19 Mar 2013 10:02 am
A Bronx Cheer for the Postal Service: The Fire Sale of Historic Post Offices Continues Earlier this week (Feb. 3, 2013) the Postal Service announced that it planned to sell the historic post office on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, New York. There's an excellent article about the post office by David W. Dunlap in Friday's New York Times. The Bronx General Post Office is the largest of twenty-nine Depression-era post offices in New York City. Built in 1935, it is one of over a thousand post offices constructed by FDRs New Deal. It is also the latest addition to a growing list of historic post offices that are being marked for sale by the Postal Service. According to the annual compliance report filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission a few weeks ago, the Postal Service has reviewed over 4,000 facilities for potential sale, and it has identified over 600 buildings earmarked for disposal. Many of these will undoubtedly be historic properties. The Postal Service has sold at least a dozen historic post offices over the past year, and there are dozens more for sale or under review. [....] The Privatization Of The Public Realm The Postal Services exclusive real estate agent on sales and leases is CB Richard Ellis, the worlds largest commercial real estate company. The Chairman of the Board is Richard Blum, husband of California Senator Feinstein. That has all the appearances of a conflict of interest, but that doesn't seem to matter to anyone in our nation's capital. One can only imagine how much money Blum and CBRE are making off the sales. The USPS properties on the CBRE website average $1.6 million. Selling off 600 properties could bring in a billion dollars. The details of CBRE's contract with the Postal Service are unknown, but even a one percent commission would mean $10 million for CBRE. In 2009, CBRE won a contract with the state of California to broker over $2 billion in office buildings the state wanted to privatize because of its financial problems. Now Blum is doing the same with the Postal Services properties, and the goal is the same, the privatization of public property. Along with outsourcing, selling off assets is one of the main steps in privatizing a public entity. The 1988 Presidential Commission on Privatization (under President Reagan) recommended that divestiture of federal assets should be pursued in the interest of ensuring the highest and best use of USPS assets, and that's exactly what the Postal Service and CBRE are doing. Converting post offices into film studios, law offices, and B&Bs may be someones idea of highest and best use, but for the hundreds of communities that treasure their historic post office, the best use would simply be keeping the post office a post office. The leaders of the Postal Service should find another way to bring in new revenues, like charging their big customers postal rates that are in compliance with what it costs to deliver their mail. They should leave the historic post offices alone. Landmark, shmandmark. Described by the Landmarks Preservation Commission as the largest of 29 Depression-era post offices in New York City, the Bronx General Post Office occupies the entire block from East 149th to East 150th Street. Its most distinguishing feature is 13 lobby murals painted in the late 30s by Mr. Shahn (1898-1969) and Bernarda Bryson (1903-2004), his companion and later wife. Like much of the artwork of that era, the murals celebrate labor and its byproducts. There are colossal figures of farmers and mill workers, steel factories and hydroelectric dams still powerful, though darkened, dulled, nicked and cracked.