Vorlage:Infobox nrhp The U.S. Post Office in Mineola, New York serves the ZIP Code 11501, covering that community in the town of Hempstead, New York, United States, the seat of Long Island's Nassau County. It is located on the northeast corner of the junction of First and Main streets.
It is a brick building in the Colonial Revival architectural style built in 1936 as part of a massive Depression-era public works project that built many new post offices all over New York. Unusually among New York post offices in that style from that time, it was built in a rough hexagonal shape so that its main entrance could face southwest, towards the corner. It was also one of the last works of the firm of Peabody, Wilson & Brown. For these reasons it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.
Building
All six sides of the two-story steel frame building are faced in brick laid in Flemish bond. The entrance terrace is granite, paved with bluestone and using limestone coping, flanked with iron lampposts. The middle three of the five bays are recessed to allow for the limestone enframents around the double doors. Each window bay is topped by a roundel and bronze grille in an abstract eagle form. "United States Post Office" is spelled out by bronze letters between the roundels, and "Mineola, New York" is carved into the frieze above the main entrance. The entire structure is topped by limestone coping and a flat roof.[1]
The interior retains the original pink Tennesee marble wainscoting with a dark marble baseboard. The walls above the marble are plaster with a molded cornice between them and the ceiling. The floor is terrazzo with embedded brass strips dividing it into areas of different color.[1]
History
Unincorporated Mineola was already a central community of a primarily agricultural area when it was chosen as the seat of the newly-formed county in 1899. In the early decades of the next century, improvements to rail and road transport led to the beginning of suburbanization in Nassau County and the Mineola area. The growth required, among many other things, new postal facilities.[1]
In 1931 an amendment to the Public Buildings Act of 1926 authorized the construction of 136 new post offices in New York. Sixteen of these were to be in Long Island, including Mineola. The site was purchased in 1933, and Peabody, Wilson & Brown, a New York firm best known for some large estates on Long Island such as Charles Millard Pratt's Seamoor in Glen Cove and the Huntington Town Hall. A.J. Paretta Contracting of Long Island City began work in 1935, finishing the following year.[1]
The Mineola post office is the only federal commission the Peabody Wilson firm is known to have undertaken, and one of its last. Charles Peabody drowned late in 1935 in the sinking of the Mohawk off New Jersey, and Archibald Manning Brown left the firm that same year to head the design team planning the Harlem River Houses, the first federally-financed housing project in New York City.[1]