Long Beach Main Post Office Building

skyscraper
art-deco
CA
Los Angeles

About the Long Beach Main Post Office Building in Los Angeles
1. Building Catalogations
Architect and team
Architectural style
Spaces and uses
Structure and materials

The Long Beach Main Post Office Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1931 by Louis A. Simon, and built between 1932 and 1934 in Los Angeles, CA.

Its precise street address is 300 Long Beach Blvd, Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Long Beach Main Post Office Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Los Angeles and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Long Beach Main Post Office Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on November 27^th 1984.

Building's timeline

Design completed

1931

Construction begins

1932

Construction completed

1934

Added to the NRHP

1984

years ago

2024

Architect and team

Louis A. Simon was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about James A. Wetmore.

Architectural Style

The Long Beach Main Post Office Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.

Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.

The Long Beach Main Post Office Building was completed in 1934, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

Spaces & Uses

It has a total of 7 floors, which combined offer a total of 34,854 sqf (3,238m²) of usable space.

Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1934, the Long Beach Main Post Office Building has mainly been used as Government space.

Materials & Structure

The Long Beach Main Post Office Building uses a frame structure made of concrete columns and beams.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features masonry blocks clad with terracotta plates throughout the building, which rises 7 stories. The central tower stands out with stairs from the street level to the main entrance, which features three doors separated by fluted terracotta columns that are repeated in the side bays.

There are decorative elements around the cornices of the tower on the sixth and seventh floors, the latter set back, and two enormous decorative lanterns flanking the entrance staircase.

Other materials found at the Long Beach Main Post Office Building include, marble, used in walls coverings, and terrazzo, found on floors.

Sources

npgallery.nps.gov