EX POST FACTO
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHING THE BUILDINGS THAT ONCE COMPRISED THE VISUAL LANDSCAPE of a vanished time is always an entire “term paper” project for me. Finding antique structures that were designed for very specific uses, and trying to shoot them in as close to their original form as possible, always trips me into reams of research on how they survived their eras, what threatens their further survival, or what grand new uses await them in the future. And most of those stories begin with my quite accidentally strolling past them en route to somewhere else.
This post office from 1935 popped into view as Marian and I were taking a recent post-lunch stroll around the reborn town of Westerville, Ohio. Photos from its grand opening show it to be nearly identical in appearance to the first day of its service, decades before its namesake was even officially a city. It was one of dozens, perhaps hundreds of village post offices built during the Great Depression by the job-creating New Deal program known as the W.P.A., or Works Progress Administration. Most of the P.O.s erected in those austere years were, themselves, no-frills affairs, devoid of all but the simplest decorative detail and as structurally logical as a Vulcan with a slide rule. Straight, clean lines. Modest appointments. Simple tablatures over the entrance.
The Westerville P.O.’s most distinct feature was actually inside the building, where a “noble work of the common man” mural typical of the period (another federal make-work project to help sustain starving artists) once decorated one wall. Sadly, Olive Nuhfer’s “The Daily Mail” depicted a neighborhood that resembled the artists’ native Pittsburgh, a bone of contention for the Westerville locals who pronounced it out-of-step with the small-town ethos of the area. In time, the painting was removed and returned to a permanent place in the Steel City.
Photographing these kinds of buildings is an exercise in restraint, in that I seek to idealize the structure, to lift it back up out of the past if you life, but without over-processing or embellishing it. Seeing it as close to how it first was is enough for me; it is absolutely of its time, and, as such, it’s a gift.
Post Script (see what I did there?): It’s also encouraging that a regional restaurant chain will soon give the empty building new life as a brew pub. However, it’s more than a little ironic in a town that was once the national headquarters of the Anti-Saloon League, the bunch that forced Prohibition down America’s throat (without a chaser), meaning that Westerville was, for a time, the busiest small postal system in the country, simply by virtue of sending out millions of pieces of anti-hootch literature every year. John Barleycorn gets the last laugh.
thenormaleye 