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Thursday, April 4, 2019

Shades of Art Deco In Exterior Design - Frankford Post Office - Meadow and Darrah Sts.- Late 1950s



My first memory of a post office, code 24, later 19124 was up in Frankford on Meadow Street in the late 1950s. And my dad was buying P.O. Money Orders to mail payment for bills. Others, like the telephone and gas and electric, he walked into their local offices there on or near "the avenue" to take cash in their bank like teller cages. 

This particular Post Post was very bare and industrial on the interior. More like the drafting room in my future high school that taught mechanical drawing decades before CAD terminals.  One floor, skylights, the work area behind the sales and service counters, mostly open and visible, like a loading dock in a factory,  and of course the standard post office tables in front on high legs and ball point pens chained to the tables. 




Cannot find much on internet except to say that this was probably built post 1942 per the PhillyGeo maps. Once the site of a dye factory. 

The design has a touch of Art Deco in its exterior design and perhaps the design was made and put away until after the War to be finally constructed. 

The only thing I remember besides not being able to draw with the pens on the tall tables as my father waited in line, was when it was summer and all windows were open, some fans, the clatter and lubricate smell of a factory across the street, deafening in the street, and more muted in the Post Office interior. 

Nickel on the parking meters.




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