US Post Office-Los Angeles Terminal Annex

About this property

The United States Post Office – Los Angeles Terminal Annex, also known simply as Terminal Annex, located at 900 North Alameda Street in Los Angeles, California, was the central mail processing facility for Los Angeles from 1940 to 1989. Across Cesar Chavez Avenue from Union Station, the Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival building of Terminal Annex, which was designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. Designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, the Terminal Annex was built by the Sarver & Zoss contracting firm from 1939 to 1940. The building was built for the purpose of processing all incoming and outgoing mail in Los Angeles. Though its purpose was principally utilitarian, Underwood sought to keep the building's design in keeping with the city's Union Station, which opened across the street in May 1939. The original building was a three-story structure with two towers and 400,000 square feet (37,000 m2) of floor space. The $3 million postal annex opened in May 1940 with 1,632 postal clerks, carriers and laborers responsible for the processing of 2 million pieces of mail per day. The facility, which was kept open 24 hours a day, was equipped with the latest facilities for rapid handling of mail, including conveyors, chutes, weighing machines, cancelling machines, and sorting and facing tables. At the time of its opening, it was considered "the most modern and efficient" post office in the nation. At the formal dedication ceremony in June 1940, the postmaster called the annex a symbol of the achievements of democracy, opening at a time when the monuments of Europe were "being ground in the dust." The lobby includes twelve Section of Painting and Sculpture murals painted by Boris Deutsch from 1941 to 1944. Only ten years after its opening, the demands of the city's mail had already outgrown the facility. Accordingly, the Post Office announced plans in 1950 for a $12 million expansion, including an adjoining five-story parcel post building and other structures as well. By the 1980s, operations had outgrown even the expanded facilities at the Terminal Annex. The facility's volume had grown by the mid-1980s to 14 million pieces of mail per day, and the annex was plagued by inadequate space, overcrowding and inadequate work areas. Accordingly, the Postal Service Board of Governors in 1984 approved the construction of a new $151 million general post office in South Los Angeles. Almost 50 years after Terminal Annex became the city's main mail-processing facility, the new processing facility in South Central opened in 1989.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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