Mullett’s Monstrosity: The City Hall Post Office

This collection of five photographs shows Alfred B. Mullett’s infamous City Hall Post Office and environs.

Alfred B. Mullett’s City Hall Post Office occupied a cramped triangular site at the southern end of City Hall Park, wedged between Broadway and Park Row directly opposite City Hall itself. Erected between 1869 and 1880, the building was a French Second Empire pile in pale Dix Island granite: five stories including the mansard, crowned by a domed pavilion at its narrow southern end, the whole thing bristling with columns, dormers, and iron cresting.

This collection includes:

Unidentified photographer. City Hall Post Office, New York, c. 1886. 

John S. Johnston. Post Office, N.Y. (from Park Row), undated. 

John S. Johnston. Post Office, N.Y., 1894. 

John S. Johnston.Post Office, N.Y., 1894. 

Loeffler. Post Office, N.Y., 1895.

The Post Office cost $8.5 million, roughly triple the original estimate, and New Yorkers despised it almost from the day it opened. “Mullett’s Monstrosity” was the standard epithet. The New York Times called it “an architectural abomination” and “an eyesore”; postmasters complained it was inconvenient, inadequate, and unhealthful. The loading docks, because of the constricted site, faced City Hall and the park, which did nothing for its reputation. 

Mullett had designed a number of major federal buildings around the country in the same style, including the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., and the Old Post Office in St. Louis, both of which survive. The New York building was not so lucky. After decades of lobbying by civic groups (including, with some irony, the New-York Historical Society and the Sons of the Revolution), it was demolished in 1938-39 to clear and extend the park in advance of the World’s Fair. The demolition proved difficult: the walls, built before the advent of steel framing, were in places ten and a half feet thick, and the wrecking ball sometimes shattered against them. Today nothing remains on the site but open parkland. Architectural opinion has since reversed itself, and the building is now generally regarded as one of Mullett’s best works. 

The earliest photograph here, dated 1886 by a pencil inscription on the mount, shows the Post Office head-on from the south, the dome rising squarely at the end of a cobblestone street flanked by telegraph poles. Johnston’s two later views from an elevated position to the south printed at different sizes from the same negative) catch the building from an elevated vantage, with the Astor House visible at left and Broadway stretching north behind it, thick with horse-drawn traffic. His view from Park Row takes in the eastern flank, with streetcars curving around the building’s base and City Hall Park extending to the right. Loeffler’s 1895 photograph, taken from the northeast, is the sharpest of the group and the most candid about the building’s surroundings: advertising billboards crowd the right edge of the frame, hawking chewing gum and other commercial wares, a reminder that whatever architects and critics thought of Mullett’s design, the neighborhood around it was commercial New York at its most unapologetic. 

A full description and inventory are available on request.

$5,000