Design: Capital Success in Washington

The Old Post Office becomes a dazzling urban fairgrounds

For generations of Americans, the local post office was far more than a symbol of federal power: the dispenser of mail and a source for tax, Social Security and Selective Service forms. The P.O. was also a social spot, where neighbors met to gossip and hear the news. That tradition has been gloriously and ingeniously revived in Washington's Old Post Office, halfway between the White House and the Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue. Once an embarrassing derelict, the ten-story, 1899 Romanesque wedding cake of Maine granite has been lovingly rehabilitated as a lively market and office place.

Like the recent developments of Boston's Faneuil Hall Market-place and Baltimore's Harborplace, the Old Post Office is a zesty example of preserving an urban landmark in a fashion that not only revitalizes an area but pays its own way. Although it opened just last month, the center is already attracting crowds of office workers at noon, tourists throughout the day and curious suburbanites after dark. The project heralds even more. Once, regulations made it difficult for profitmaking vendors to sell so much as a candy bar on Government property. But in 1976 the Public Buildings Cooperative Use Act was passed to encourage commercial activities within public buildings. Now, for the first time on a major scale, Government and private enterprise are sharing the space and the income from leases granted in a federally owned edifice.

The real estate is breathtaking. Glowing Victorian brass fittings, red oak woodwork and frosted glass set off the Pavilion, a graceful three-level gallery of restaurants and shops in a vast sunlit atrium that rises 215 ft. and has a floor two-thirds the length of a football field. Visible through the distant glass roof, past floors of balconied corridors where 800 federal workers have offices, is a dramatic view: the 315-ft. clock tower that presides loftily over Pennsylvania Avenue. Developer Charles Evans Jr., whose firm also was part of the team that refurbished the nation's oldest covered shopping arcade (1829) in Providence, is delighted with the result. Says he: "People should be able to enjoy monuments like this. The private sector could never duplicate their grandeur or scale, and they go unused."

The Post Office not only was neglected, it nearly fell to the wrecker's ball. In 1899, the building's flossy exterior blended well with the theaters, taverns and whorehouses that enlivened the 1 ½-mile esplanade. The atrium design permitted postal inspectors to prowl catwalks, checking up on mail sorters below. But as Government grew more dignified, its architects demanded cool, neoclassic superblocks on the Avenue of the Presidents. To them, the Post Office seemed as out of place as flamboyant Diamond Jim Brady at a state dinner. Abandoned in 1934 by the Post Office Department, the building became known as the "Old Tooth" that blocked progress in the Federal Triangle, a stolid group of buildings that includes the National Archives and the Justice Department. For 45 years the structure gathered grime, and its seedy offices were used by various Government agencies, including the FBI's wiretapping unit.