page_title: James A. Farley Building
section_title: Architecture
hierarchical_section_title: James A. Farley Building / Description / Architecture
context_page_description: The James A. Farley Building is the main United States Postal Service building in New York City. It is located in Midtown Manhattan and was built along with the original Pennsylvania Station in 1912. The building is famous for bearing the United States Postal Service creed: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
  The James A. Farley Building was formerly the General Post Office Building. The building was designated a New York City Landmark in 1966. It was officially renamed in 1982 as a monument and testament to the political career of the nation's 53rd Postmaster General James Farley. Since 2010, plans have been under way to integrate Moynihan Train Hall into the landmark as part of the Penn Station Expansion.
context_section_description: The monumental facade on Eighth Avenue was conceived as a Corinthian colonnade braced at the end by two pavilions. The imposing design was meant to match in strength the colonnade of Pennsylvania Station (also designed by McKim, Mead, and White), which originally faced the General Post Office Building from across Eighth Avenue. An unbroken flight of steps the full length of the colonnade provides access, for the main floor devoted to customer services is above a functional basement level that rises out of a dry moat giving light and air to workspaces below. Each of the square end pavilions is capped with a low saucer dome, expressed on the exterior as a low stepped pyramid. Inside, the visitor finds an unbroken vista down a long gallery that parallels the colonnaded front.  The north end of the gallery houses a small Museum of Postal History. McKim, Mead, and White's range, which continues its Corinthian giant order as pilasters between the window bays, was simply repeated in order to carry the facade to Ninth Avenue.
  The original building was one of the last built under the Tarsney Act.  Up until 1893, all federal non-military structures were designed by in-house government architects in the Office of the Supervising Architect in the United States Treasury Department.  The 1893 act introduced by a Missouri Congressman permitted the Supervisory Architect to pick private architects following a competition.  Supervisory architect James Knox Taylor picked McKim for the New York post office.  In 1913, the act was repealed partially in light of a scandal in which Taylor had picked his former Minnesota partner Cass Gilbert to design the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House.
  The building prominently bears the inscription: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, which is frequently mistaken as the official motto of the United States Postal Service.  It was actually supplied by William Mitchell Kendall of the firm of McKim, Mead & White, the architects who designed the Farley Building and the original Pennsylvania Station in the same Beaux-Arts style. The sentence is taken from Herodotus' Histories (Book 8, Ch. 98) and describes the faithful service of the Persian system of mounted postal messengers under Xerxes I of Persia.  The U.S.P.S. does not actually have an official motto or creed, but nonetheless the inscription on the building is often cited as such.
  The ceiling of the front reception hall is decorated with carved national emblems or coats of arms of ten major nations at the time of the building's construction: the United States, the United Kingdom, the German Empire, the French Third Republic (represented by the cipher "R.F." for République Française since lacking an official national emblem), the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Italy, the Kingdom of Spain, Belgium, Austria-Hungary, and the Netherlands.
caption: A carefully detailed Corinthian colonnade under the inspirational inscription
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