Cooper Station Post Office
93 4th Avenue | also 93 Park Avenue South | East Village | built 1936
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1934
Treasury architect Louis A. Simon hires William Dewey Foster, who goes on to design five New York post offices
In 1934 Louis A. Simon, the Supervising Architect of the Treasury, hired the MIT-trained William Dewey Foster to carry out Depression-era public works. Over eight years Foster designed five New York City post offices, among them Cooper Station, plus the Weather Bureau in Washington and several State Department buildings there.
- 1936
Eleven small tenements are demolished to clear the corner for the Cooper Station post office
The Treasury's Office of the Supervising Architect built the Cooper Station Post Office in 1936-37. To make room, eleven small tenement buildings were torn down. They had stood at the corner of Fourth Avenue and East 11th Street, where the new post office's curved facade now follows the turn of the corner. This was an earlier set of buildings on the site.
- 1937
William Dewey Foster designs the Cooper Station post office
The federal government clears eleven small tenement buildings on the block and, between 1936 and 1937, builds the Cooper Station post office designed by William Dewey Foster of the U.S. Treasury's Office of the Supervising Architect. Foster, who designs five New York City post offices during his years under Supervising Architect Louis A. Simon, gives the limestone Art Moderne building a two-story colonnade of seven Doric columns and a curved corner facade rarely seen on a post office of its era.
- 1989
The Cooper Station post office joins the National Register of Historic Places
On May 11, 1989, the post office at 93 Fourth Avenue, named for industrialist and Cooper Union founder Peter Cooper, is added to both the National Register of Historic Places and the New York State Register. The Art Moderne building later becomes familiar to television audiences as the frequent establishing shot for the post office where Seinfeld's Newman supposedly worked.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2005
A developer buys the post office's air rights to build bigger on the St. Ann's Church site
Hudson Companies, a Brooklyn developer, acquired St. Ann's Church from the archdiocese of New York in December 2004. In January it bought extra air rights from the Postal Service over the Cooper Station post office on East 11th Street. By the neighbors' count, the transfer allowed about 61,000 additional square feet, roughly 62 percent more building than otherwise permitted.
“The next month, the company bought additional air rights for the Peter Cooper Station Post Office, on East 11th Street, from the United States Postal Service.”
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- United States Post Office (Cooper Station)Wikipedia
- 93 Fourth Avenue; 93-99 Fourth Avenue; 101 East 11th StreetVillage Preservation: East Village Building Blocks
Nearby
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- St. Ann's School117 East 11th Street | 4 entries
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- Grace Church802 Broadway | 13 entries