Suffern Post Office: New Deal Stone and Plaster

The post office on Chestnut Street in Suffern is a small building that carries a surprisingly large story about how the federal government tried to use architecture during the darkest years of the Great Depression.

The building was constructed in nineteen thirty-six and designed under Louis Simon, who served as the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department during the New Deal era. Simon's office was responsible for hundreds of federal buildings across the country during the nineteen thirties and early nineteen forties, and the Suffern post office reflects the design philosophy he applied consistently: take the Colonial Revival style that the Treasury Department preferred for civic dignity, and blend it with the Streamline Moderne sensibility that was defining contemporary American design. The result at Suffern is a building that reads as both authoritative and of its moment.

The interior holds something that elevates the building beyond architectural interest alone: a wall relief by the sculptor Elliot Means, commissioned by the Section of Painting and Sculpture, the federal program that placed artworks in public buildings throughout the New Deal period. The Section, distinct from the better-known Works Progress Administration arts program, operated through competitions rather than relief rolls, selecting artists by the quality of their proposals rather than their economic need. The result was a national dispersal of public art into post offices and courthouses in cities and towns that would otherwise never have commissioned original works.

Suffern received Means's plaster relief.

The Suffern Post Office was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-nine. It sits at the northern edge of the village's downtown business district, just where Chestnut Street meets Route Two Oh Two, a Depression-era federal investment still doing its original job.