.S. Post Office which is just one block away from City Tech. I didn’t notice there is one, until I took my sixteen minus of work. To get to the U.S. Post Office with my path, first you need to walk left after get out of Namm hall, at the first block on your right hand side across the street, you can see a park, people are playing hand ball in there. As you keep walking, at the same block on your left hand side, there is another building of City Tech. In front of that building cross the street, there is a church which is right next to the park. Keep walking about 5 minus, you can see the third building of City Tech. On the right hand side, you can see a little garden where you can take a break. Keep walking straight to the next block until reach to the road turn right and look up, you can see a bridge that connects two building, which is for people to walk from building to building. Walking straight to the next block, you can see a parking lot and also, you can see the Brooklyn bridge is not far away from here. Now turn right because that’s the only way to move forward which is also walking back to Namm Hall. This is Adams Street, as you can see on this block its all apartments, until you reach to the end of the block, you can see a restaurant called. Celeste Cafe & Grill. Now look diagonally across the street. There we go, The U.S. Post Office.

This U.S. Post Office is just one street away, behind the Namm Hall building. The building took over the whole block. The post office is not the only part of the building, US Passport Agency, US Attorney’s Office, and US District Bankruptcy Court are also in the same building. The architecture feels like 19th centuries, because of its appearance. The whole building appears in white, it contains many features of the Romanesque Revival style. The building has seven stories tall. I took this photo at a small park which is at the junction between Johnson St. and Cadman Plaza. In the photo, you can see the square corner tower rise above the roof line. Each level was distinguished with different belt courses around the building. In order to capture angle in the photo of the building, you must stand on the right hand side of the statue in the park I was talking about earlier.

I choose U.S. Post Office as the location for this project because when I first arrive to that location, it attracts me with its bright white appearance. The architecture feels like in the past centuries , because of the special design of the building. What I thought about of the building is it must has some stories or it may be a very important building back in time, for some reason the origin purpose of the building is gone, however people don’t want take down the building and make a new architecture. They probably think this building is part of the history, its priceless, so they make the building to a post office. From what I learned about this building is this building was build for both a post office and courthouse, designed the building in the Romanesque Revival style of architecture in 1885.

From the article “City Limits” by Colson Whitehead, it states that “Go back to your old haunts in your old neighborhoods and what do you find: they remain and have disappeared.” Even though, we didn’t have the opportunity to see the changes of the post office, however the history would like to tell us about what part of the building have change. The building was built in 1885, after the almost fifty years later, in 1930, as the population continued to grow, officials determined more space of the building was needed, the addition extended to the north. The article also mentioned “Our old buildings still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time.” the statement have shown that it was luck enough that people can still see those old buildings as they walking through their long and short shadows.