Visiting the U.S. Post Office this holiday season? Look up! You might see some New Deal art!

Rincon Annex lobby, former U.S. post office, San Francisco, photo by Gray Brechin (C) creative commons

By Heather Christine Ripley, ADSC Preservation Committee member

If you are visiting your local post office this busy holiday season, you might be lucky enough to be patronizing a New Deal-era post office, complete with a 1930s mural painted in the social realist style. Hundreds of murals were created during the Great Depression, through funding from the Works Progress Administration created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The goal was to promote pride in local industries and history, to give artists much needed work during hard times, and to instill civic pride.

In the San Francisco Bay Area and in the rest of California, there are several examples of 1930s post offices with New Deal art, and some historic murals are located inside Art Deco Society of California Preservation Award winners.

One of our local favorites is the Rincon Annex, a former post office built in 1940, and an ADSC Preservation Award winner in 1989. Designed by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood (who also designed the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite) in the sleeker Streamlined Moderne style, it opened as a major mail and package handling center on Mission between Spear and Steuart streets in the South of Market neighborhood.

The exterior features leaping dolphins over wavy turquoise bands of tile, black marble surrounding the entrances and gorgeous metal work.

The lobby houses 27 murals by Russian immigrant artist Anton Refregier depicting the history of California, which were not completed until 1948 because of so many controversies and ugly history depicted in his murals. The building, now part of Rincon Center, is no longer a working post office but the lobby is open every day. And if you need to go to the post office, there is one around the corner on Steuart. You can read more about the complex history of Refregier’s murals on the Living New Deal website.

U.S. post office, 1461 Main Street, St. Helena, Ca. Photo by John W. Murphey (c) creative commons

The historic St. Helena Post Office in St. Helena, California was built in 1940–1941 and opened for business in March 1941. It was designed by architect Lewis Simon, who was responsible for the building’s transitional Art Deco/Moderne style typical of small federal post offices of that era. It won an ADSC Preservation Award in 1997.

This post office features a mural called “The Grape Pickers” depicting the wine industry of the Napa Valley, commissioned by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts and painted by Lew Keller. Located in a shallow niche above the Postmaster’s office door in the lobby, the mural was completed in 1943. Decades later, according to the city of St. Helena’s website, another mural in a similar, social realist style, was proposed by local artist Arthur Lisch, to portray the Latino workers that work in the vineyards today. That mural was complete in 1999 and is on the opposite wall of Keller’s mural.

The grape pickers by lew keller, U.S. treasury department, via Wikimedia commons

Facade of U.S. Post office, 836 Anacapa St., Santa Barbara, photo by Therese Poletti

While there are no murals, public art still abounds at the Santa Barbara Main Post Office, designed by architect Reginald Davis Johnson, completed in 1937. The Santa Barbara Post Office, which won an ADSC Preservation Award in 2024, is an unusual combination of Spanish Colonial revival style, the dominant architectural style in Santa Barbara, and Streamlined Moderne details, such as in the metal door and window frames and light fixtures.

Inside the lobby, visitors will see the public art in the form of six Streamline Moderne bas-relief panels by artist William Atkinson. They depict themes like “Carrying the Mail” with images of the Pony Express, a stagecoach, a clipper ship, a train, and an airplane, and “The Opening of the West” with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Santa Barbara Post Office was the subject of a successful preservation battle, when the Postal Service attempted to put the building up for sale.

Bas relief panel inside the Santa barbara post office, “carrying the mail”, Photo national archives and records administration, via the Living new deal

In the Bay Area, you can also visit The Bradford Station Post Office in Hayward on C Street, built in 1936 with federal Treasury Department funds as a New Deal project. It features a distinctive Art Deco style, flattened neoclassical columns and murals from the era and still looks remarkably like this 1940s postcard.

U.s. post office, Bradford Station, C Street, Downtown hayward, vintage postcard, circa 1940s

Inside, a 5’ by 10’ mural called “Rural Landscape” by Tom Lewis from 1938 graces a main wall. It possibly depicts the town of Hayward which consisted mostly of farmland at the time. Lewis was a California-based artist who began painting in the late 1920s, exhibiting widely and helping to organize the Progressive Painters of Southern California.

Rural landscape, 1938 mural inside the Hayward post office, by artist Tom Lewis. Photo by Heather christine ripley

Finally, another local Bay Area post office to visit is the Berkeley Main Post Office in downtown Berkeley, which was also the subject of a successful preservation battle, after the U.S. postal service planned to sell the Renaissance Revival post office building built in 1914 to developers. Among the artwork at Berkeley’s beloved post office is a mural by Suzanne Scheuer, created with funding from the Treasury Relief project. Scheuer is probably best known in the Bay Area for her mural “Newspapering” inside Coit Tower. Her mural at the Berkeley Post Office is called “Incidents in California History,” painted in 1936-1937.

Mural by Suzanne Scheuer in the lobby at the Downtown Berkeley main post office, photo by Gray Brechin

If you want to “branch out,” pun intended, to see more post office murals across the country, Texas-based photojournalist Justin Hamel has traveled across the U.S., documenting post office murals and their civic art. An article in Atlas Obscura includes an interview with him and his website documents murals in cities across the U.S., ranging from Cooper, Texas to Concord, Mass.

Preservation director Therese Poletti also checked in with a mural in a post office in Rockport, Mass., a post office built in the standard Beaux-Arts style, but with a 1939 mural in the lobby, called “Preparing Granite for Shipment,” by artist W. Lester Stevens, an appropriate mural for the New England town that was a once-thriving granite quarrying region.

Rockport Post office, mural by W. Lester Stevens, “Preparing for granite shipment,” Photo by Therese Poletti

We would be remiss if at this time of year we did not also thank the postal workers who accept, sort and deliver an incredible amount of mail through post offices across the country. Thank you all for bringing much-needed cheer to millions of Americans this holiday season. Also, visit our friends at the Living New Deal for more information on public works of the 1930s and early 1940s. We thank them for creating such an amazing website with so much research, and to historian/author Gray Brechin for his photos that we used in this post!

Do you have a favorite mural at your local post office? Please share in the comments below!