Recalling the Destruction of a City Hall Park 'Monstrosity'

The remains of the City Hall Park post office building in 1939. In the foreground is the controversial Triumph of Civic Virtue [1] statue that was removed in 1941. Photo: H.F. Dutcher/Courtesy of Jack Banning

If it were not for the tall buildings looming in the background, one might almost think that the photographer had snapped the photo above in Rome—somewhere near the Forum.

But the picture, by H.F. Dutcher, was actually made in City Hall Park in early 1939 and commemorates the demolition of the old City Hall post office, a huge and unloved structure that had sat for 68 years at the foot of the park. The fountain at left, once directly in front of City Hall, is also gone.

The old P.O. was never popular with New Yorkers. As the diarist George Templeton Strong wrote when ground was broken for it in 1869, “This will destroy the best-known and most characteristic street view in New York, viz., looking up from Fulton Street and Broadway across the Park to the South front of old City Hall. The Park will be destroyed.”

To many, the structure, designed in Second Empire or French Renaissance Revival style, was not only too big, but also ugly, memorializing the excesses of the Ulysses S. Grant Administration. In time it came to be called “Mullett’s Monstrosity,” in a slap at its architect, Alfred B. Mullett.

Hindsight, however, would seem to indicate that Mullett got a bum rap, for tastes have changed somewhat in the intervening years.

Mullett put in many years of service as an architect for the Federal Government and designed a number of admirable and generally popular courthouses, custom houses and post offices throughout the country.

His crowning achievement was the old State, War and Navy Building—now known as the old Executive Office Building—that sits next to the White House and which in many ways resembles the New York building. A couple of generations ago it, too, was derided and there were cries for its removal. It endured, however, and recently was spruced up and given a new and glorious paint job.

Suddenly, it became one of the most popular buildings in the nation’s capital, and people go out of their way to gaze admiringly at it.

Alfred Mullett also knew how to build solidly. Because City Hall Post Office went up before the advent of steel construction, it was equipped with walls as much as ten and a half feet thick in places and was made of the sturdiest brick and granite available. Window frames were fashioned of plate armor, the type used to protect battleships.

Efforts to pry the walls apart so that the granite blocks could be salvaged were unsuccessful, so the demolition contractor resorted to the usually reliable method of swinging a huge iron ball against them. It only worked part of the time, for again and again the iron shattered. The contractor could not believe it.

Nevertheless the “eyesore” was finally removed, and New Yorkers rejoiced. During ceremonies marking the event, one speaker was emboldened to urge the city to take the next step. Now that we have gotten rid of one obnoxious building from City Hall Park, he said, why not also take down the other one—the Tweed Courthouse? There were murmurs of approval. As we all know, that building is now a jewel of the park. Too bad the same change in tastes could not have benefited Alfred B. Mullett and his doomed post office.

This article originally appeared in the May 2003 issue of The Tribeca Trib.