Post Office Displays Stamp of a Bygone Era

The Santa Monica post office does not look at first glance like a very large or impressive building.

It’s just a one-story block sitting on the corner of Arizona Avenue and Fifth Street. Inside, all you get is a long thin room divided into an area for mailboxes and a place to wait for counter services. All the offices, sorting rooms and loading areas that make this building the center for mail operations in downtown Santa Monica are hidden behind its plain concrete-block walls or in the basement. Such a compact building is reminiscent of a simpler time when government services facilities were clear in form and content.

That doesn’t mean that the Post Office has no pretensions to civic grandeur. Architects Dennis Murray and Neil A. Mellck, who designed it in 1937, gave it all the manners of an urban monument: It sits back from the street, so that you can admire its form; its impressiveness is enhanced by flights of stairs leading up to its main floor, which is slightly higher than street level; it is symmetrical, its facade divided into bays by streamlined piers; the interior space is taller than necessary for its function; there are even bas-reliefs of the globe over the main entrances. This is obviously a building that is bigger than a store or a house, more formal than an office building, and dedicated to a sense of order.

That order is marked by just the thinnest pieces: The piers that define the separate bays are no more than stepped flutes that rise up to an abstract design at the top.

On the building’s south side, a cornice that should give this civic building a proper top is no more than a few lines of angular stucco running over the white-painted concrete block. When the central piers do peel off the facades on either side of the entrances, they do not become columns, but instead flow into stucco curves that resemble little more than stylized versions of the lion’s claws you might see at the bottom of an old-fashioned table.

The windows are tall, but have no serious frames. Even the original letters that pronounce the function of the place are not placed on top of the facade, but are modestly cut into it.

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There is a beauty to this economy that is evident inside. In the main space, everything over eye height consists of broad wood planks, their horizontal sweep accentuated by redwood spacers. The ceiling appears to be slightly coved, but this is only because the planks stack up at the corner to allow the ceiling to slide up above them. Metal lamps divide the space, their simple geometries jazzed up with a zigzagging spacer bar. The detailing is, according to some observers at least, based on Native American motifs. But the main sense is an angularity that energizes the grand clarity of the monochromatic setting.

There is a bit of a dichotomy between the dark, bungalow-like character of the inside and the stripped-down monumentality of the outside, but both are so simple that you barely notice this. The only things that mar the order of these few building blocks of civic decorum are the renovations and additions. Especially egregious are the oversized sign at the corner, the bulky planters, and the unforgivably ugly counter in the middle of the main room.

Most of the time, however, the form and space of the Santa Monica Post Office are enough to make you feel in place and part of a civil society--even when you just want to buy some stamps.

* Santa Monica Post Office: 1248 5th Ave.

* Architects: Dennis Murray and Neil A. Mellck, 1937.