More on York’s old post office
Many of us are excited about the prospect of seeing the wonderful building on the northeast corner of Philadelphia and Beaver Streets restored. As promised in my last post on the old York Post Office, I’m repeating my blog post here of June 25, 2011, consisting mainly of photos I had taken of the exterior and interior shortly before writing the column and subsequent original posting of photos.
Depending on how you access my blog, you might not be able to see all the photos. If not, you can gain access to my blog posts through www.yorkblog.com/universal.
Old York Post Office Photos
My recent post detailed the history of the 1895 York Post Office, designed by nationally-known architect Willoughby Edbrooke, while he was serving as the Supervising Architect for the U.S. Treasury Department.
Many of Edbrooke’s buildings have been restored to their original grandeur. The accompanying photos give you an idea of how much of the building at Philadelphia and Beaver Streets is unchanged. The exterior looks exactly as it did 116 years ago. The interior retains much of its original fabric, only having been painted over. It seems to me that it would be a prime candidate for future restoration.
See below for some interior detail.
I’ll be looking at some of the other interior photos that I took on that tour, and I will share some more of them. We are fortunate that there have only been two main owners of the sturdy building in the past century, after the post office erected a new building on South George Street. They were the York Masonic Lodge from 1917 to the 1970s and the York Rescue Mission’s Lighthouse Youth Center Ministry since then. Whether by design or perhaps chronic non-profit need for funding, both left much of the structure as it had been designed, making the building a great candidate for restoration.
